← Encyclopedia of Astrology · lesson 172/235
Fixed stars
The fixed stars are the stars proper — the distant suns that make up the constellations — as distinct from the planets, which the ancients called "wanderers" because they move against that background night after night. The stars were called fixed because they keep their places relative to one another: the shape of Orion or the Plough does not change in a lifetime. Astrology has used the brightest of them for more than two thousand years, each read as a point with a character of its own.
Why they move
Fixed as they are among themselves, the stars do creep forward through the tropical zodiac. The zodiac is measured from the spring equinox, and the equinox slowly slides backwards along the stars because the Earth's axis wobbles like a spinning top. The effect, called precession, carries every star forward about one degree every 72 years. So Aldebaran, at about 10° Gemini today, stood at about 9° Gemini in 1950. A chart has to place each star for its own birth date, as Viastaro does.
How they are used
Ptolemy described each star by the planets it resembles: Aldebaran "like that of Mars", Regulus like Mars and Jupiter, and so on. Medieval writers singled out fifteen Behenian stars for talismans and magic. In a birth chart the main contact is the conjunction: a star lying on a planet or an angle. The orb is kept tight, usually a degree or a degree and a half, because a star is a single point rather than a moving body. A star does not act alone; it colours the planet or angle it touches, and is read through that planet's own condition and house.
Viastaro looks at twenty major stars and reports those within one and a half degrees of a planet, the Ascendant or the Midheaven.
The Royal Stars
Four bright stars, spaced roughly a quarter of the sky apart, are known as the Royal Stars, traditionally said to come from ancient Persia, where they were held to guard the four quarters of the heavens: Aldebaran in the east, Regulus in the north, Antares in the west and Fomalhaut in the south. They are often read as promising prominence and success, on a condition each star sets in its own way.