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Fixed-Star Reference
Explore Agrippa's fifteen Behenian stars, each placed at its precessed longitude for the date, and compare them to the Sun and Moon positions, with the nature, stones, plants and image Agrippa gives each star.
Placing the stars for your moment
In the Library of Alexandria · Claudius Ptolemy and Almagest (Mathematical Syntaxis)
The tradition
The Behenian stars are fifteen bright fixed stars that Hermetic astral magic singled out for talismans. The list goes back to the Liber Hermetis de quindecim stellis, a Latin text of the twelfth or thirteenth century, and reached the Renaissance through Agrippa's Three Books (1533), which gives each star its stones and plants (I.32), its planetary nature and its degree (II.31), and the image to be engraved under it (II.47).
Agrippa's natures are not always Ptolemy's. The Tetrabiblos (I.9) gives the stars of each constellation a planetary temperament, and where the two differ the instrument says so: the Pleiades, of the Moon and Mars in Agrippa, are of the Moon and Jupiter in Ptolemy.
The four Royal stars, Aldebaran, Regulus, Antares and Fomalhaut, are a modern scheme, carried into astrology by nineteenth-century writers, chiefly Allen (1899), who tie them loosely to the equinoxes and solstices of about 3000 BC. Fomalhaut is not one of Agrippa's fifteen.
Reading the instrument
- The band is the zodiac laid flat: longitude runs left to right from 0° Aries, ecliptic latitude up and down. Each star stands at its place for the date shown, carried from the J2000 catalogue by its proper motion and by precession; the stars drift about 50″ a year against the signs, and Agrippa's own degrees, from his day, sit about seven to nine degrees behind.
- The Sun and Moon stand on the band at their apparent longitudes, with the orb you choose shaded about them. A contact is measured in longitude alone, so a star far off the ecliptic, Vega 62° north or Sirius 40° south, meets a luminary only by projection.
- The ninth star, Agrippa's Wing of the Crow, is disputed. The instrument takes δ Corvi (Algorab), as most published Behenian tables do and as Agrippa's 7° Libra fits; read by its name, "the right wing of the crow", it would be γ Corvi (Gienah), which is shown faint beside it.
Where it descends from
- Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533), I.32, II.31 and II.47
- Stones and plants, natures and degrees, and the images of the fifteen; English by J. F. (London, 1651).
- Liber Hermetis de quindecim stellis
- Agrippa's source, a Latin Hermetic text whose manuscript families differ in some stones and herbs.
- Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos I.9
- The older planetary temperaments of the constellations, recorded where Agrippa differs.
- Hipparcos, via the HYG database; the Yale Bright Star Catalogue
- J2000 positions and proper motions, and visual magnitudes.
What this does not claim
Star places agree with a reference computation to under a second of arc, and the Sun and Moon to a few seconds; star longitudes are mean places with nutation, without annual aberration. Agrippa's images and effects (II.47) are recalled and partly confirmed by quotation, not proofed against a scan, and are marked medium; the effect of the tail of Capricorn is unsettled and given only as prosperity. The identification of the Crow's wing is disputed. Nothing here claims that a star, stone or plant has any effect.
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