Today’s newsletter is a deep dive on the star Zosma, found in the lower back of the Lion constellation. You don’t need to have much technical knowledge of astrology to appreciate the stars. We have been writing stories and praying to them since we have been looking up. This essay is meant to help readers connect more deeply to these shining pin pricks and better understand ourselves. If you want to know if Zosma touches your chart, see if you have any planets or significant placements within 2º of 11º Virgo. Even if not, you have so much to learn from this subtle, tender, oracular star.
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While there are only 7 planets, 12 signs and 12 houses, there are hundreds of fixed stars being analyzed in an astrological context, and countless more twinkling in our sky. Part of studying the stars is learning to keep track of them and spend enough time to understand each deeply.
It can be easy to forget Zosma, then; in a way that is her nature. If you read Brady’s Book of Fixed Stars, you will simply see Zosma as a star of victims. But I’m going to ask you not stop there. While Zosma has long been associated with defeat and misfortune, this understanding doesn’t speak to the whole experience of this star. My research reveals Zosma to be a prophetic, oracle stars; one twinned with a lush romance and a rich, ornate artistry. Through scrying and direct contact with Zosma, I have been able to piece together a fuller and more lived-in understanding of this star.
May this understanding enrich you.
If you want to explore this star more deeply or find out about the stellar spirits touching your life, book a fixed star reading with me:
Ode to the Victims
Found in the Leo constellation, it must co-exist with Regulus, heart of the lion, one of the brightest stars in the sky and one of the four Royal Stars. Since Babylon, the Leo constellation has been, as Gavin White Puts is, “a symbol of high summer, war and carnage, and the king”. Time and time again civilizations have associated Regulus and Leo with the exaltation of royalty and the military might needed to secure it. This fixed star, when affecting a chart, is said to bring prominence and success. Just as its earthly counterpart is the king of the jungle, so too, did the ancients predict the status of the king by the shifting of this star. Leo’s heliacal rise in the middle of summer, coinciding with the parching of the land and the burning up of crops, mimics its connection to the “vagaries of war and the occurrence of natural disasters such as famine” (White). Rarely does Regulus obtain power without effort or conflict.
But while the king has proved himself victorious over such shifting conditions, an ordinary person may not be so fortunate. While Regulus was said to represent the king, the whole body of the celestial lion was said to stand for the people; within that body, Zosma, the star in the lion’s back near the tail, corresponds to a specific subset of those people: the forgotten, abused, targeted, and marginalized.
In his series of 12 labors, the battle with the Nemean Lion was Herakles’s first. Borne of monsters, this lion was said to be impossible to kill because of its special fur that could not be pierced or broken. Hercules succeeded instead by breaking its back in the spot where Zosma lay.
Embodying that brokenness, Brady sees Zosma “present in the charts of victims, of people who are abused by the system” or whom have lost to the marching of time. While there is a strong connection between Zosma and feminine goddesses, Brady tells us this star more “belongs to those whom the establishment, either directly or indirectly, makes powerless”. Anyone who is not included in our seats of power, our cultural narratives of success, the accumulation of capital, is a child of Zosma. This idea of victimization has always reminded me of Walter Benjamin, who remind us that history is written by the victors: “Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate” (Benjamin). Just as Regulus co-exists in Leo with Zosma, so must the victors coincide with the defeated. How could either one exist otherwise?
I love talking about Zosma with the following two examples because it showcases the range of Zosma’s more straight-forward definition. The first is poet-philosopher Robert Graves, who has Zosma in paran to his Moon and Venus. His most famous work, is “The White Goddess,” which revives the ancient tradition of goddess worship and asserts this forgotten tradition as the defeated, primal religion that predated a violent take-over by the patriarchal strain of worship that is still practiced today.
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