The library · The other points and bodies

Ceres in Aries

the dwarf planet Ceres in tropical Aries, in modern Western asteroid astrology

What the tradition reads

Ceres is a modern addition to the Western chart, read as the manner in which a person gives nurture and the manner in which nurture is received; in Aries the two delineations consulted agree on activity rather than tenderness as the medium. Bob Marks reads Ceres in Aries as nurtured by action and physical movement of nearly any kind, and as less inclined to comfort others by being cuddly than by taking them out into something strenuous; he adds that a child with the placement may want fewer embraces and more shared activity. Astrology Club's delineation names this the warrior figure among the twelve, unwilling simply to accept being looked after, as though the right to care had to be won, and giving care by fighting for another person's needs and rights; the same page reads losses and defeats taken personally, and a reputation as the one called on when heavy support is wanted. Cafe Astrology, which groups Ceres by element rather than giving twelve separate sign readings, has the fire signs reaching first for moral support and encouragement, which sits close to both accounts. None of this is ancient doctrine: Wikipedia dates astrological use of the asteroids to Eleanor Bach's ephemeris of 1973.

The story

The goddess whose name the body carries is not, in her myth, a figure who waits. Wikipedia's article on Ceres records the tradition that when she sought Proserpina through all the earth with lit torches she called for her with shouts where three or four roads meet, and that from this her rites kept certain days on which a lamentation was raised at the crossroads. The Latin telling summarised on Wikipedia's Proserpina page has her walking the earth as the sun sinks and darkness falls, stopping the growth of crops and making a desert with each step, until Jupiter sent Mercury to order the daughter's release. The astronomical body arrived in a similarly forward register: Giuseppe Piazzi picked it out from Palermo on 1 January 1801, the first object identified in the asteroid belt, and it was announced not as something small but as a new planet. Aries is the sign the tradition reads as first assertion, and both delineations of Ceres here take the searching rather than the waiting half of that story, one giving nurture through strenuous shared activity, the other through fighting on somebody else's behalf.

Written from

Corpus key point:Ceres:sign:Aries.