Starlore

Vega

Vega - Arabic name, Al-Waki, or "the Falling." can be seen as a pale blue star in the lower part of the constellation Lyra. Vega is the fifth brightest star and together with Deneb and Altair makes the Summer Triangle in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Romans called Vega the harp-star and used its setting to mark the beginning of autumn.
The Egyptians associated the star with Ma'at, sister of Isis, the Vulture, whose task it is to weigh the soul of the deceased against a feather (her symbol as goddess of justice, truth and good order).
In the Rg Veda of India, the star is known as Abhijit and is associated with Brahma, the creator.

The Greeks associated the constellation Lyra, in which Vega appears, as belonging to Orpheus who charmed animate and inanimate objects and even the Lord of Death with his music - but not, as Ovid tells us, the mad Ciconian women who:

 ...slew the oxen
Who lowered horns at them in brief defiance
And were torn limb from limb, and then the women
Rushed back to murder Orpheus, who stretched out
His hands in supplication, and whose voice,
For the first time, moved no one. They struck him down,
And through those lips to which the rocks had listened,
To which the hearts of savage beasts responded,
His spirit found its way to winds and air.

The birds wept for him, and the throng of beasts,
The flinty rocks, the trees which came so often
To hear his songs, all mourned. The trees, it seemed,
Shook down their leaves, as if they might be women
Tearing their hair, and rivers, with their tears,
Were swollen, and their naiads and their dryads
Mourned in black robes. The poet's limbs lay scattered
Where they were flung in cruelty or madness,
But Hebrus River took the head and lyre
And as they floated down the gentle current
The lyre made mournful sounds, and the tongue murmured
In mournful harmony, and the banks echoed
The strains of mourning. On the sea, beyond
Their native stream, they came at last to Lesbos
And grounded near the city of Methymna.
And here a serpent struck at the head, still dripping
With sea-spray, but Apollo came and stopped it,
Freezing the open jaws to stone, still gaping.
And Orpheus' ghost fled under the earth, and knew
The places he had known before, and, haunting
The fields of the blessed, found Eurydice
And took her in his arms, and now together
And side by side they wander, or Orpheus follows
Or goes ahead, and may, with perfect safety,
Look back for Eurydice. Ovid,
Metamorphoses, Book XI, trans. Rolfe Humphries,
Indiana University Press, 1957, pp.260-261.

And in China, the star is Chih Nu, the Weaving Sister, who rises in the eastern night sky early in May and works at her weaving until the gentle appearance in early June of her beloved Niu Lang, the Ox-boy.
Vega was once the Pole Star and, owing to the wobble of the earth as it rotates on its axis, will be once again - in about 26,000 years.