Algol

Beta Persei — the Gorgon's head, the Demon Star

Position (J2000)

26°10′ Taurus

Magnitude

2.12

Colour

Blue-white

Spectrum

B8 V

Distance

93 light-years

Nature

Saturn · Mars

In the sky

Algol is the second-brightest star in Perseus and the best known variable star in the sky. Every two days, twenty hours and forty-nine minutes it dims from magnitude 2.1 to about 3.4 and then recovers, a change large enough to follow by eye in one evening. A dimmer companion passes in front of it at each revolution and blocks part of the light. The colour is blue-white, indicating a young and very hot star, and the distance is about ninety-three light-years. It lies below the W of Cassiopeia on autumn evenings, marking the head that Perseus carries.

The myth

The name descends from the Arabic Ra's al-Ghūl, the head of the ogre, which also gave English the word ghoul; Hebrew sources give Rosh ha-Satan. In the Greek account the star is the severed head of the Gorgon Medusa.

Of the three Gorgon sisters only Medusa was mortal. The earliest Greek sources call her monstrous from birth, but Ovid's version has been the more influential: Medusa was a priestess of Athena, known for her beauty and particularly for her hair, until Poseidon violated her inside Athena's temple, and Athena punished Medusa for what had been done to her by turning her hair to serpents and her gaze into something no living thing could meet. She was not born a monster; she was made into one and then held responsible for it. She is also, in the older sense, an oracle — violated, punished, and never silenced — and the refusal of erasure is part of what the star carries.

Three details of the myth carry directly into the reading. Perseus does not confront her face to face, which nobody survives, but approaches watching her reflection in a polished shield. Pegasus springs from her severed neck. And her head is afterwards fixed to Athena's shield, where the face that once destroyed becomes a protection for whoever carries it.

What it gives

• Composure before the unbearable The native can remain present with material that most people cannot look at — injury, dying, violence, or a deception taking place in front of them — without the involuntary turning-away that protects the majority. This is frequently mistaken for coldness, including by the native, but the feeling is generally present; only the flinch is absent.
• Aptitude for crisis work Because the capacity is uncommon and genuinely needed, natives of this star are found in surgery and emergency medicine, in hospice and palliative care, in police, forensic and legal work, and in writing that treats subjects others decline to treat.
• Thoroughness Whatever this star touches in a chart tends to be done completely rather than partially. Half-measures are difficult for these natives to sustain, and work left unfinished troubles them out of proportion to its importance.
• Resistance to deception The same willingness to examine unwelcome facts is applied to the native's own circumstances, which makes them difficult to mislead and unusually quick to identify a false account.

What to watch for

• Intensity with no object The chief difficulty of this placement is not force but force without employment. Where the native has no demanding outward work, the same close attention settles on the self, on an old injury, or on a single relationship, and becomes fixation.
• Unspoken anger These natives feel strongly and are commonly taught early that strong feeling is unacceptable. Anger that is never expressed does not disperse; it accumulates and begins to influence decisions outside the native's awareness.
• Direct confrontation with what cannot be faced Attempting to deal with the hardest material head-on, without any intermediate step, generally fails and leaves the native worse placed than before.
• Cycles of exhaustion Periods of complete engagement followed by withdrawal are usual with this star. Treated as failures rather than as a rhythm, they produce discouragement out of all proportion.

How to work with it

Choose demanding work early, and choose it deliberately — work that genuinely requires somebody able to face difficult things. This is the single most reliable measure, because it gives the star's force a legitimate object before it finds one of its own.

Say when you are angry, to one trusted person if not more widely. Naming the feeling is usually enough to restore its proportion.

Approach the worst material indirectly. What cannot be confronted directly can very often be handled at one remove — written down, drawn, told as a story about someone else, or described to a single person who can hear it calmly. The polished shield in the myth is practical instruction rather than ornament, and for material of this severity the indirect approach is usually the only one that succeeds.

Plan for the quiet periods rather than resisting them, and build rest into the year deliberately.

In brief

Algol describes the ability to look steadily at what others cannot, and the tradition's severity about the star reflects what happens when that ability is denied rather than what the ability is. Kept idle it turns inward and does harm, which is what the old texts recorded. Given serious work and approached with the indirectness the myth itself recommends, it is among the most useful capacities a person can bring into a difficult situation. The star is the same in both cases; the difference lies in whether its owner has examined it.