The library · The other points and bodies

Ceres

the dwarf planet Ceres as a point in a natal chart, in modern Western asteroid astrology

What the tradition reads

Ceres is read by a minority of modern Western astrologers as the chart's significator of nurture. Wikipedia's account of asteroids in astrology states that the placement of Ceres in a birth chart is said to show what the native needs to feel loved and nurtured. Cafe Astrology gives Ceres rule over food, agriculture, nourishment, motherhood and family relationships, together with a love of what is simple, natural and wholesome, a strong need to nurture and protect, and respect for other living beings, animals included; the same page ties Ceres to grief, to separation and time sharing, and to the possibility of destroying everything in one's path in order to regain what was lost. Astrology King reads motherly love and family bonds here, and separates the Moon's traditional mothering, which stays at home, from the modern kind Ceres is given, which takes in working parents, single parents and sole parent fathers; as a grain goddess, that page adds, Ceres rules the growing of plants and food crops, the harvest, natural resources and the environment. The reading is recent rather than inherited. Wikipedia dates astrological use of the asteroids to Eleanor Bach's first asteroid ephemeris in 1973, and Cafe Astrology says plainly that Ceres is not one of the standard bodies of a natal reading, only an additional point some astrologers consider.

The story

Ceres was discovered on 1 January 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi at the Palermo Astronomical Observatory in Sicily, the first object identified in the asteroid belt, and was announced as a new planet; it held a planetary symbol and a place in astronomy books and tables, alongside Pallas, Juno and Vesta, for over half a century before being counted an asteroid instead. In 2006 the debate over Pluto produced a definition of planet requiring that a planet clear the neighbourhood around its orbit, and Ceres has been classed a dwarf planet since. Wikipedia calls it the largest asteroid in the main asteroid belt, with a mean diameter near 939 kilometres. Piazzi named it for the Roman goddess of agriculture, grain crops and motherly relationships, whose earthly home and oldest temple lay in Sicily. Her myth is the one the astrological reading leans on. Her daughter Proserpina was seized at the Pergusa Lake near Enna by Dis, god of the underworld; Ceres searched the earth with lit torches, stopping the growth of crops as she walked, until Jupiter sent Mercury to order the daughter freed. Proserpina had eaten pomegranate seeds, the food of the dead, and so returns above for only part of the year, the earth bearing crops while she is there.

Written from

Corpus key point:Ceres.