On the Fixed Star Sirius

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Hello friends,

I am working on a newsletter I don’t want to release until tomorrow so, to tide you over, I have released my essay on the fixed star Sirius from behind the paywall.

One reason is that tomorrow, the moon will conjoin Sirius at 14º Cancer, making it a lovely day to connect with this star, even just to light a candle and say hi.

Another reason, as this essay gets into, is the significance of this dog star throughout time and space. It is the brightest star in the sky and deeply fiery, powerful, magical. I even got some gnosis over the summer that Sirius can act as a guide or messenger as you traverse the stellar and chthonic worlds, so long as you can integrate the light and the dark. Try it for yourself: does working with Sirius improve your insight or clairsentience?

But I include this to remind you that my star essays are not just regurgitations of extant fixed star tomes; they’re channelings, syntheses of the hunches and breadcrumbs and threads I follow through star lore, mythology, symbolism and art. What you find here, while indebted to the work of countless other thinkers, mystics and creatives, is not synthesized in this way anywhere else.

I also want to give you a taste for what my star essays are like and stay tuned: for my next paid newsletter I will be discussing Alphecca, star of the northern crown and success through love but not without sacrifice. We’ll be talking Ariadne, flower garlands, Nina Simone and the ties that bind.

Upgrade to paid now to begin connecting to this noble star.

Do you have Sirius or Alphecca in your chart and want help finding your place with them? Want to weave your life with the myths and divinities that are already calling to you? Be open to stellar and mystic possibilities during this darkest time of the year? Book a fixed star consult with me. They’re poetic, flowing; a balm.

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Even if you have just begun your stargazing practice, you would be hard-pressed to miss Sirius. As the brightest star in the sky, the Egyptians dubbed it “The Shining One,” in addition to using its heliacal rise to mark the beginning of their calendar year. As a part of the Canis Major constellation, it has often been called “The Dog Star,” and still holds deep ties to this animal.

Since the beginning of its worship around 3285 BC, the core meaning of this star has stayed consistent over its human witnessing. Both Robson and Ebertin point out its ability to impart fame and honor upon a the native and Brady also calls it a “marker of great deeds”. More specifically, she sees the star as turning the mundane sacred, or able to turn one small action into transcendent symbol or publicly significant act. By engaging with Sirius, we are able to go beyond our mortal limits and have power greater than our our single soul.

But the actual symbol for Sirius, the dog, brings in a deeper nuance than pure, shining fame. Since its domestication, “The Book of Symbols,” tells us, “our constant companion the dog has come to be associated with our other constant companion, death”. William Churchill called depression the “black dog” and countless underworld deities have the dog as their symbol or companion. As both a herald of the lightest light and the darkest dark, Sirius embodies a crucial pivot point in humanity’s collective psyche, one that touches Sirius natives deeply and unmistakably.

How do these conflicting meanings coalesce into one star, one body, one mind?

I See the Light

they call it Orion's dog, and though it is the brightest of all stars it bodes no good, bringing much fever, as it does, to us poor mortals.
- Homer, Iliad

To understand Sirius we must first dive into its connection with light. Even if you knew absolutely nothing about the star, to witness it with your own eyes is to feel its significance. In addition to being called “The Shining One” or “The Scorcher” due to its unmatched magnitude, its rays were said to cause rabies or madness in dogs, in part because its heliacal rise coincided with the hottest, “dog days” of summer. As a beacon of extreme brightness, Sirius can shed light on what was hidden or make what was unconscious, conscious. It also sets apart. In the dark net of night, Sirius emerges as an immediate focal point, drawing our eyes to it and away from everything else. This eye-drawing quality is part of why the Egyptians used Sirius as the foundation for their calendar. In the light, distinctions emerge. All of your deeds, for better or worse, can become more visible if Sirius touches you.

It wasn’t merely its brightness, however, that gave it power. In his “Three Books on Occult Philosophy,” Agrippa includes it amongst the 15 Benhenian stars noted for the strong magical applications. To make a talisman for Sirius, you would make an image “of an[sic] hound and a little virgin”. To make such a talisman would “bestoweth honour and good will, and the favour of men, and aerial spirits, and giveth power to pacify and reconcile kings, princes, and other men”. Sirius is the star of leadership, of fame and the favor of the powerful. You would only work with Sirius if you too wanted to be big and unmistakably bright.

