Deneb Algedi
Eleni Tezapsidou // GR-BE
Deneb Algedi, tail of the Seagoat, is the brightest star in the constellation of Capricorn. It happens to be my heliacal rising. The star is associated amongst other significations with the gate of the Underworld and the god Pan, a primordial guide and protector. [1]
This creative exploration with Deneb Algedi came during a highly transitional time in my life. In many ways it has been about finding my way back home, diving in the muck of it, and shedding all the tales that were no longer needed for this leg of the journey. I asked, what is home when home, constantly changes? What customs and practices of care do we inherit and nurture?
From fossilised shells in a desert that was once a sea brimming with life, to birds never missing their daily appointment with the sun as it rose and set, to Venus morning star prominent in the sky, the residency in Egypt offered hints of an answer, or at least more questions.
Working with Deneb Algedi has been a reflection on cycles, and asking what remains, when you allow yourself, your relationships, and the world around you, to change.
[1] References on signification of the stars where drawn from Amaya Rourke, Kaitlin Coppock, Genie Raftopoulos writings.
Deneb Algedi
Eleni Tezapsidou
During a first fixed star reading two years ago, I was told that Deneb Algedi symbolises cosmic justice. It felt very outside of me. As I’ve been shedding identities that held me together for years, more personal entry points to the star’s themes have begun to appear—emerging slowly, one by one—as I rebuild the practices that hold me in my day-to-day life.
I asked Deneb Algedi: What remains, when everything changes constantly?
Responses arrived gradually. I noticed fossils of past life in the desert—sea shells embedded and encrusted in rock, preserved for who knows how long. If Deneb Algedi represents where we come from, I thought, then it also speaks to what we inherit.
Until now, what I’ve inherited has often felt like chaos. Finding threads within that chaos has required me to slow down: to look beyond contradictions, to feel through paradoxes, to notice what remains when everything is in constant flux. This was the first invitation from Deneb Algedi—to slow down and listen. To myself, to my body, and to turn with intention toward the past: toward lineage and ancestors. Through this relationship, themes of heritage and embodied ancestral exploration began to surface.
Approaching these themes requires allies—human and more-than-human. I sought support from Venus, natally placed in my sixth house of health, chores, and the maintenance of daily life. Over the past months, as I attuned to Venus and as she built towards meeting the Sun and Mars on her recent cazimi in Capricorn, new threads wove themselves into the inquiry.
With Venus added to the dance, the question shifted.
What’s values are needed to sustain the thread of life, when the only constant is change?
What is preserved, when everything else is eroded?
As I stayed with these questions, past stories and traditions emerged. Traditions are strange things: practices of ritual repetition—personal, interpersonal, and collective—that survive across generations, passed on consciously or unconsciously. Some are ancient, and when the context that produced them changes, we forget why they were ever needed. Others disappear, only to resurface later in altered forms. I understand one would attribute grandmotherly qualities to Deneb Algedi. [1]
The months spent with Deneb Algedi, supported by Venus, have been about remembering practices that sustain life and unearthing familial threads that had been buried.
What emerged was a mosaic of devotional practices of care and preservation: tending through healing, cleansing, weaving, and feeding; repeated day after day to sustain life and the social fabric around it. Tending through fire, wood, air, metal, and earth. Stories and jokes retold countless times. And, at times, movement, song, levity, and beauty—offered as moments of release.
When the stories of burdens of tending are so heavy, and one is invited to repeat them, it becomes difficult to fully accept the gift. To continue, I had to begin moving through grief, creating space between my own story and the traditions held in my body, and the narratives I grew up with. Through singing, writing, and movement, some of the weight began to shift - balancing between sacrifice and loving devotion.
While reflecting on lineage and inheritance, I began to think in terms of roots. There are four lines. Almost like a square. What would be the square root of what I’ve inherited? How do we find a root?
I arrived at a provisional equation:
Devotion (sacrifice × repetition) = √love ?
This question sent me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole (wik(e)omancy?) where snippets of information seemed to echo my inquiry. I learned that the Greeks found square roots of positive integers that are not perfect squares are always irrational numbers. [2] That many cultures have grappled with roots, error, and approximation. [3] That attempts to get to the root of things mathematically have involved heresy, paradox, and even death at sea, along with stories like Achilles and the tortoise, which disrupt linear notions of motion, space, and time.
Eventually, this detour led me back to chaos, contradiction, and infinite regress—back to my inheritance, but of practice: returned to through repetition, care, devotion, and the body, which is definitely fully of irrational and non-linear.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_root#cite_note-12
[3] In the Chinese mathematical work Writings on Reckoning, […] the square root is approximated by using an "excess and deficiency" method, while in medieval Muslim mathematics, an algorithm to find the root of thing called double false position, double false position was known as hisāb al-khaṭāʾayn ("reckoning by two errors")."[17]