The library · The other points and bodies

Juno in Libra

the asteroid Juno in tropical Libra

What the tradition reads

Juno's delineations are modern, dating from the 1970s, when the first four asteroids began to be used by astrologers; the corpus records that rather than dressing the reading in age it does not have. Cafe Astrology reads Juno's sign as where a person wants to excel and wants the scales level, and notes that Juno itself carries what the site calls shades of Libra. In Libra, the delineation reads a native for whom being treated as anything more or less than equal is intolerable, who dislikes having to compete with a partner and will work to even matters out, and who holds that a partnership is cooperative above all. The same source adds a second irritant, being thought unfair by others, since fairness and meeting others halfway are the deliberate effort here. It closes with a caution that the corpus keeps as the tradition's own: the pursuit of harmony and balance can become so all consuming that it defeats its purpose. Against Juno's wider associations of commitment, compromise and the balancing of power between two people, this is the placement where the sign and the point are read as saying the same thing twice.

The story

The Roman marriage rite gave Juno two names that belong to the ceremony itself. Wikipedia records Pronuba and Cinxia among her epithets, and glosses Cinxia as she who looses the bride's girdle, adding that these names accord with her central role as a goddess of marriage. The role itself is reported as an import: the divine couple of Jupiter and Juno received its matrimonial implications from Greece, and thence bestowed on Juno the office of tutelary goddess of marriage, Iuno Pronuba, though the association of the two gods is called part of the most ancient Latin theology. The same page states that Juno is the patroness of marriage and that many people hold the most favourable time to marry to be June, the month named after her. In five Latin towns a month bore her name. A sign the tradition reads through pairing, agreement and the space between two parties has in Pronuba an exact counterpart: a goddess invoked not for either partner but for the joining itself.

Written from

Corpus key point:Juno:sign:Libra.