Procyon

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

What the tradition reads

Procyon, the brightest star in Canis Minor, is given the nature of Mercury and Mars according to Ptolemy, of Venus and Mars according to Simmonite, which Robson himself notes is probably a misprint, and of the Moon, Jupiter and Uranus according to Alvidas. Robson's catalogue entry for its general influence names activity and violence, a sudden and violent malevolence, sudden preferment won through exertion that nonetheless ends in disaster, and a specific danger of dog bites and hydrophobia, going on to describe a temperament that is petulant, saucy, giddy, weak natured, timid, unfortunate, proud, easily angered, careless and violent. Robson records two case charts in which natives were bitten by dogs while Procyon stood in hard aspect to a personal planet, offered as direct evidence for the star's own dog bite danger. A rising Procyon, in Robson's own separate reading for that angular position, is read as artful, crafty and dissembling, bringing wealth by violence and rapine, lust, dissipation, waste and ruin, military preferment, quarrels, and loss in trade or through servants, a harsher picture than the star's general influence alone suggests. The tradition's picture of Procyon is accordingly split between a narrow set of favourable contacts, such as help from friends and gifts when closely joined to the Sun, and a broader general character reading that names very little else to recommend it, a contrast Robson's own entry does not attempt to fully reconcile.

The story

Procyon takes its name from the Greek prokyon, before the dog, a name earned simply by rising ahead of Sirius, the Dog Star, in the night sky, a purely positional relationship between the two brightest stars of the two dog constellations, Canis Minor and Canis Major. Canis Minor itself is identified in Greek myth as Maera, the hound belonging to Icarius, an Athenian given the secret of wine by the god Dionysus and murdered afterward by neighbours who mistook their own drunkenness for poisoning; Maera, the story goes, led Icarius's daughter Erigone to her father's shallow grave and, once the truth was uncovered and avenged, drowned herself from grief rather than live on without her master, both dog and master honoured afterward with a place in the sky for a loyalty that outlasted the master's own death. Procyon's specific danger of dog bites, named directly in the astrological tradition, follows the constellation's own canine identity closely enough that the reading looks drawn straight from the animal the star is named for rather than from any independent astrological logic, a hound's own bite read into the star that marks it, whatever the star's positional or planetary reasoning might otherwise suggest on its own terms.

Written from

Corpus key star:Procyon.