Zosma

Zosma is Delta Leonis, a white main-sequence star of spectral type A4 at about 58 light years, a relatively near and ordinary hot star marking the hindquarters or rump of Leo, at the top of the triangle that forms the lion's hind parts. The name comes from an ancient Greek word for a girdle or belt, apparently transferred to the star from a different position in the figure at some point in the long transmission of star-names, one of many cases where a traditional name no longer sits where its meaning would suggest.

The girdle-to-rump shift in the star's name is a documented example of what specialists in star nomenclature call transferred names: as figures were redrawn slightly differently by different cartographers over the centuries, a name coined for one part of a constellation's outline could end up permanently attached to a star that, on the current standard figure, sits somewhere else entirely. Zosma's Greek name for a belt or girdle has no connection to the modern astronomical term seismic zone or any related coinage, a coincidence of English homophones rather than any shared etymology worth pursuing. Its comparatively unremarkable astrophysics stands in some contrast to the more storied stars that dominate the rest of this Leo-Cancer-Hydra stretch of the catalogue.

The tradition gives Zosma the nature of Saturn with Venus, and Robson reads it in a distinctly dark key, associating it with an unhappy and fearful disposition, the danger of poison, and the curious note of benefit gained through disgrace, advancement that comes by way of downfall. Like the readings of the other stars of Leo's body it derives from the compiling tradition rather than from a specific ancient assignment, and its litany of misfortune should be taken as schematic. The reliable content is astronomical: a nearby, hot, white star of the main sequence, unremarkable in itself and made notable only by its place on the back of the Lion.

"Benefit through disgrace" is one of the more psychologically specific delineations in the whole Robson-descended catalogue, and its very specificity is a useful diagnostic: broad, generic promises of fortune or misfortune are the ordinary currency of this material, and a phrase this particular is more likely to trace to a single identifiable nineteenth-century source than to any older layer of tradition. No source earlier than the modern compiling tradition is known to supply Zosma's specific delineation, which should accordingly be read as a comparatively recent addition to the fixed-star literature rather than an inheritance from antiquity.