Almagest

The library · The fixed stars

Spica

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

What the tradition reads

Spica, alpha Virginis, the brightest star in Virgo, sits in the ear of grain the Virgin carries in the classical constellation figure, and Ptolemy gives it the combined nature of Venus and Mars, a mixture the later astrologer Robson reads as producing success, renown, riches, a sweet disposition and a love of art and science, tempered by a less flattering reputation for unscrupulousness and, in some placements, an injustice worked against the innocent that is nonetheless later corrected, with eminence and riches following the correction. Robson names it the most fortunate of all the fixed stars, and the wider tradition has kept this reading substantially intact, a planet or angle in close conjunction with Spica by longitude is treated as one of the most favourable fixed star contacts available in a chart, marking talent, particularly artistic or intellectual talent, and success that endures rather than flares briefly. The tradition draws a further distinction by the contact's position, Spica rising or culminating is read as unreservedly fortunate, while Spica setting, especially if afflicted by Mars, is read as carrying a harder edge, closer to the star's less generous face.

The story

Spica's name descends from the Latin spica virginis, the virgin's ear of wheat, and the star has carried an agricultural association for as long as it has been named, appearing in Sumerian records as absinnu, the seed furrow, long before the Greeks fixed it in the hand of their own harvest goddess. In Hindu astronomy it gives its name and its position to Chitra, the fourteenth lunar mansion, the bright one or the jewel, ruled by Mars, a rare point of near agreement between two otherwise separate traditions about the same star's essential brightness and worth. Spica also carries a quieter but consequential place in the history of astronomy itself, comparing its position against older Babylonian records is credited with giving Hipparchus the data that first revealed the precession of the equinoxes, the slow drift of the whole visible sky against the fixed stars that every later astrological ayanamsa calculation depends on. A star this closely tied to both the harvest and the discovery of deep time has rarely needed much embellishment to be read as fortunate.

Written from

Corpus key star:Spica.