Alcyone
a planet or angle in close conjunction with the fixed star Alcyone, in the Pleiades
What the tradition reads
Alcyone, the brightest star in the Pleiades cluster, sits on the shoulder of Taurus and takes, in Robson's assignment, the mixed nature of Mars and the Moon. Robson reads a planet or angle in close conjunction with it as producing love and eminence, set against a harsher note of blindness brought on by fevers, smallpox, and accidents to the face, a mixture of favour and physical risk rather than an unmixed fortune. The wider cluster carries its own separate reading in the same tradition: Robson describes the Pleiades as a whole as inclining a native to be wanton, ambitious and turbulent, a temperament read as restless and appetite driven rather than settled, and a contact with Alcyone specifically is generally read as inheriting some of that same restlessness alongside its own particular promise of love and public standing. Because Alcyone marks the brightest point in a cluster the tradition already associates with a mixed and somewhat unruly influence, close conjunctions here are read carefully, weighed against whatever else in a chart might soften the harsher physical risk Robson names or might instead sharpen the ambition and turbulence into something more productive than merely restless.
The story
The Pleiades take their name in Greek myth from the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas and the ocean nymph Pleione, sisters pursued across the sky by the hunter Orion until Zeus intervened and placed them among the stars to end the chase, a rescue that left the cluster forever associated with flight from an unwanted pursuit rather than with any settled home. Alcyone herself is named for one of the seven, and is, fittingly, the brightest star of the cluster that bears their name. The star's own proper name is drawn from the Greek alkyon, the kingfisher, a separate strand of Greek myth in which a woman of that name was turned into the bird, though the astrological tradition uses the name chiefly for its place among the seven sisters rather than for the kingfisher story itself. A cluster whose central myth is escape from pursuit, ending only through a god's direct intervention, sits comfortably beside Robson's own reading of turbulence and restlessness, a light that shines brightest, in this telling, precisely because it was never allowed to simply stay still and be caught.
Written from
Corpus key star:Alcyone-Pleiades.