Altair

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

What the tradition reads

Altair, in the neck of the Eagle, is one of the few fixed stars in this tradition that Vivian Robson's own 1923 catalogue does not treat individually: checked directly, his book names Altair only in passing, as a neighbour of Antinous, in a table of coordinates, and in a chapter on weather by conjunction, never as one of the numbered star by star delineations the rest of this tradition draws on. Astrologyking.com nonetheless publishes a reading it attributes to Robson's book, giving the star's nature as disputed among older authorities, Ptolemy naming Mars and Jupiter, Wilson naming Saturn and Mercury, Simmonite naming Uranus alone, and Alvidas naming Uranus and Mercury in sextile to the Sun, and describing its influence as a bold, confident, valiant, unyielding, ambitious and liberal nature, together with great and sudden but ephemeral wealth and a position of command, and adding that it makes its natives guilty of bloodshed and gives danger from reptiles. That attribution could not be confirmed against Robson's own scanned text, where no such passage appears, so the reading is recorded here as astrologyking.com's own publication of it rather than as a confirmed Robson quotation. Altair's older name, the Bird of Jove, ties the star to Jupiter's own sacred eagle in classical mythology even where none of the planetary mixtures listed above actually name Jupiter alone, a case where the star's name and its disputed astrological nature appear to come from separate strands of tradition.

The story

Altair's name comes from the Arabic al-Nasr al-Tair, the flying eagle, and the star marks the body of Aquila, the Eagle, in the Greek constellation figure, the bird that in myth carried Zeus's thunderbolts and, in one telling, abducted the Trojan boy Ganymede up to Olympus to serve as cupbearer to the gods. In Chinese tradition the star is given an entirely separate story, that of Niulang the cowherd, separated forever from his beloved the weaver girl, represented by the star Vega, by the great river of the Milky Way running between them, the two permitted to meet only once a year when a bridge of magpies spans the gap on the seventh night of the seventh month. Altair's own physical nature adds a further point of interest missing from most fixed stars discussed in this tradition: it rotates so quickly, completing a full turn in under eight hours against the Sun's twenty five days, that its own shape is measurably flattened at the poles, one of only a handful of ordinary stars whose surface has actually been directly imaged. A star claimed by two unrelated mythologies as a bird and, separately, as a lover eternally kept at a distance, carries an unusually doubled identity for a single point of light.

Written from

Corpus key star:Altair.