Algorab

Algorab, Delta Corvi, marks the right wing of Corvus, the crow, a small but distinctive constellation of four principal stars forming a compact, easily traced quadrilateral just south of Virgo. The constellation's Greek myth ties it to two neighboring figures, Crater the cup and Hydra the water snake, in a story where Apollo sent the crow to fetch water in the cup but the bird delayed, distracted by an unripe fig tree, and returned late with a false excuse, blaming a water snake for the delay; Apollo, seeing through the lie, is said to have placed all three, crow, cup, and snake, in the sky together, with the crow positioned so that the cup and the snake's coils remain forever just out of its reach as a lasting punishment for the delay and the false blame.

Algorab's own Arabic name, from al-ghurab, simply names the bird directly, a considerably plainer designation than the narrative Greek myth attached to the figure as a whole, and one of many cases in traditional star naming where the Arabic tradition names a star for its position within a figure while the Greek tradition supplies the figure's story. Corvus itself is a small, compact constellation, its four brightest stars forming a distinctive quadrilateral that stands out precisely because it contains so few stars packed into so small an area of sky, a shape sometimes likened to a sail or a kite as well as to the wings and body of a bird, and one that made it comparatively easy for widely separated observing traditions to trace and to remember even without a bright, immediately eye catching central star anchoring the figure the way Aldebaran anchors Taurus or Antares anchors Scorpius.

Algorab is counted among the fifteen Behenian fixed stars, a set of prominent stars singled out in medieval and Renaissance astrological magic as carrying particularly concentrated occult influence, useful for the specific kind of talismanic work that tradition described. The list was compiled in the Arabic and Latin magical literature of the medieval period, most influentially transmitted through the Picatrix, and was repeated with additional detail in the sixteenth century by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, whose tables paired each of the fifteen stars with a planetary nature, a sigil, and, in fuller versions of the tradition, a corresponding plant and stone thought to draw on the same influence.

Compilations of this material, including Vivian Robson's widely cited twentieth century survey The Fixed Stars and Constellations in Astrology, gather the scattered classical and medieval attributions given to each of the fifteen stars into a single reference, though the specific correspondences recorded for any one star can vary somewhat between sources depending on which manuscript tradition a given compiler worked from.

Algorab's place on the list reflects Corvus's long standing prominence in the older astrological literature generally, well beyond the fixed star tradition specifically, since the constellation's mythic association with false speech and broken oaths made it a frequently cited figure in judicial and predictive astrology dealing with deception and testimony.