"The Swan Hides a God"

on the fixed star Deneb Adige

Hilma af Klint 1915 The Swan

Hello friends,

Today’s newsletter is a deep dive on the fixed star Deneb Adige, marking the tail of Cygnus, the swan 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 divine messengers and better understand ourselves through the language of the stars.

Here are some ways to determine if this star is for you:

• Do have any placements within 3-7º Pisces?

• Are you interested in swans, ?

• Are you an artist trying to make a living with your art?

• Do you have a strong voice of intuition you’re trying to enhance?

Then read on. Deneb Adige may be the star for you.

And, as always, if you want to connect with this star yourself, I outline my method for doing so here:

Remember: You don’t need to have much technical knowledge of astrology to appreciate the fixed 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 divine messengers and better understand ourselves.

If you want to learn more about how the stars touch and guide your beautiful life, and what your soul is asking of you, book a fixed star reading with me ⭐. My books are open for July:

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Deneb Adige, the tail of the Swan

Constellation: Cygnus the Swan

Zodiacal Degree: 5°39’ Pisces

Planetary Nature: Mercury and Venus

Talismanic Power: makes its wearer beloved by all, erudite, and increases riches. It frees him from paralysis, gout and quartan fever. (Camillo Leonardi)

For as long as I’ve known her, Deneb Adige has been an enchantment. I grew up inundated with swan myths and longed to see the pale, long-necked birds in person, floating two by two for life before they let out their final, mournful song.

When I found out I had a personal connection to a swan star, I was elated. In my list of fixed star parans, I saw that the bright white star in the tail of Cygnus, was rising with my Venus. The one-sentence description read:

The poetic soul struggling to live in the mundane world

I could scarcely believe it. My primary aspiration in life could be summed up as being a poetic soul struggling to live in the mundane world. And this star is saying it’s not in my head? I had to know more.

But, beyond the paragraphs I could find in Brady’s books, I didn’t find much else that satisfied my curiosity. So, I present to you my own remedy. This essay has been a long time coming, but I’ve been putting it off because Deneb Adige is one of my most precious stars— I didn’t want to spend the pleasure too quickly. But the time to speak of the swan is now. Please enjoy.

Seeing a star in the night sky is its own form of ritual. My first in-person encounter with Deneb Adige came through tracing her position the Summer Triangle, the stellar shape formed by her, Vega, the vulture, and Altair, the eagle. I found that even in this remote stellar pattern the stars were still themselves. Bellicose, bold Altair led the helm from the ground while Vega stood high above, watching and guiding. Deneb Adige, the faintest of the three, was tucked behind the other two birds, more secretive but also able to lead in her own, subtle way.

In the years since, I have realized how much her place in the sky revealed. Despite being a star woven into my nativity, she has long been mysterious to me, both luminous with poetry and shifting in and out of my focus. I have somehow lost my Cygnus talisman somewhere in my apartment. I know I will find her when she wants me to.

Let us, together then, wander through the winding realm of the swan.

Contents:

• The Ancient Bird

• Swans and Myth

• The Union of Opposites

• Delicate Advance

• Creative Skill

• “The Swan Hides a God”

• Eternal Return

The Ancient Bird

Deneb Adige has always been a bird. In Ancient western Asian cuneiform inscriptions, Cygnus, alongside its Summer Triangle companions, Lyra and Aquila, were the three demon-birds. Cygnus was initially a kite, “a fierce hunter/scavenger bird of the hawk family, known for its graceful and sustained flight” (COS). Aratus describes her, poetically as “a sparkling Bird, clothed in fog ... rejoicing in its flight”. Even in antiquity the star was recognized for its shrouded mystery. Manilius, in the 1st century A.D. tells us those born when this constellation rises “shall make the denizens of the air and the race of birds that is dedicated to heaven the source of his pleasure and profit”. Cygnus natives, in other words, will find joy and resource in birds, which Manilius aptly connects to the heavens themselves. There is already an elision forming between the avian and the divine, especially wit this star. Deneb Adige may offer us entry to worlds beyond and above our own.

