Regulus
a planet or angle in close conjunction with the fixed star Regulus
What the tradition reads
Regulus, Cor Leonis, the Lion's Heart, is given the mixed nature of Mars and Jupiter by Ptolemy, though Robson notes that most later authors have come to attribute it to Mars alone. Robson's reading of its effect names violence, destructiveness, and military honour of short duration ending in ultimate failure, imprisonment or violent death, set directly beside success, high and lofty ideals and strength of spirit, and describes its natives as magnanimous, grandly liberal, generous, ambitious, fond of power, desirous of command, high spirited and independent. Regulus is counted among the fifteen Behenian fixed stars and carries as well its older status as one of the four Royal Stars, a watcher of the sky honoured across the ancient Near East long before Ptolemy's own systematic account of the fixed stars was written. Because its favourable and unfavourable readings sit so close together, ambition and generosity on one side, a short lived honour that risks ending in disgrace or worse on the other, the tradition treats Regulus as marking real greatness that is nonetheless conditional, a crown genuinely available to the native but never simply guaranteed to be kept once it is won.
The story
Regulus takes its Latin name, the little king, from a diminutive of rex, and the Greek Basiliskos, its own older name, carries the identical royal sense, a naming pattern repeated again in the Arabic Qalb al-Asad, the heart of the lion, and in the Babylonian Sharru, simply the King, four separate languages independently reaching for sovereignty to describe the same point of light. The star marks the heart of Leo, the constellation Greek myth identifies with the Nemean lion, a beast whose hide no ordinary weapon could pierce, said to have lured warriors to their deaths by taking women hostage in its cave; Heracles, unable to wound it with club, sword or spear, instead wrestled the lion at close quarters and broke its back with his bare hands, the first of his twelve labours, and Zeus set the defeated lion among the stars afterward to commemorate the victory. That four unrelated languages should crown the same star king, and that the constellation it anchors should preserve the memory of a beast beaten only by strength that needed no weapon at all, together explain why the tradition reads Regulus as a mark of real, if conditional, greatness rather than of comfortable or guaranteed success.
Written from
Corpus key star:Regulus.