By Agent EI - Andrew Smith

Tags: astrology, creativity, fixed stars, heliacal rise, heliacal stars, procyon, sirius

Procyon

Tropical 26 Cancer 09

Sidereal 1 Cancer 55

Long before the Greeks mapped the sky into the stories they had been told, and long before the Egyptians oriented their temples and their theology around the blazing certainty of Sirius, the Babylonians of the Euphratean valley looked up at the eighth brightest star in the visible heavens and gave it a name that has been largely forgotten in the centuries of astronomical poetry that followed: Nangar. The Carpenter.

In Babylonian cosmology, the Carpenter was an aspect of Marduk, the supreme deity, the one who shaped the heavens as a craftsman shapes timber, who placed the stars in their positions with the deliberate precision of one who understands load-bearing and long arcs of time. To name Procyon after this figure was to say something of considerable weight about the star's function: Nangar’s song actively crafts the structure that hosts the sky suggesting that Procyon may very well be the One who understands the tone of stars, the arcs of their movement and the heaven shaper. He is a star to help us penetrate the structure of the firmament and laws that prop up our reality.

That very same tradition knew the Milky Way as a river, a vast and luminous congress of light-tones flowing through the depths of the firmament, carrying along its current a symphony of tens of thousands singing presences. Along the banks of this celestial river, Procyon stands at the crossing point, and its full Babylonian title reflected precisely this: Kakkab Paldara, the Star of the Crossing of the Water-Dog.

A Star of many names

Please close your right eye for a moment and allow the current of light travel through your left, accessing your analeptic memory – there, standing steadfast at the shore of a light channel in a dark fertile ocean, is the threshold keeper, the one who knows the ford that grants passage through the surging current, who holds the liminal lamp that heralds the deeper light that lies quietly behind the light.

Continue facing East but look beyond the horizon towards the vast aquatic home of the remnants of the ancient lands of Lemuria, to the island peoples of the Hawaiian archipelago, where she is known by a different name – Puana, though her role remains steadfast – a blossoming beauty that lights the path.

Now look a little further south towards the island of Tahiti, where she is now a towering pillars that holds the sky in place, a structural support of the heavens. A different name, the same presence as those who stood aloft their ziggurats – She is a load-bearing star that holds something essential in position so that everything else may be properly oriented around it.

Turning West towards the former fertile lands of the Nile, lies the people who persuaded the world to see her as a four legged faithful guardian, loyal companion and fierce protector. Why? Well the Egyptians organised their theological world around Sirius, whose rising announced the flooding of the Nile and the rebirth of the agricultural year, and they gave Sirius the form of their jackal-headed god Anubis, the great psychopomp who weighs the heart of the dead against the feather of truth. Rising an hour before this spiritual Sun, Procyon adopted the role as herald, a role that mirrors Anubis's own function as the one who prepares the way.

Cú

Thanks to the Egyptians, Procyon and Sirius are seen by many cultures as being hounds, one of the oldest and most venerated beings to hold sacred meaning. The hound is unwavering loyalty made flesh, the steadfast protector who holds the threshold as long as breath remains, the fierce guardian of those in its care, and the possessor of a discernment of character so absolute and so instinctive that no human duplicity can move it. The hound knows. It has always known.

In the Ireland, the Cú Sídhe, the supernatural hounds of the fairy world, are great white creatures with red ears, the classic colouring of Otherworld beings, sovereign guardians at the boundary between the visible world and the world that lies behind it, creatures whose fidelity was total and whose judgment at the threshold was final.

No figure captures this more vividly than the great hero, Sétanta, more commonly known by his legendary name, Cú Chulainn, after slaying the fearsome guard dog of the smith, Culann, in self-defense. In recompense, the young lad vowed to take the hound’s place, thus becoming “Cú Chulainn”, the Hound of Culann. However, it is to the mountains of the South Western Dingle peninsula that we turn our attention to, the curiously revolving strong hold home of Cú Roí mac Dáire, a sorcerer king of Munster, whose name means ‘hound of the plain/ field’. Every night, as darkness descends across the land, the fortress sitting at the formidable elevation of 835 meters at Caherconree spins upon its axis, and its entrance withdraws entirely from the world of men. Every warrior or raider, however skilled or determined, finds the door lost to them after sunset, for the entrance itself ceases to be findable. Cú Roí commands this rotation through enchantment, and he is said to maintain this control even when wandering in distant lands. The castle turns without him, obedient to a will that reaches across geography and time.

The rotation of the fortress hints of celestial mechanics – specifically the apparent rotation of the night sky around the pole. This implies that Cú Roí’s home encodes stellar knowledge and he is a kind of astral guardian figure – a hound of the sky, whose fortress spins like the heavens themselves each night.

But what of Procyon?

