The library · The other points and bodies

Ceres in Scorpio

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

What the tradition reads

Ceres is read in modern Western practice as the shape nurture takes, and in Scorpio the delineations consulted put that shape underground. Bob Marks reads Ceres in Scorpio as finding the nurtured feeling through contact with whatever is deep, mysterious or transforming, and offers a plain illustration, a visit to Pompeii or another archaeological ruin; he also reads intimacy as a channel of nurture for this placement, and suggests the sign suits work in the healing professions, where the person cared for is made to feel tended during the process. Astrology Club calls this the priestess figure among the twelve, nurturing through protectiveness, loyalty and passion, seeking out the darkest piece of a situation and carrying it into the light, adept at replenishing itself and slow to let anyone else take that over, and becoming the bridge across which others reach their own renewal. Cafe Astrology, sorting Ceres by element rather than by twelve sign readings, has the water signs reaching first for emotional support. Cafe Astrology also records Ceres's tie to grief, which the sign's readings take as their working ground.

The story

Scorpio holds the part of the myth the other signs borrow from. In Claudian's version, summarised on Wikipedia's Proserpina page, Ceres had already tried to keep her daughter safe by sending her to Sicily, her own earthly home and sanctuary, when Dis came out of the volcano at Mount Etna in his chariot, seized Proserpina at the Pergusa Lake near Enna and took her down into the underworld. Wikipedia's article on the goddess records that in the myth of the abduction on the plains of Enna the tracks of the search were obscured by the trampling of pigs, and that the Roman cult named Proserpina queen of the underworld and spouse to its king, with days of the mundus suggesting rites to Ceres as a door warden of the afterlife, co-ruled in the winter months by her daughter. A goddess of the crop whose story runs through a hole in the ground, and whose daughter becomes the underworld's queen, is the reason this sign's delineations read nurture as something that has been down and come back.

Written from

Corpus key point:Ceres:sign:Scorpio.