Jupiter with Saturn, and a Behenian Star

The tradition gives Deneb Algedi the nature of Jupiter with Saturn, and Robson reads it as a mixture of beneficence and sorrow, legal and public position on the one hand, quiet grief and reversal on the other, the Jovian and Saturnine strands pulling against each other. It is the last of Agrippa's fifteen Behenian stars, the set singled out in Renaissance magic for talismans, where it is paired with the stone chalcedony and with the herbs marjoram and sorrel. That makes it, unusually, one of the few stars with a documented early-modern stone-and-herb correspondence rather than a modern invention, a genuine link between the fixed-star lore and the talismanic tradition of the sixteenth century.

Deneb Algedi's recorded Agrippa correspondences, chalcedony and the herbs marjoram and sorrel, close out the fifteen Behenian stars in the traditional ordering, which generally runs from Aldebaran through the zodiacal and circumpolar bright stars to this last entry in Capricornus; three of the fifteen, this star, Procyon and Alphecca, happen to fall among the articles gathered in this set of tables, a useful reminder of how much of the Behenian scheme threads through stars otherwise treated only for their constellation position.