Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Ceres in the twelfth house

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

What the tradition reads

Ceres is read in modern Western practice as the shape nurture takes, and the twelfth house is the one Alan Leo gives to occult tendencies, read through its connection with the fourth as a psychic thought inheritance from the past whose result is either joy or sorrow, and which he calls the house of confinement and of self undoing. Bob Marks calls the twelfth the house of hidden things and of restriction, holding what a person would rather not show to the world or to themselves, and reads Ceres there as nurturing needs kept out of sight: such needs may have been suppressed early, and the same reticence can make it hard to tend anyone else. He gives the constructive channel in the same breath, charity work in which nurture is provided to the poor, the sick and the unfortunate. Cafe Astrology's general delineation stands behind that, tying Ceres both to caregiving and to grief. Among the sources consulted, only Marks's lesson delineates Ceres through the houses, so this reading rests on one named astrologer rather than on any settled tradition.

The story

The myth begins with an attempt at concealment. Wikipedia's article on Proserpina records that in Claudian's version Ceres had already sought to hide the innocent Proserpina by sending her to safety in Sicily, her own earthly home and sanctuary, before Dis came out of Mount Etna in his chariot and seized her anyway. The same page records that Ceres then sought her daughter across the world, but in vain, the sun sinking and darkness falling as she walked. Wikipedia's article on Ceres adds the detail that in the myth of the abduction on the plains of Enna the trail was lost because pigs had trampled and obscured her tracks. The Proserpina page notes that the Greek name Hades stands both for the hidden underworld and for its king, the hidden one, and that Latin sources name the abductor variously as Dis or Pluto, so that the figure who takes the daughter is named for concealment itself; renamed Pluto, the same page says, he is distanced from the abduction. A hiding place that failed, a search conducted in the dark, and a trail wiped out before it could be followed all belong to the house the tradition reads through concealment, loss and what is not shown.

Written from

Corpus key point:Ceres:house:12.