Aldebaran
al-DEB-uh-ran
arabic: Al-Dabarān (The Follower)
Definition
Aldebaran (Alpha Tauri) is a bright orange giant star — 1st-magnitude, at apparent magnitude 0.86 — lying close to the ecliptic, the Sun's yearly path, so the Moon regularly passes in front of it. Its Arabic name al-Dabarān ("the follower") notes how it rises just behind the Pleiades. It is one of the four Royal Stars of Persia (with Regulus, Antares, and Fomalhaut), traditionally the Watcher of the East, and the first of the fifteen Behenian Fixed Stars in the medieval Latin Hermetic manuscript known as BM Bodleian MS. 52.
In Tradition
In the Persian Royal-Star tradition, the Hermetic-Behenian doctrine, and modern Western fixed-star astrology alike, Aldebaran is read as a star of honor, public recognition, and martial or civic eminence when it sits close to a planet or an angle of the chart — though tradition warns that the rise it grants is unsteady if violence or dishonor comes with it. The Hermes text *On the Fifteen Fixed Stars* places Aldebaran first in the Behenian sequence and gives it a Mars-Venus nature.
In Practice
Modern fixed-star astrologers find Aldebaran's current position by taking the BM Bodleian MS. 52 reference point (10 Gemini 02, around 1265 CE) and carrying it forward by precession — roughly one degree every 72 years — which puts it near 10 degrees of Gemini today. A conjunction within one to two degrees of your Sun, Moon, Ascendant, or Midheaven is weighed for honor, prominence, or martial-civic standing. Practitioners in the Picatrix-Agrippa magical tradition follow the Hermes 15-Fixed-Stars talisman recipe — carbuncle or ruby, milky thistle, and an engraved Character — to draw on the star's wealth-and-honors meaning, electing a moment when the Moon is conjunct Aldebaran and the star is either rising at the Ascendant or culminating at the Midheaven, per Agrippa's *Three Books of Occult Philosophy* I.47.
Historical Origin
Aldebaran is catalogued as a key calendar and navigation star in the Babylonian *Mul.Apin* and in Ptolemy's star catalogue in the *Almagest* (2nd c. CE). The Arabic name al-Dabarān is recorded in Al-Biruni's *Kitāb al-Tafhīm* (c. 1029). It is the first Behenian fixed star in the medieval Latin Hermetic manuscript BM Bodleian MS. 52 (Greer trans. 2017). Vivian Robson's *Fixed Stars and Constellations in Astrology* (1923, public domain) drew the modern Western interpretation together.
Further Reading
- Hermes Trismegistus, On the Fifteen Fixed Stars (Greer trans. 2017)
- Vivian E. Robson, The Fixed Stars and Constellations in Astrology
- Bernadette Brady, Brady's Book of Fixed Stars