Almagest

The library · The fixed stars

Arcturus

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

What the tradition reads

Arcturus, alpha Bootis, one of the brightest stars visible from Earth, takes the nature of Mars and Jupiter in Ptolemy's assignment, though the later astrologer Alvidas substitutes Venus and Mercury conjoined, a disagreement that has never fully settled in the later literature. Robson reads the Ptolemaic mixture as giving riches, honour, high renown, self-determination and prosperity, particularly through navigation, travel and voyages of discovery, a reading he repeats in slightly different words as success in the fine arts and in business, high office, and honours, tempered by a note of possible turbulence along the way. The tradition treats a planet or angle in conjunction with Arcturus as a marker of self made prominence, recognition that arrives through personal initiative and a readiness to go where others have not yet gone, rather than through inheritance or quiet accumulation, consistent with the Mars and Jupiter mixture of drive and expansive confidence Ptolemy assigned it. As a Behenian fixed star in the later medieval magical tradition, Arcturus was additionally linked to the stone jasper and to the plantain herb, a use quite separate from its ordinary astrological reading.

The story

Arcturus takes its name from the ancient Greek Arktouros, the guardian of the bear, watching over Ursa Major, the great bear, in the sky beside it, and Greek myth ties the star to the story of Arcas, who was about to shoot and kill his own mother, Callisto, after she had been transformed into a bear; Zeus averted the tragedy by transforming the boy into the constellation Bootes, called Arctophylax, the bear guardian, by the Greeks, and his mother into Ursa Major. An alternative telling instead ties the star to Icarius, who gave the gift of wine to other men and was murdered by them because they had no experience with intoxication and mistook the wine for poison, his own dog, Maira, becoming the nearby star Procyon. Both stories share a single theme, watching and guarding rather than pursuing, and the tradition's reading of Arcturus as a marker of self determined, honourable prominence sits comfortably beside a myth that, whichever version is told, ends with grief transformed into an eternal, careful watchfulness.

Written from

Corpus key star:Arcturus.