This quality of Sirius finds its way into interpretations of the star. It marks great deeds as well as the lifting up of mundane events into something universally significant. It is the fact that each day the calendar progresses, but is always connected to the rise and set a far-off, unfathomably bright star 8 light years away. On the one hand, this star can catapult someone to notoriety or help them gain more from a simple act than expected. But when dealing with a star so bright, you have the ability to be eclipsed by its power. Like the fame machine, Sirius may burn you if you get too close. Princess Diana, who has the star in paran with her Sun, is a classic Sirius native; her flirting with the Prince of England completely altered the course of her life and she often suffered for it. Her individual needs were subsumed under the stifling demands of the crown as well as the paparazzi’s unending gaze.

In the light, things can’t be hidden, can’t be taken back, mean so much. The responsibility and consequences of bringing light, of being the light, is often what Sirius natives must face.

The Black Dog

But that such a star would be given an image so synonymous with darkness is another layer to consider. According to Brady, “in early times, dogs in myth only accompanied the goddess and guarded the gates of death”. In Greek myth, the goddess became Hecate, an underworld deity who holds rulership over the crossroads, witchcraft, poison plants, and demons. But she stands out from other underworld goddesses by the scope of her power. Singularly, Zeus never denied her the Ancient Power “of bestowing on mortals, or with holding from them, any desired gift,” even after the rise of the Olympians destroyed the older order of which she is a part. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, Zeus honored Hecate “above all” and “gave her special gifts,” including a share of the heavens, the seas, and the earth; she was one of the few gods, in other words, who could travel to all domains of existence unassisted. She was said to advise kings to glory, lead armies to victory, helps players win their games. But Hesiod also points out that while can increase one’s flock or catch, she can also lessen one’s bounty as well or take away what one has gained.

Her role as goddess of the crossroads, then, becomes clearer; as the mediator between places, Hecate can turn the pivot in either direction. Her great darkness is only matched by her great light; she was, after all, also known as a nurse for the young.

The hound, too, embodies this hinge position. As man’s best friend for much of history, The Book of Symbols points out that “the dog has assumed a central place in countless mythologies as a guide between the worlds of life and death, known and unknown, human and animal... conscious and unconscious”. But of the two poles, it is death where the dog usually lands. As our constant companion in life, “the dog has come to be associated with our other constant companion, death”. Though rather than causing death, the dog was more seen as a friendly guide through the murky depths of the underworld.

This chthonic aspect of Sirius finds its expression in the part of us that is forgotten or burned off by the star’s blinding light. Or, like Hecate’s shifting fortune and omnipresence, it reminds Sirius natives that all light comes at a price. To exist in the orbit of Sirius is to join Hecate at the crossroads, neither wholly bright nor wholly dark, though we may find it harder to incorporate the latter. Zeus’s praise of Hecate strikes me as similar to the fairies of Sleeping Beauty. The exclusion of the dark fairy at the princess’s party was to deny the fact of her eventual demise, thus condemning the princess to a deep sleep leaving her stuck between life and death. To deal with Sirius is to deal with the unshakeable facts of life; that it is meaningful; that our everyday actions are sacred; that light will burn out; that life will end.

Sirius natives are touched both by the illuminating power of the dog star as well as an acute understanding that darkness follows light. Shirley Jackson had Sirius in paran to Jupiter and her macabre short stories are still taught in English classrooms all across America; her fascination with death and darkness brought her great fame, perhaps because she had the black dog to guide her through.

“Loss of the Killing Instinct” (1977), acrylic on canvas. © Ginny Stanford

But plenty of natives exemplify this archetype whether they realize it or not. Many figures who died young or were burned up by public scrutiny have a strong Sirius presence, including Princess Diana, River Phoenix and my personal favorite, Frank Stanford, who had Sirius as his heliacal rising star as well as in paran to his Mars. Perhaps the only reason this poet is not better known is due to his death by suicide just shy of his 30th birthday. But anyone who met him in person seemed unable to forget him. From an early age he was known for his passionate, charismatic presence and his equally compelling poems, earning him the nickname “Swamprat Rimbaud”. He had multiple love affairs over his short life, including with fellow poet C.D. Wright, and Lucinda Williams, who knew him growing up, immortalized his life and death with her song “Pineola”.

His short life has inspired a cult-like following, including documentaries, all-night read-a-thons, conventions and a 2015 collected edition of all his published and unpublished work. But it is to his poems I return, and it is an excerpt from his longest work— a 10,000-line unpunctuated epic entitled “The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You”— that I leave you with as we close out this essay, hopefully letting the energy of Sirius ring in your ears well after this essay is done:

I think life is a dream

and what you dream I live

because none of you know what you want follow me

because I’m not going anywhere

I’ll just bleed so the stars can have something dark to shine in

Sources:

• “Brady’s Book of Fixed Stars,” Bernadette Brady

• “Theogony,” Hesiod

• “The Book of Symbols,” Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism

• “Three Books on Occult Philosophy,” Agrippa

• “What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford,” Frank Stanford