Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Great Ambition, and Where the Reading Comes From

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Great Ambition, and Where the Reading Comes From

The traditional reading of Antares (courage, ferocity, headstrong daring, honours won and lost through rashness, a sudden fall), is one of the more coherent fixed-star delineations, and it is worth tracing.

Ptolemy supplies the raw material: a Mars nature with a Jupiter admixture. That pairing is what generates the standard reading. Mars alone would give simple violence; Jupiter alone would give expansion and honour. Together they give something more specific, great ambition that destroys itself, magnitude of enterprise combined with a lack of restraint. The tradition's reading of Antares is a fairly disciplined inference from Ptolemy's two words, which is more than can be said for many.

The elaborated delineations (the specific predictions of ruin, of danger from fire and from beasts, of self-inflicted disaster), are from the later compilers, and in English from Robson in 1923, drawing on Arabic and Renaissance material.

Antares is one of Agrippa's Behenian fifteen, paired with sardonyx and with birthwort. It is also counted among the four Royal Stars, as the Watcher of the West, a scheme discussed under Aldebaran, and one that should be treated as unsourced.

There is a genuine older layer. Antares is the heart of the Scorpion in the Babylonian tradition as well as the Greek, and Babylonian astronomical texts treat the Scorpion constellation as significant. Rochberg's work on Mesopotamian celestial divination sets out what that material actually says, which is considerably more concerned with omens for kings and states than with individual character. The shift from state omens to personal delineation is one of the largest changes in the history of the subject and it happens in the Hellenistic period.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.