Antares
a planet or angle in close conjunction with the fixed star Antares
What the tradition reads
Antares, the heart of the Scorpion, is given the mixed nature of Mars and Jupiter by the classical tradition, and Robson reads that mixture as producing malevolence and destructiveness set beside liberality and broad mindedness, evil presages and a real danger of fatality, and a temperament in its natives that is rash, ravenous, headstrong, and destructive to themselves through their own obstinacy rather than through any outside enemy. The same tradition nonetheless records that the star has always been associated with eminence and activity in mankind, a promise of real prominence that arrives bundled with the harsher risks Robson names rather than as an unmixed gift. Antares stood among the four Royal Stars of ancient Persia around three thousand years before the common era, one of the sky's four guardian points, a status shared with Aldebaran, Regulus and Fomalhaut and generally read as marking the star's influence as unusually consequential, for good and for difficulty both, wherever it falls in a chart. Because its nature already combines a beneficent and a malefic planet within a single fixed star, the tradition treats a close Antares contact as demanding particular care in judgement, its eminence and its self destructive obstinacy read as two faces of the very same underlying intensity rather than as separable outcomes.
The story
Antares takes its Greek name, anti plus Ares, rival of Mars, directly from its colour, a red so close to the planet's own that ancient observers set the two in direct comparison and gave the star a name built entirely around that resemblance. The star marks the heart of Scorpius, the constellation Greek myth ties to the death of Orion: the giant hunter, having boasted he would kill every animal on earth, so angered the earth goddess Gaia that she sent the scorpion against him, and the sky preserves the enmity permanently by keeping Scorpius and Orion on opposite sides of the heavens, the hunter always set by the time the scorpion that killed him rises. Egyptian tradition gave the same star its own independent identity as the scorpion goddess Serket, a protective figure invoked against venomous stings rather than a symbol of the sting itself, while the Maori people of New Zealand knew the star as Rehua and regarded it as chief of all the stars, an honour with no obvious connection to its scorpion associations elsewhere. Vedic astronomy in turn fixes the same star as Jyeshtha, one of the twenty seven lunar mansions, giving Antares the same rare distinction Aldebaran holds, a point of light independently significant to at least three unconnected traditions rather than to Greek myth alone.
Written from
Corpus key star:Antares.