Sirius
a planet or angle in close conjunction with the fixed star Sirius
What the tradition reads
Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, marks the mouth of the Greater Dog and is given the nature of Jupiter and Mars by Ptolemy, while Alvidas instead reads it as the Moon, Jupiter and Mars together. Robson's reading of its influence names honour, renown, wealth, ardour, faithfulness, devotion, passion and resentment together, an unusually full and emotionally charged list for a single fixed star, and adds that the star makes its natives custodians, curators and guardians, a reading of watchful responsibility that follows the star's own constant, unmissable brightness fairly directly. Robson also records a danger of dog bites attached to Sirius, cross referencing the same danger given to Procyon in Canis Minor, the smaller and dimmer of the sky's two dog stars, and treats the two canine stars as sharing a single specific physical risk between them rather than assigning each an unrelated one. Because Sirius outshines every other star visible from Earth, the tradition generally reads a close contact with it as marking an unusually prominent life, one whose passions and loyalties, whether fulfilled as devotion or curdled into resentment, are read as running deeper and burning longer than an ordinary placement would produce.
The story
Sirius takes its Greek name, Seirios, from a word meaning sparkling or scorching, though Robson records an alternative derivation from the Egyptian god Osiris, a disagreement over the name's true origin that has never been fully settled. The star's heliacal rising, its first reappearance in the dawn sky after a period of invisibility, coincided closely with the annual flooding of the Nile, and the Egyptians accordingly worshipped the star as the goddess Sopdet, building their calendar of chronology, the Sothic period, around its reappearance as the most reliable marker of the year the ancient world possessed. The Greeks gave the same star's summer prominence its own separate and much harsher reputation, the dog days, a stretch of the hottest weeks of the year they believed the star caused directly, wilting plants, weakening men and arousing women, a season named for the star precisely because its unusual brightness in high summer seemed too consequential to be mere coincidence. Chinese astronomy names the star Teen Lang, the Heavenly Wolf, and reads an unusual brightening in it as a specific portent of thieves, a wolf's opportunism read directly into a star that, across every one of these traditions, is treated as too bright to be watched passively.
Written from
Corpus key star:Sirius.