Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Ceres in the second house

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

What the tradition reads

Ceres is read in modern Western practice as the shape nurture takes, and the second house is the one Alan Leo gives to finance and monetary prospects, read as the outcome of the profession in remuneration and in monetary condition generally, with hereditary position added in the heading of the chapter he gives it, and as the house where the desires caused by the tenth house bear on moral growth. Bob Marks reads Ceres in the second house as a placement whose practical needs for nurture tend to be met when the point is well aspected, and which returns nurture in the same practical currency; he puts the felt centre of it plainly, that nothing registers as more nurturing here than a large bank balance and a full refrigerator. Cafe Astrology's general delineation stands behind the reading, giving Ceres rule over food, agriculture and nourishment, with a liking for what is simple, natural and wholesome, and a regard for the ordinary rather than the adorned; the same page treats Ceres as an additional point that some astrologers consider rather than a standard body of a reading. Among the sources consulted, only Marks's lesson delineates Ceres house by house, so this reading rests on one named astrologer rather than on an agreed tradition.

The story

Grain was wealth before it was symbolism. Wikipedia's article on the goddess records that much of Rome's grain was imported from the territories of Magna Graecia, Sicily in particular, which later Roman mythographers described as Ceres's earthly home, and that the days of the mundus suggest rites to Ceres as the guardian deity of seed corn in the founding of cities. Among the attributes listed for her are the sheaf of wheat, the crown of wheat stalks and the cornucopia of fruits and cereals, all of them images of a store rather than of a single meal. The body carries the same association forward into chemistry: Wikipedia records that cerium, a rare earth element discovered in 1803, was named after Ceres, two years after the discovery of the body itself. A house read through finance and monetary prospects, holding a point named for the goddess who guarded the seed that a city was founded on, is the tidiest of the twelve pairings in this set.

Written from

Corpus key point:Ceres:house:2.