Algol

Perseus is a constellation in the sky.

And there's a star called Algol.

which is a variable star.

It changes its brightness over relatively short periods of time.

That's why we call them variable stars.

And the eye of the severed head is Algol.

So this is Medusa, like, looking at you.

It's pretty fun.

Phew! Well, I say that because I've always memorised Speaker at 23 degrees Libra.

But Speaker has actually shifted, just like Algol and the other fixed stars, they shift.

Regulus is now in Virgo.

Regulus the king's crown is now in Virgo.

And she is going to be therefore conjunct with the sun every year on the 16th of October.

And great, if you've got a birthday on the 16th of October, yay, you're going to be right there with her.

Now, the fixed stars in astrology are named bright stars, which are Algol, Regulus, Antares, Spica, Sirius, Aldebaran, and a few more.

15 or so more and they are projected onto the ecliptic and we read them by one degree conjunction to natal planets or chart angles only one degree or just like the asteroids really of the fixed stars there are canonical or should we say official 20 that are the brightest in the heavens And these include eight royal stars, actually.

And in the sky, Perseus is seen holding a head.

And in the eye of that head is a star called Algol.

which a lot of people call the Demon Star.

Now tonight's story comes to us from ancient Greece.

Pieces of it were already being written down about 2,700 years ago.

But the version I'm going to tell tonight follows a Greek handbook of myths written down about 2,000 years ago, which tells the whole story start to finish.

And after the story, we'll see if the people who named the star the Demon Star actually knew if the star was blinking or not.

And we'll take a look at a 3,000-year-old Egyptian papyrus that some researchers think recorded Algol's rhythm, the blink.

Now for our Halloween attractions.

Look toward the northeast on these autumn evenings for the constellation Perseus, home to Algol, sometimes called the Demon Star.

Its name comes from an Arabic expression associated with the head of a ghoul, and in Greek mythology, it represents the severed head of Medusa.

But algol has a genuinely strange property.

Then again during three months it grows brighter and brighter, until it is once more a second magnitude star, and after a fortnight's pause begins anew to fade.

There is also a variable star in the constellation of Perseus named Algol.

This too waxes and wanes regularly, but much more rapidly, since it runs through its list of changes in less than three days.

It never becomes brighter than a star of the second magnitude, or dimmer than a star of the fourth magnitude.

Unquote.

So I assume this is the same as the star Algol.

Oh, yeah, there is that star.

And this is that weird star that has this very rare alignment in Donald Trump's chart, which seems to suggest that he could suffer a head injury because it's so related-

[laughs] He was right about everything.

Who I owe my-

Am I understanding what's going on here? So they're relating basically Nephilim to the head of Algol?

Yeah, dude.

The variability of Delta Cephei was discovered in 1784 by the English astronomer John Goodricke, who was only 19 years old.

Just a year earlier, he'd been studying Algol and proposed the correct explanation for its changing brightness, that another object periodically passed in front of it.

Delta Cephei was clearly different.

Its smooth, regular rhythm suggested the star itself was physically pulsating.

Finally, Saturday night gives us an astronomical change that you can watch without any telescope at all.

Algol, the demon star in Perseus, is an eclipsing binary.

Two stars orbit one another in a system turned almost edge-on toward Earth.

Every two point eight seven days, the fainter star passes in front of the brighter one, and the combined light noticeably fades.

On October seventeenth, the timing is unusually friendly for North America.

Algol should reach minimum brightness around ten PM Eastern or seven PM Pacific.

You can find Algol in the northeastern sky earlier in the evening and compare it with nearby stars, such as Mirphak in Perseus or Almach in Andromeda.

Algol normally shines around magnitude two point one.

One is short fiction about an agent of some type being instructed to undertake a bizarre mission.

And one, which I will share with you all here to lead us back into my conversation with Jason from Ecstatic Agendas, is a piece that ended up being written for Medusa and her sisters called The Cycle of Algol.

So there's a lot of very cool lore associated with the star Algol, which is sometimes referred to as the Eye of Medusa or the Demon Star.

So this fixed star is also called Beta Persei, and it's not in reality a single star, but is rather a variable eclipsing binary star system.

So two stars that spin around each other and block one of the other ones out as they do it.

Thanks also to CJ Lane for taking the time to fill me in about the Dream Shard Grimoire Volume 1 St. Cyprian's Nightmare.

I had to cut out a bunch of takes of me saying that wrong, by the way.

I thought that these two conversations had a lot in common, and much like the stars of Beta Persea, aka Algol, might do, they danced really nicely together, so I was really glad they were able to share the space of this episode.