Betelgeuse

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

What the tradition reads

Betelgeuse, marking the right shoulder of Orion, is given the nature of Mars and Mercury according to Ptolemy, and of Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter in good aspect according to Alvidas; Robson's own catalogue entry for its general influence is comparatively brief, giving simply martial honour, preferment and wealth. Robson expands this considerably for a culminating Betelgeuse, reading it as great military fortune, command, invention and ingenuity, and an aid to the perfection of the arts and sciences, adding that if the culmination falls together with the Sun, Moon or Jupiter it brings ample fortune and great honour besides. Read specifically with the Sun, rather than as the star's general nature, Robson gives a different and harsher combination: an interest in and a genuine ability for occult and mystical subjects, together with acute diseases and fevers, and honour and preferment that end, in this particular contact, in final ruin. The pairing of martial and mercurial qualities in one star is unusual in this literature, most fixed stars leaning toward a single dominant temperament, and Robson's reading of Betelgeuse accordingly touches both direct, forceful advancement and, in its specific solar contact, a subtler and more esoteric intelligence bought at a steeper price.

The story

Betelgeuse takes its name from the Arabic Yad al-Jawza, the hand of al-Jawza, the figure medieval Arab astronomers used for the constellation later fixed in the West as Orion, and the star marks that figure's shoulder in the constellation's final Greek form. The modern spelling and pronunciation owes itself to an actual transcription error, a thirteenth century manuscript misreading the initial Arabic letter so that a sound that should have produced a Y instead produced a B, an accident of copying that gave the star a name its own etymology does not really support. Orion himself is told in Greek myth as a gigantic and supernaturally strong hunter, born to the Gorgon Euryale and the sea god Poseidon, a lineage that marks him as more than merely mortal even before his own boasting brought the anger of the gods down on him and ended in his death. That the softer, more mercurial reading the tradition gives Betelgeuse should attach to the shoulder of a hunter otherwise remembered chiefly for raw strength and a fatal excess of pride fits Robson's own mixed assignment of Mars and Mercury together, force and subtlety sharing a single point of light on the same doomed figure's own body.

Written from

Corpus key star:Betelgeuse.