Hundreds of years before, in the 6th century BC, this constellation was already known as Kyknos, “Swan,” by the poet Stesichoros. But the constellation’s connection to birds as a broad category indicates this star not only partakes in the unique symbolism of the swan but also that of birds generally, who chiefly symbolize the meeting of heaven and earth, of matter reaching ever-upward. Deneb Adige does not primarily attach her attention to the mundane, practical world but to the world of spirit that lives hidden within matter— a poetic soul indeed.

Swans and Myth

Let us return to the swan in particular. This bird has a specific significance in part due to the many myths attached to the bird, often echoing similar themes. Growing up, I read the Swan Maiden, the tale of a beautiful girl cursed to become a swan half the time, keeping her from her true love. In The Ugly Duckling, an awkward, ostracized baby bird turns into a beautiful swan when they grow up, defying the expectation of their youth. Leda and the Swan, the Greek myth attached to Cygnus, is also a tale of passion and transformation.

In the most well-known version, Leda is the wife of King Tyndareus when she is raped by Zeus, who had turned himself into a swan in order to gain access to the mortal woman. Leda then lays an egg, from which two sets of twins are born: Helen and Clytemnestra and Castor and Pollux. She is then deified as Nemesis, goddess of retribution, her name meaning “the-Power-which-distributes-what-is-due,” for good or for ill.

There is much duality in this myth— both the human and the divine, the masculine and feminine, the loss and the gain. The same is true for the swan.

On the one hand, there is a long symbolic tradition connecting swans to light and masculinity. The Dictionary of Symbols records that:

From Ancient Greece to Siberia, via Asia Minor, as well as among Slav and Germanic peoples, a great mass of myth, tradition and poetry has gathered in praise of the swan, the spotless bird whose whiteness…strength and grace have made it a living manifestation of light itself.

The purity of their hue and the power of their slender, phallic necks gives the bird a mighty, transcendent quality. Connected to the chariots of the Sun, swans are also sacred to the Sun god Apollo, doubly so due to their love of music.

The swan is also deeply associated with new life. Just as Leda’s union with the swan produced four offspring, in many cultures a swan was said to have laid or nurtured the World Egg. There is also an ancient belief that babies came from earth and water and were brought to their parents by swans.

But you can find equal and opposite cygnine significations for all of those listed above. The swan is just as much a feminine symbol as they are masculine, often synonymous with the Virgin Mary. Though Gaston Bachelard compares the swan to a nude woman, he ultimately labels the swan as a symbol of the hermaphrodite. Specifically, “[t]he swan is feminine when brilliant waters are contemplated, but it is masculine in action”. The two poles are not static states, but sites of continual exchange depending on the pose of the person.

Like the aptly-named “swan song,” these birds are also associated with the funeral pyre, harps, “martyrs and Christian resignation” (Rosenberg), as well as “the mystic journey to the other world”. Bachelard actually calls the death the swan song heralds is a “sexual death”: “it is clear that the song the swan sings before his death can be interpreted as the eloquent professions of a lover, as the warm voice of the seducer before the supreme moment, an ending so fatal to exaltation that it is really a "love- related death." Death here is not an ending but a hinge-point to another beginning, one with perhaps even greater intimacy with another. Whether marking birth or death, swans remain tether to unseen worlds beyond this one. Brady also calls Deneb Adige a shaman star due to of their connection to the World-egg. The Khitan people, a nomadic tribe previously found in Korea, would sacrifice a swan at the beginning of winter as an offering to the gods. Geese, who are often used interchangeably with swans, were important animals for those undergoing rituals to be initiated into Siberian shamanism.

From this connection to astral travel and exploring other realms, we can see that the swan is not caught in dualities of masculine and feminine or life and death; rather Deneb Adige shows us the alchemical process that takes place when these opposites come together, fused, intermingling, but still themselves.