Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Ceres in the eleventh house

the dwarf planet Ceres in the eleventh house, in modern Western asteroid astrology

What the tradition reads

Ceres is read in modern Western practice as the manner of nurture given and received, and the eleventh house is the one Alan Leo gives to friends and acquaintances, hopes, wishes and aspirations, the friends read as arising from unions. Bob Marks reads Ceres in the eleventh house as tending friends or attracting friends who do the tending, and then takes the house's second subject seriously: since the eleventh also rules hopes and wishes, he reads a wish to nurture large numbers of people, perhaps discharged by joining a humanitarian group or by founding one. Cafe Astrology's general delineation of the point sits comfortably beside that, describing Ceres as democratic and caring, concerned with the environment and with nutrition, and concerned for other living beings rather than for one household only. Among the sources consulted, Marks's lesson is the only one that delineates Ceres through the houses, so this reading rests on a single named astrologer's text.

The story

The cult behind this point was a membership before it was a symbol. Wikipedia's article on Proserpina records that the reformed cult installed at the Aventine temple around 205 BC was based on the Greek Thesmophoria, a rite for women only, and that it was promoted as morally desirable for respectable Roman women both as followers and as priestesses, with ethnically Greek priestesses recruited to serve Ceres and Proserpina as Mother and Maiden. The same page records that the innovation may have been an attempt by Rome's ruling class to please both the gods and the plebeian class, whose cultural ties ran to the Greek settlements of southern Italy. Wikipedia's article on Ceres adds that she was originally the central deity of Rome's plebeian or Aventine Triad. An association with conditions of entry, a shared rite and a political purpose behind its founding belongs in the house the tradition gives to groups and to common hopes.

Written from

Corpus key point:Ceres:house:11.