The library · The other points and bodies

Juno in Gemini

the asteroid Juno in tropical Gemini

What the tradition reads

Nothing in the classical tradition speaks of Juno, a body discovered in 1804 and taken up by astrologers only in the 1970s; the reading given here is modern and is stated as such. Cafe Astrology's frame holds for every sign: Juno marks where a person wants to excel and wants the scales level, where unfairness is felt out of proportion to its size, and where insecurity can turn to manoeuvre before it turns to speech. In Gemini, the delineation reads communication, ideas and intelligence as mattering more to such natives than they may care to admit. Insecurity is said to show as feeling threatened when another does not agree, or does not respect a perspective. The lesson the source attaches is detachment from one's own ideas, on the ground that disagreement in a single moment is not the same as being held cheap, and that power here comes through learning and understanding rather than through outwitting, which the same page names as the likelier reflex. Being ignored, or left without a voice, is given as the particular irritant. Juno's wider themes of fairness and give and take are read, in this sign, as playing out in who gets heard.

The story

The Roman Juno had a title that belongs to speech. Wikipedia records the epithet Moneta, placed in a warring context and derived from the verb monere, to warn, with the alternative sense of recording noted because her temple held the Libri Lintei, the linen books; Livius Andronicus identified her with Mnemosyne. M. Guarducci is reported as considering her cult very ancient and calling her the Warner, on account of her presence near the auguraculum, her oracular character and her announcement of perils, and as taking her to be an introduction into Rome of the Hera of Cuma in the eighth century. Her temple on the summit of the Capitol was dedicated in 348 BC by the dictator L. Furius Camillus, who is said by Livy to have vowed it during a war against the Aurunci, though modern scholars hold the cult older than that dedication. A goddess of marriage who is also a keeper of records, a warner and an oracle gives this sign, which the tradition reads through words and messages, an image close to its own: the union watched over by what is said about it.

Written from

Corpus key point:Juno:sign:Gemini.