Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Juno in the fourth house

the asteroid Juno in the fourth house of the Western chart

What the tradition reads

Juno's reading belongs to the modern period. The body was discovered in 1804, the four earliest asteroids started being recognised by astrologers in the 1970s, and Cafe Astrology's delineations, which are the fullest reachable set, are recent work. Those delineations read Juno as commitment, marriage, give and take in partnerships, fairness and compromise, and as the place where a person seeks to make matters balanced, fair and right. The fourth house is described by Alan Leo as environment, home and parents, and the end of life: hereditary tendencies, home and domestic life, parentage, and the general state of things at the close of life. He calls it the Nadir or Lower Meridian, reads it as the life of the householder together with the hidden and secret matters bound up with parentage or domestic affairs, and sums it up as the personal environment where the tenth house is the individual environment. He notes that Western astrologers commonly give one parent to this house, usually the father, where Hindu astrologers give the mother. The pairing of the two is not something the sources support: none of the pages consulted for this entry, Cafe Astrology's Juno material included, gives a delineation of Juno by house, so this entry states the reading of the point and the field of the house and stops there, declining to manufacture a reading that no source gives.

The story

The fourth house is the house of roots, and the marriage at the root of Juno's own story is older than any rite that grew from it. Wikipedia calls the association of Juno and Jupiter part of the most ancient Latin theology, and says the divine couple received its matrimonial implications from Greece, with Praeneste offering a glimpse into original Latin myth. Juno's own household is given on the same page: a daughter of Saturn and Ops, sister and wife of Jupiter, and mother of Mars, Vulcan, Bellona, Lucina and Juventas. On the Greek side the sacred marriage went further back still. The page on Hera reports that the hieros gamos of Zeus with the earth goddess, finally named Hera, was celebrated at Knossos in Crete, and describes the hieros gamos as indicating a ritual of fertility magic probably introduced into the Aegean from the Near East. The same page adds that in her festival at Plataea she is related to the nymph Plataia, called an old forgotten form of the Greek earth goddess. A house read through ancestry is well matched by a goddess whose marriage was already ancient before Rome recorded it.

Written from

Corpus key point:Juno:house:4.