Algol

a planet or angle in close conjunction with the fixed star Algol

What the tradition reads

Algol, Beta Persei, is Ptolemy's own example of a star tied to violent death, and Robson's own catalogue entry gives it the mixed nature of Saturn and Jupiter, calling it flatly the most evil star in the heavens: an influence spanning misfortune, violence, decapitation, hanging, electrocution and mob violence, and a dogged and violent nature that brings death to the native himself or to others. Robson records that a culminating Algol brings murder, sudden death, beheading, and a native prone to murder and mischief, though he allows that the same culmination, joined at the same time with the Sun, Moon or Jupiter, can instead give victory over others in war. Read specifically with the Sun or with the Moon, a close contact with Algol is given as violent death or extreme sickness, a reading Robson keeps to that particular contact rather than folding it into the star's general nature. Robson also records that Algol conjunct Mars, or Mars elevated above the luminaries while Algol is angular, makes a native a murderer who comes to an untimely end, and that Algol with Fortuna or its depositor brings poverty; the tradition has generally treated any close conjunction with Algol, particularly to the Sun, Moon or an angle, as one of the more serious warnings a chart's fixed stars can carry.

The story

Algol takes its position from the severed head of Medusa, the Gorgon slain by Perseus in Greek myth, carried afterward as a weapon so terrible that a single glance at it turned any onlooker to stone; Medusa herself, in the fuller telling, had been transformed by Athena, her hair changed into serpents, as a punishment that left her monstrous rather than born that way. The star's Arabic name, Ra's al-Ghul, the head of the ogre or demon, gave English its own nickname, the Demon Star, and other cultures reached for equally dark names of their own, Hebrew folklore calling it Satan's Head and a sixteenth century Latin tradition naming it Caput Larvae, the spectre's head. Part of this reputation is owed to the star's own visible behaviour: Algol is an eclipsing binary, one star regularly passing in front of the other every two days and twenty hours, causing its brightness to dim noticeably and then recover, a variability ancient observers had no way to explain and which many cultures across the Mediterranean and the Near East seem to have read, independently, as something sinister rather than merely strange. A severed head, a demon's name and a light that visibly falters on a fixed schedule together make Algol one of the few fixed stars whose evil reputation is genuinely cross cultural rather than a single tradition's invention.

Written from

Corpus key star:Algol.