Capella
a planet or angle in close conjunction with the fixed star Capella
What the tradition reads
Capella, the brightest star in Auriga, is assigned the mixed nature of Mars and Mercury by Ptolemy, though Alvidas instead reads it as Mercury and the Moon, one of several fixed stars where the two authorities never settle on a single mixture. Robson reads the resulting influence as giving honour, wealth, eminence, renown, a public position of trust and eminent friends, a favourable list matched by a particular temperament: the tradition describes Capella's natives as careful, timorous, inquisitive, and very fond of knowledge, particularly of novelties, a curiosity read as genuine rather than merely restless. The star's public honours are accordingly read as arriving through trustworthiness and intellectual curiosity rather than through the more forceful, martial route several other bright fixed stars are given, a distinguished position earned by being reliably interesting and reliably careful rather than by open ambition. Because the star is visually the brightest point in its constellation and one of the brighter stars in the whole night sky, the tradition treats a close conjunction with it as a genuinely significant contact, one whose gifts of trust and renown are nonetheless read as most fully realised in a native who keeps the same careful, curious temperament the star is itself said to confer.
The story
Capella takes its name from the Latin capella, little she-goat, a diminutive of capra, and the star has carried a goat's identity in the sky for as long as its Greek name, Aix, has been recorded. Greek myth identifies the goat as Amalthea, the nurse who reared the infant Zeus on her own milk after his mother Rhea hid him from his father Cronus, who had been swallowing his own children to prevent exactly this kind of survival. In play, or in some tellings by simple accident, the infant god broke off one of the goat's horns, and the horn, rather than being lost, was transformed into the cornucopia, the horn of plenty, forever overflowing with whatever fruit or grain was wished into it, an image of abundance that traces directly back to the same animal the star is named for. That a star tied to nourishment, survival, and a horn that produces plenty without ever running dry should be read by the later tradition as bringing wealth, trust and renown follows naturally from the myth beneath it, a light named for the creature that literally kept a god alive in his own infancy.
Written from
Corpus key star:Capella.