Castor

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

What the tradition reads

Castor, marking the head of the northern twin in Gemini, is read with disagreement among the authorities Robson names for its planetary nature: Ptolemy gives it Mercury alone, Wilson, Simmonite and Pearce give it Mars, Venus and Saturn together, and Alvidas gives it the Moon, Mars and Uranus. Despite this disagreement, Robson's catalogue entry for the star's own influence is fairly settled: distinction, a keen intellect, success in law and publishing, many travels, a fondness for horses, and sudden fame and honour, though this fame, Robson adds, is often followed by loss of fortune and disgrace, sickness, trouble and great affliction, a rise the tradition explicitly expects to reverse. Robson's natives are additionally described as mischievous and prone to violence, a temperament that sits uneasily beside the star's own promise of legal success and intellectual distinction, and he further records that a rising Castor gives blindness, bad eyes, injuries to the face, disgrace, stabs, wounds and imprisonment, an unusually harsh angular reading for a star otherwise tied to real achievement. The tradition's overall picture of Castor is accordingly one of real gifts, wit, travel, standing in law and public life, undercut by a character reading harsh enough, and a fortune unstable enough, that the star's brighter promises are rarely read as arriving without a corresponding cost paid somewhere else in the same life.

The story

Castor and Pollux, the twins who give Gemini its name and its two brightest stars, are told in Greek and Roman myth as sons of Leda, one of the pair mortal and the other immortal, a difference in their birth that becomes the whole point of their story. When the mortal Castor died, his immortal brother Pollux could not bear the separation and asked to share his own immortality rather than live forever without him, and the gods granted the request, in the version fixed permanently in the sky, by placing the two together as neighbouring stars so that neither brother is ever without the other again. The twins were also honoured together as protectors of sailors and of warriors, invoked jointly rather than separately, a further sign that the myth's real subject is the bond between them rather than either brother's individual achievement. That Castor, the mortal of the pair, should be given the harsher astrological reading, its Venus Saturn mixture tied to disgrace and instability where Pollux's own reading leans toward audacity and courage, fits a myth built entirely around one twin's vulnerability to loss and the other's refusal to accept it.

Written from

Corpus key star:Castor.