Mars and Jupiter, the Eagle's Nature

Ptolemy in the Tetrabiblos gives the bright star of Aquila the nature of Mars with Jupiter, and the tradition that follows reads Altair for boldness, command and confidence, with a recurring caution about sudden or self-inflicted mischief, the martial half supplying the daring, the Jovian half the position it wins. The eagle is a fitting figure for it. In East Asian tradition Altair carries a quite separate story: it is the Cowherd of the Qixi legend, separated from the Weaver star Vega by the river of the Milky Way and permitted to cross to her once a year, a festival still kept in China and Japan.

The Qixi festival tied to Altair and Vega is kept on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month across China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam under various local names, Tanabata in Japan among them, and it is one of the clearer cases in this whole set of tables of a genuinely independent, non-Hellenistic interpretive tradition attached to a star that also carries a full Ptolemaic delineation, the two traditions running side by side without either having influenced the other. The Qixi and Tanabata festivals attached to Altair are unrelated to anything in the Ptolemaic or later Western fixed-star tradition, a genuinely separate interpretive layer resting on the identical star.