Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Juno in the first house

the asteroid Juno in the first house of the Western chart

What the tradition reads

Juno is read by modern astrologers as the point of partnership, and the reading is modern in the strict sense: the body was found in 1804 and astrologers began using the first four asteroids only in the 1970s, after Eleanor Bach published an asteroid ephemeris. Cafe Astrology gives Juno's associations as commitment, marriage, betrayal, give and take in partnerships, infidelity, fairness and compromise, and holds that its position shows where a person seeks to make things balanced, fair and right. The first house, for its part, is given by Alan Leo as the personality, the natural disposition and the worldly outlook generally, together with the physical experiences that come through the five senses. He calls the Ascendant and the house it opens the quality of the life forces, the material brought to the front, holds that it rules the personal appearance and, to a considerable extent, the disposition as well, and assigns to it the head and face. Beyond that general principle, the sources consulted for this entry give no separate delineation for Juno in the first house: Cafe Astrology publishes Juno in each of the twelve signs but no companion set for the houses, and no other reachable page consulted supplies one. The corpus records the absence rather than inventing a reading to fill it.

The story

The first house begins at the Ascendant, the degree rising in the east at birth, and the tradition reads it as what is seen of a person before anything is said. Juno's own first appearance is a matter of record. Wikipedia reports it as the third asteroid discovered, found on 1 September 1804 by the German astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding, counted a planet at first and reclassified as an asteroid and minor planet during the 1850s, so that its standing changed while the object did not. Its symbol is described on the same page as historically astronomical and now astrological, and the adjectival form of the name is given as Junonian. Cafe Astrology describes the glyph as a star placed over the cross of matter. The body itself is small, one of the four the site calls the major asteroids, about 254 kilometres across. A point whose identity was reassigned twice, once from planet to asteroid and once from astronomy to astrology, has an accidental fitness for the house of how a thing first presents itself.

Written from

Corpus key point:Juno:house:1.