Rigel
a planet or angle in close conjunction with the fixed star Rigel
What the tradition reads
Rigel, marking Orion's left foot, is given the nature of Jupiter and Saturn by Ptolemy and by Lilly after him, though Robson notes that later authors have generally come to read the star as favourable, closer in practice to a mixture of Jupiter and Mars. Robson's own summary of its effect is almost entirely positive, benevolence, honour, riches, happiness, glory, renown, and inventive or mechanical ability, a combination the tradition reads as favouring practical ingenuity as much as any purely social kind of success. Robson treats Orion as a whole as the single most important constellation in the heavens outside the zodiac proper, a judgement that colours the reading given to every star within it, and notes the constellation's older association with war in judicial, or mundane, astrology, a martial reputation the tradition nonetheless reads as expressing itself through strength and courage in an individual natal chart rather than through open violence. Rigel's own reading is accordingly one of the more consistently fortunate fixed star contacts a chart can show, inventive and mechanical skill joined to a genuine and lasting renown, without the reversal or hidden cost several of Orion's other stars, Betelgeuse chief among them, are given.
The story
Rigel's name comes from the Arabic Rijl Jauzah al-Yusra, the left foot of al-Jauzah, the figure Arab astronomers used for the constellation the Greeks had already fixed as Orion, and the star marks precisely that position, the hunter's trailing foot rather than his shoulder or his belt. Orion himself is told in Greek myth as a gigantic and supernaturally strong hunter, born to the Gorgon Euryale and the sea god Poseidon, whose fatal mistake was boasting that he would kill every animal on the earth, a claim that so angered the earth goddess Gaia that she sent a scorpion to kill him; the constellation Ophiuchus, the serpent bearer, is credited in the same tradition with reviving Orion afterward using an antidote, and the sky itself preserves the enmity between hunter and scorpion by never showing Scorpius and Orion above the horizon at the same time, Ophiuchus standing permanently between them as the figure who restored what the scorpion took. That Rigel, the foot planted furthest from Orion's raised weapon, should be read by the later tradition as the most consistently fortunate point in so violent and boastful a figure's own body suggests the astrologers read the star's position at the hunter's most grounded, least aggressive extremity as tempering the whole constellation's harder reputation.
Written from
Corpus key star:Rigel.