The brightest star in the Lesser Dog constellation carries the meaning that Cú Roí's name carries in Irish: the lesser hound. Procyon itself derives from the Greek Προκύων (Prokyon), meaning "before the dog”, a reference to the fact that it rises above the horizon a short time before Sirius, the great Dog Star of Canis Major. The two dog-constellations, Canis Major and Minor, are the pellucid otherworld hounds of a divine hunter, Herne, or Orion, and associated with the passage between the world of the living and the realm of the dead. Cú Roí’s fortress functions as a portal to the Otherworld, just as Cú Roí oscillates between the mortal and the divine. Procyon is thus the herald of the greater hound, the forerunner who arrives first in the night sky and announces what is to follow.

As an aside, the canine association synonymous with this luminous pairing morphed into wolves in Macedonia, Volchi, shifting his loyal companionship to a more aggressive predator, even though the wolf is regarded as a threshold being, operating at the boundary of the liminal and solid world in many Earth-based traditions – the First Nation of the Americas and the Celts.

Hekate

The association with Hekate flows through this star by way of its dog-star lineage. This elder, torch-bearing goddess of the crossroads is also the guardian of all liminal spaces and the sovereign of the place where one path becomes three. Her hounds accompany her as external expressions of her inner nature: unwavering loyalty, fierce protection, and the discernment that sees through all concealment at the moment of crossing. Hekate holds the torch at the place where orientation dissolves and the traveller must choose.

Procyon, rising at the boundary of the Milky Way, standing at the crossing of the celestial river, shining from the threshold between one order of heaven and the next, is precisely that torch in stellar form, a light held at the liminal place so that those who are crossing may find their way.

The Steerman

Returning to the navigational tradition, Procyon is also the name of the navigator aboard the Argo, the ship on which Jason and the Argonauts made their epic voyage in search of the Golden Fleece.

The Golden Fleece is the true knowledge, the gold of inner transformation, the understanding of our origins and of what shaped us into what we are, that knowledge which carries within it the quiet and persistent conviction that something in us, properly understood, will heal us and carry us forward to heights of attainment that the ordinary self cannot compass from where it presently stands. Procyon the steersman held the helm of that vessel. He knew the stars well enough to sail by them through waters that carried every other member of the crew to the very limit of what they could endure. He held the course. He is still holding it, still getting the crew to where the fleece waits, in those realms of the deeper psyche where mortal time stands as a barrier no longer.

In Literature and Culture

The Greek poetic tradition received Procyon with a seriousness that its constellation's diminutive name tends to obscure for modern readers. Aratus, writing his Phaenomena around 270 BCE in the hexameter verse that stands as the foundational poem of ancient stellar observation, placed Procyon shining brilliantly by the Hydra and beneath the Twins, declaring that all such constellations be marked as the seasons pass, each returning at its appointed time, unchangingly and firmly fixed in the heavens as ornaments of the passing night. The poem achieved such authority in antiquity that Cicero, Ovid, Germanicus, Manilius, Callimachus, and Leonidas of Tarentum all drew upon it, and Saint Paul, in the Acts of the Apostles, quoted from its opening lines. For the Roman poet Manilius, writing his Astronomica in the first century, Procyon was a functional star of the huntsman's year, a vigorous and practical celestial presence whose rising marked the season of the chase and whose gifts were those of the skilled and purposeful tracker.

At the Temple of Apollo at Delos, the island where Apollo himself entrusted the temple's winter care to Dionysus, the priests aligned the building's eastern view with a precision that was anything but incidental. A watcher standing at the interior and looking East saw Canis Minor rising, with Procyon blazing at its heart, and understood that a week later Sirius would appear in that same eastern sky, signalling the Rural Dionysia, the great festival of dissolution and renewal.

Procyon was the sacred announcement, the star whose rising told the temple's guardians that the Dionysian mysteries were approaching, that the god was returning, that the loosening of the ordinary world was imminent.

Far to the northwest, at Dowth in the Boyne Valley complex, the same winter sky presided over the great Neolithic passage tombs whose orientations acknowledge the same stellar traditions running through the same seasonal darkness. These peoples watched the same sky. They oriented their most sacred structures by the same stars. And Procyon, arriving first into the winter dark, was the announcement that something of consequence was about to rise.

Behenian Star Lore

In the esoteric body of correspondence that flowed from Ptolemy through the medieval occultists and into the living Western tradition, Procyon was assigned rulership of the left eye.

The left eye, across Egyptian, Greek, and broader Indo-European thought, is the eye of the moon — the organ of intuition, of inner knowing, of the perception that operates at the level below ordinary rational sight. It is the Eye of Horus that was shattered and then painstakingly restored by Thoth, piece by piece, until sight was returned to the god: a symbol of wholeness regained, of vision rebuilt from its ruins. To hold Procyon as the star of the left eye is to say that this star governs the capacity to perceive what approaches before it has fully arrived — the very function that defines Procyon's position in the sky, arriving before, perceiving before, knowing before.

She holds a position of sovereign protective authority among the fifteen Behenian fixed stars, those particular stars selected across medieval Europe and the Arab world as repositories of especial magical potency, the word Behenian itself deriving from the Arabic bahman, meaning root.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, in the Three Books of Occult Philosophy, recorded the working of Procyon's talisman: "Under the lesser Dog-star they made the image of a cock, or three little maids; it conferreth the favor of the gods, of spirits, and men; it giveth power against witchcrafts, and preserveth health." Furthermore he associated it with the gemstone agate, as this stone is long understood as a ground of discernment and a carrier of protective strength.

