Venus with Jupiter, a Benefic Star

The tradition gives Agena the nature of Venus with Jupiter, one of the more fortunate pairings, and Robson reads it for refinement, morality, honour and good health, and for friends and position won by merit. This is a benefic delineation, free of the menace attached to the martial and Saturnine stars, though like all these southern-star readings it belongs to the modern compiling tradition rather than to any ancient text, since the star was beyond the horizon of the astrologers who founded the system. Its genuine distinction is as one of the two dazzling pointer-stars of the southern sky, a landmark for finding the Southern Cross.

Agena and its neighbour Alpha Centauri were first properly catalogued for Europeans by navigators and astronomers working from the southern hemisphere, notably the Dutch expeditions of the late sixteenth century whose star positions Petrus Plancius incorporated into the first globes and atlases to show the deep-southern sky accurately, centuries after the northern constellations had already received their full traditional treatment. No Ptolemaic reading exists for Agena because the star never rose above the horizon anywhere in the ancient Mediterranean world, a geographic fact that applies equally to its neighbour Alpha Centauri and to Achernar far to the south.