The library · The other points and bodies

The asteroid Juno

the asteroid Juno (3 Juno) in the Western chart, read around partnership and commitment

What the tradition reads

Juno is read by modern astrologers as the point of partnership: what a person needs from a committed bond, and what cannot be borne inside one. The reading is recent rather than inherited, and the corpus says so plainly. Juno was discovered on 1 September 1804, so no classical author treats it at all; Wikipedia dates the astrological use of asteroids to Eleanor Bach's publication of the first asteroid ephemeris in 1973, notes that the first four asteroids started being recognised by astrologers in the 1970s, and credits the popularising of that use to Demetra George's Asteroid Goddesses in 1986. Inside that modern practice, Cafe Astrology lists Juno's associations as commitment, marriage, betrayal, give and take in partnerships, infidelity, fairness and compromise, and reads the partnership itself, including the effort of balancing power between two people, as Juno's proper ground. The same source holds that Juno is enraged by inequalities, that its position shows where a person seeks to make things balanced, fair and right, and that the place it marks is both a sore spot and a possible source of power. Wikipedia puts the reading more briefly: Juno is taken as an indicator of what a person requires to feel satisfied in love or marriage.

The story

The body was found first and the meaning was attached long after. Juno was the third asteroid discovered, on 1 September 1804, by the German astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding. It was at first counted a planet, and was reclassified as an asteroid and minor planet during the 1850s. Wikipedia describes its symbol as historically astronomical and now astrological, gives a mean diameter of about 254 kilometres, calls it one of the two largest stony asteroids along with 15 Eunomia, estimates it to hold one per cent of the total mass of the asteroid belt, and gives its orbital period as 4.36578 years. The name honoured the highest Roman goddess. Juno in Roman religion was the protector and special counsellor of the state, daughter of Saturn and Ops, sister and wife of Jupiter, called Regina, the Queen, and a member of the Capitoline Triad; her Greek counterpart is Hera, queen of the gods and a goddess of marriage. None of that naming was astrological. Astrologers took the name up more than a century and a half later, once Bach's ephemeris made the positions of the first four asteroids easy to find, and read the goddess's own domain, marriage, into the small body that carried her name.

Written from

Corpus key point:Juno.