In the Kabbalistic tradition assigned the Hebrew letter Tzaddi, the fishhook, the letter of the seeker who draws meaning up from the depths with Procyon whereas the Bodleian manuscript adds that a talisman of Procyon grants its wearer the favour of the spirits of the air, an attribution that places this star among the mediating presences, the beings and forces that move between the earthly and the celestial registers and make communication between them possible.

The potency of Columbanus’ mission lay in the vivid way that he gave physical expression to the conception of religious secularism, that opened Christian’s minds to the concept of actively embodying heaven’s mandate: to be born anew by repenting and being absolved from sin, a summons that proved to have many takers over the following centuries

There is always a solution

Across every tradition, from the Babylonian carpenter who helped to build the sky, to the Hawaiian navigator who blossomed in the dark above the Pacific, from the threshold keeper at the Milky Way crossing to the Behenian star whose talisman moves the gods and spirits and men toward favour, from the sacred announcement at Delos to the spinning castle on the Atlantic mountain, Procyon transmits a light of solution and resolution through the message - There is always a way through.

Unwavering Fidelity

Those in whom this star speaks carry an unwavering loyalty and fidelity that asks nothing in return, a steadfast and fierce protection of those in their care, an emotional discernment that reads the truth of a situation before the reasoning mind has organised its response, and an absolute and unshakeable conviction that the crossing can be made, that the ford is passable, that the door, even when it seems to have withdrawn entirely from the world of the findable, will open.

There is a beautiful and instructive irony in finding Procyon currently positioned within Cardinal Water, the domain of Cancer, a sign whose essential nature is the open and immediate outward expression of feeling, sentiment experienced and articulated at the level of the heart before thought, reason or caution has had any opportunity to qualify it. Cardinality is the impulse that initiates, primal and instinctive in its reaching, enthusiastically extending itself outward to explore and to share without pausing to measure consequence or apply the cooler instruments of moral consideration. It is simply an open heart in motion. Water, as the dominion wherein the ethereal realm finds its articulation, carries within it the imaginal, the soulful, the realm of memory, feeling and deep sentiment, the place where the heart speaks in its own language before the mind has composed its translation.

That Procyon shines from within this domain is telling. For the teaching this star carries is precisely the channelling of that open-hearted expression into something faithful, clear, honest and utterly focused, a quality of feeling that is freely given and freely sustained, generous in its nature and unwavering in its commitment, asking nothing in return and placing no condition upon its continuing. What Procyon offers to the Cardinal Water impulse is fidelity, the capacity to bring the full depth of that instinctive, reaching, expressive heart into a mature and discerning constancy, to feel as deeply and as openly as Cancer at its most unguarded, and to hold that feeling with the steadfastness of one who has already stood at the threshold of the celestial river and knows that the crossing requires a steady hand.

The aptitude Procyon cultivates in the human spirit is the refinement of loyalty into something that transcends the vicissitudes of emotional weather. She is kinship held through difficulty and fierce protection that endures beyond the moment of its first fierce impulse. She teaches a discernment of people and circumstance that is empathic and honest and free-spirited, engaging fully with what is present rather than retreating behind entitlement or expectation. And she is the educator of a heart that sees clearly, that speaks truthfully, and that remains open even when openness carries a cost.

The presence of Procyon in this degree of the zodiac asks you to raise the quality of your feeling upward, toward a clarity of heart truth that extends beyond the personal and the temporal, a constancy that is alive and responsive rather than rigid, that is utterly focused and resolute in its orientation and utterly free in its expression. This is the distinction at the heart of Procyon's teaching: fidelity of this order is the furthest thing from fixedness. It is a living, breathing, open constancy, the torch held steady at the crossroads through whatever wind the night sends across it, the steersman holding the course through waters that shift and surge, the hound at the threshold whose loyalty is total and whose heart, in every season, remains unlocked.

Concluding thoughts

Whilst Sirius blazes with the overwhelming force of revelation, Procyon arrives earlier, and with a different quality of light altogether, the quality of one who has already walked the road ahead and found it passable and returned to say so. Where Sirius illuminates the deeper insights that motivate our everyday ego, Procyon prepares the path through her Yin lineage, her left eye, steadying the way, just as the Magdalene anointed the feet of the Messiah, to enable the Yang path to teach and show the way. Her torch at the crossroads, held with a calm and ancient hand, a steersman at the helm, not only reading the stars but also illuminating the deeper architecture that constructs this universe, all the while holding the course through whatever the night brings, getting the crew there, in the heavens and in the deeper reaches of the soul.  Procyon’s presence illuminates The Way with unwavering fidelity and loyalty. She is the Carpenter’s tool and Light and she is the hound that accompanies the awakening of your deeper light. Ask her and she will show you the Way.