Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Ceres in the ninth house

the dwarf planet Ceres in the ninth 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 ninth house is the one Alan Leo gives to the higher mentality with its scientific, philosophic and religious tendencies, and to long journeys, dreams and what he calls the image making power. Bob Marks reads Ceres in the ninth house as nurtured by long journeys taken either physically or mentally: travel serves, and so does the study and the discussion of religious or philosophical matters. Cafe Astrology's general delineation of the point supplies the rest of the ground, giving Ceres to teaching and mentoring as well as to feeding, and describing a concern for the environment that reaches past any one household. The pairing is modest by design; the ninth house is not where a point about food and nurture is usually expected, and the sources consulted offer no further reading for it. Only Marks's lesson delineates Ceres house by house at all, so this entry rests on one named astrologer's text rather than on a consensus.

The story

Ceres was for two centuries a body known only from a distance. Wikipedia records that its surface features are barely visible even with the most powerful telescopes, and that little was known about it until the robotic NASA spacecraft Dawn approached for its orbital mission in 2015, which found a surface mixing water, ice and hydrated minerals such as carbonates and clay. The name travelled in the other direction long before the spacecraft did: Piazzi chose it for the Roman goddess of agriculture whose earthly home and oldest temple lay in Sicily, and Wikipedia's article on the goddess records that the Romans saw her as the counterpart of the Greek Demeter, whose mythology was adapted for her. A body reached only by a long voyage, carrying a name that had already crossed from Greek into Latin practice, makes a fair occupant for the house the tradition gives to distance, foreign learning and belief.

Written from

Corpus key point:Ceres:house:9.