In the previous post we saw as Salome’s story, the story of a woman who asked the head of a prophet in a gold plate in order to satisfy her lust of power can be easily connected with Algol and its representation in Art, especially in Decadent ((from the famous verse of Paul Verlain (1883) Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la décadence, qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs, en composant des acrostiches indolents, d’un style d’or où la langueur du soleil danse. )) and Symbolism movement, which liked so much witches, sinners and femmes fatales.
Now it’s time to see some example charts. Unfortunately we cannot take those charts where Algol has the same longitude of the Moon or some other planet because a fixed star is not always where its longitude is.
Stars are not like planets – in Greek this word means wanderer, planets wander on the ecliptic in fact- stars are ,on the other hand FIXED.
For this reason- because they always keep the same distance and proportion between each other, they generate unexpected event, as the pseudo-Ptolemy states:
The fixed stars grant extremely good fortune, unconnected with the understanding; but it is most commonly marked by calamities, unless the planets also agree in the happiness.
This is explained in a very plain way in Jean Stade De Stellis Fixis Commentarius (( Johannes Stadius, Tabulae Bergenses aquabilis et apparentis motus orbium coelestium (Colonia Agrippina, 1560). )), translation from latin here in this blog.
Fixed stars don’t have any other motion than the motion of the sky, so they should be measured according the diurnal motion.
Ptolemy describes their motion in the Almagest: (( Almagest VIII.4. Claudius Ptolemaeus, Almageste ou Astronomie de Ptolemée. Klaudiu Ptolemaiu Mathēmatikē Syntaxis = Composition mathématique de Claude Ptolémée, ou Astronomie ancienne Trad. … par M. l’Abbé Halma, et (A Paris: Chez Merlin, 1816). My translation from French. ))
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