Venus with Mercury, an Ingenious Nature

The tradition gives Deneb the nature of Venus with Mercury, and Robson reads it for a clever, ingenious and idealistic disposition, apt in matters of art and mind, a benefic and gentle delineation. The reading belongs to the modern compiling tradition; the older layer is thin, as it is for most of the bright stars whose confident personality-readings are largely Victorian in their wording. The form Deneb Adige preserved in the astrological catalogues is a corruption of the same Arabic root that gives Deneb its name, the tail, one of several stars across the sky, in Cygnus, Aquila, Capricornus and Leo, that share the name for marking the tail of their figure.

The corrupted form Deneb Adige, preserved specifically in the old astrological lists rather than in astronomical usage, illustrates how the same Arabic root could drift into quite different-looking Latin spellings depending on which chain of manuscript copying a given compiler was working from, so that a modern reader comparing an astronomical reference book with an astrological one can easily fail to recognise that Deneb and Deneb Adige name the identical star. The tail-name pattern linking Deneb, Denebola, Deneb Algedi and Deneb Kaitos across four unrelated constellations is one of the clearest illustrations in this entire catalogue of how a single descriptive Arabic word could be recycled wherever a figure happened to have a tail worth marking.