Mercury and Mars, and a Behenian Star

Ptolemy gives Procyon the nature of Mercury with Mars, and the tradition reads it for quick wit and activity that brings sudden advancement and equally sudden loss, Robson supplying the elaboration, Ptolemy the core. Procyon is one of Agrippa's fifteen Behenian stars, the set singled out in Renaissance magic for talismans, where it is paired with agate and with the herbs buttercup and pennyroyal. That makes it one of the relatively few stars for which a specific stone-and-plant correspondence has a named early-modern source rather than a modern invention.

Procyon's Agrippa correspondences are given as the stone agate and the herbs buttercup and pennyroyal; being one of the fifteen Behenian stars placed Procyon, alongside Aldebaran, Regulus, Sirius and the rest of Agrippa's set, at the centre of Renaissance ceremonial magic in a way most of the stars catalogued in this whole set of tables, named only for position and lacking any documented magical use, never were. The pairing of quick wit with sudden reversal that Robson gives Procyon echoes the general Mercury-Mars formula applied elsewhere in this catalogue, intellect supplying the gift and the martial component supplying the instability that undoes it.