Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Ceres in the sixth house

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

What the tradition reads

Ceres is read in modern Western practice as the shape nurture takes, and the sixth house is the one Alan Leo gives to service and to the attachments that arise from it, and so to servants and helpers and to those he calls inferiors in social rank, the house of employment in his scheme, which he also calls the house of phenomenal magic. Bob Marks reads Ceres in the sixth house as a placement where work itself gives the nurtured feeling, and where the tending either runs outward to colleagues or is received from them; he adds that those in the healing professions may be felt as a source of nurture by someone with this placement. Cafe Astrology's general delineation of Ceres supplies the surrounding material, giving the point to caregiving, teaching, mentoring, gardening, farming and cooking, all of them daily and repeated occupations rather than grand ones, and describing Ceres as understated and appreciative of the ordinary. Among the sources consulted, Marks's lesson is the only one that reads Ceres through the houses, so this entry rests on a single named astrologer rather than on an agreed doctrine.

The story

The goddess of the crop was also a goddess of office and of ordinary duty. Wikipedia's article on Ceres records that she was the patron and protector of plebeian laws, rights and Tribunes, and that she was the central deity of Rome's plebeian or Aventine Triad; the article on her daughter's cult adds that the rites were almost certainly supervised by Rome's Flamen Cerealis, a male priesthood usually reserved to plebeians. The same article on Ceres records that pigs offend her by their destructive rooting up of the field crops under her protection, which places her, in the plainest possible way, in charge of the standing work of the fields rather than of a festival alone. Her festival was organised by her own plebeian aediles. A deity whose portfolio is the daily protection of a crop, the rights of common people and the duties of a working priesthood is a reasonable occupant for the house the tradition gives to labour and service.

Written from

Corpus key point:Ceres:house:6.