algol29

Objectively speaking Algol is an average star about 100 light
years distant from us. It appears to be three to four times as
massive as the Sun. It is one of the sixty or so brightest stars in
the sky, having a visual magnitude (a brightness) of about 2.1.
(The lower the number, the brighter; the brightest star in the
sky is Sirius, with a visual magnitude of -1.5.)
This is not all, however. It grows dimmer and brighter in
roughly three-day cycles. This occurs because Algol is an
"eclipsing binary," which means it is not one star at all, but two
stars orbiting each other. The description above, except for the
magnitude, covers the larger, brighter of the pair. When the
brighter star faces us, then Algol appears brighter to us, but
when the darker of the two stars passes in front of its
companion - for about ten hours every three days or so - then
Algol grows noticeably dimmer.
I have observed this brightening and dimming myself, I think.
There is some reason for uncertainty on my part because star
magnitudes are frequently and sincerely affected by the
weather in my part of the world. In central Maine it's too
cloudy four nights out of seven to bother looking up, and even
clear nights there is high scud or high vaporous humidity which
interferes with the passage of starlight to the eyes, and calls
into question the verifiable scientific brightness of the stars.
The seeing is more accurate in a desert because the air is so dry
and clear. There is no desert here in Maine.
Algol is well-seen from Maine, however, because the farther
north you go in autumn, the sooner darkness falls. Beginning in
late August Algol is visible rising over the eastern tree line by
about 10:30 or so. By the same time in early October it's high
enough in the sky to watch with clear trepidation, located as it
is in the constellation Perseus. Apart from the act of scientific
imagination which discovered and recorded Algol's distance,
mass and visual magnitude, the word "constellation" is the first
indication that we are on the dusty outskirts of objective
speaking and moving into the damp frontiers of the human
imagination.
Of course, many citizens of the scientific twentieth century
would create this metaphor backwards. They would say that
the objective facts - the gist of science - are on the frontier of
imaginative possibility and the constellations are in the faded,
outdated, used-up territory. But the constellations imply the
creative part of the human mind, which I'm trying to speak of
here, and the objective facts (however radical and innovative
the scientific method still seems to some people) gleaned by
astronomers imply only the attempt to categorize observational
data, not yet to make anything out of it. Constellations are
generations of the human mind. They are bunches of stars
grouped together by ancient astronomers who knew nothing
about absolute magnitude or thermonuclear combustion or
binary stars or even about stars at all, in the sense we think of
stars: they believed the stars were literal gods. The groupings of
the ancients, however, were powerful, if immensely practical,
acts of imagination. Amateur stargazers like me still use their
groupings to locate ourselves.
Perseus is a group of stars just east of another familiar
northern group called Cassiopeia. Perseus's brighter

brighter stars make a kind of crooked leg under Cassiopeia, and
about two degrees east of one crook sits Algol, actually the
second brightest star in the group. According to the
imagination of the ancients, Perseus tracked down the Gorgon
Medusa in the land of the Hyperboreans to kill her as a
wedding gift to his mother's treacherous suitor. Medusa had
been transformed by Athena into a being so supernaturally
hideous that anyone who looked her in the face, with her
snake-hair, huge protruding teeth and tongue, and wings,
would be turned to stone. Perseus approached Medusa by
watching her reflection in his shield, and cut off her
snake-writhing head. Up from the blood leapt Chrysaos and
Pegasus, the winged horse, and Perseus tucked the head into
his satchel. As he flew in his winged sandals back over the
Libyan desert, drops of blood fell out of the satchel from the
head and boiled up into snakes.
In the catasterism, Algol is the eye of the Gorgon, and hence is
also known as the Demon Star. It apparently gets its name
from the Arabic al Ghul, meaning "the demon's head," and
according to Robert Burnham was listed on star maps of the
seventeenth century as "The Spectre's Head." The Chinese
called it "Tseih She, or the Piled Up Corpses," and Burnham
says: "Ancient and medieval astrologers considered Algol the
most unfortunate star in the heavens."
To us of scientific mind, this is a playful if somewhat morbid
story to accompany our observations of the ancient
star-groups. The ominous nature of Algol might suggest (at
least to Burnham) that the ancient myth-makers and
astronomers had noted the brightening and dimming, and
regarded it as unnatural and foreboding, the celestial bodies
being otherwise divine, and perfect. If this is true then the story
is telling us more about the human imagination than about the
star itself. And certainly the ancients never claimed to know
any more about the stars than that they were bright and eternal,
which human beings obviously were - are - not.
The story depicts a deep inner complexity which is triggered or
- better, perhaps - generated in the meeting point of the strange
star and the mind. The star stirs a sense of foreboding, a sense
that the cosmos in its veils conceals more than the human
mind can consciously grasp. Behind a star which noticeably
dims every three days or so, there is a god, Poseidon maybe,
engendering some unfathomable act upon a woman, Medusa,
maybe, raping her in Athena's own temple. In her anger
Athena, of all gods and goddesses less formidable than only
Poseidon, Zeus and Hades, makes Medusa unsightly, eclipsing
her previous existence and turning her very appearance into a
malevolence.
That malevolence stirs a foreboding and terror latent in the
almost-frost of fall evenings. The story reflects the entire
emotional and intuitive response of the mind to the star itself,
its own uncertain light in a field of certain lights. The mind
makes reality of starlight. Certainly this is a frontier more
troubling than a sheet of paper showing magnitude, mass and
distance.

* * *

It's troubling because the story itself has in common parlance
"survived" for thousands of years, and survival suggests life. In
a sense the story is alive. And yet, of course, it is merely a
shifting bundle of words formed and reformed in different
languages for different purposes and applied to the imagination
of a group of stars which were, unknown to the ancient
Greeks, merely luminous balls of gas generating light by
nuclear fusion.
Myths, in other words, seem like little more than good fun to
us. On the other hand, there is the troubling sense that the
"survival" of the Perseus myth suggests life of some kind, and
with that suggestion comes some nervousness about Algol. In a
sense there are two ways of coming to grips with the
nervousness: one is to take the objective, scientific view that
Perseus is an array of mega-distant stars associated almost