Vega

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

What the tradition reads

Vega, alpha Lyrae, one of the brightest stars in the night sky and, after Arcturus, the brightest visible from the northern hemisphere, takes the nature of Venus and Mercury in Ptolemy's assignment, a mixture the later astrologer Robson reads as giving "beneficence, ideality, hopefulness, refinement and changeability," and describes as making its natives "grave, sober, outwardly pretentious and usually lascivious," a harsher and more double edged reading than the star's benefic pairing might suggest on its own. A planet in close conjunction with Vega is treated in the tradition as gaining charm, artistic sensitivity and a certain leadership through idealism, tempered by a warning against relying on the star's gifts for lasting stability, since its Mercury-Venus mixture is read as bringing brilliance more readily than persistence. Because Vega lies far to the north of the ecliptic rather than close beside it, the tradition treats a longitude conjunction with it as a looser, more symbolic contact than a conjunction with a star nearer the planets' own path, its influence read as present but diffuse rather than sharply focused.

The story

Vega's name descends from the Arabic an-nasr al-waqi, the falling eagle or vulture, an image drawn from the way the constellation Lyra's other stars were once seen forming the folded wings of a swooping bird around the harp itself, the lyre the Greeks credited to Orpheus, later set among the stars at the request of Apollo and the Muses after his death. Vega has held the pole star's position twice over in the very long cycle of precession, once around twelve thousand years before the present era and again, the same slow drift promises, some twelve thousand years from now, a rare distinction shared with only a handful of bright stars close enough to the pole's circling path. In Chinese tradition Vega is Zhinu, the weaver girl, separated from her herdsman lover Niulang, the star Altair, by the river of heaven, the Milky Way itself, and permitted to cross to him only once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh month, over a bridge the magpies form with their own bodies for the occasion, a story of patient, long deferred devotion that the later astrologers' reading of Vega as idealistic and hopeful, whatever its practical instability, seems to echo without ever quite naming.

Written from

Corpus key star:Vega.