Venus and Mercury, and a Behenian Star

The tradition gives Alphecca the nature of Venus with Mercury, reading it for honour, artistic and poetic gifts, and dignity, a benefic delineation fitting a jewel, carried in English by Robson. Alphecca is one of Agrippa's fifteen Behenian stars, paired in the Renaissance talismanic scheme with topaz and with rosemary and trefoil, which again gives it, unusually, a documented early-modern stone-and-herb correspondence rather than a modern guess. The crown it heads has been read as Ariadne's, set in the sky after Dionysus, which suits the star's gentle and honourable reputation.

Alphecca's Agrippa correspondences are recorded specifically as the gemstone topaz and the herbs rosemary and trefoil, one of the more fully preserved of the fifteen entries; the scheme paired each Behenian star not only with a stone and plant but with a magical sigil meant to be engraved on the appropriate material while the star was rising, though the sigils themselves survive only as diagrams in the manuscripts and print editions of De Occulta Philosophia rather than as anything easily rendered in words. Agrippa's stone-and-herb correspondences were intended for practical talisman-making, engraving the star's sigil onto the named gem while the star was suitably placed and binding the plant to it, a magical technology largely abandoned in mainstream astrology by the eighteenth century even as the bare delineations survived.