The library · The other points and bodies

Pallas

the asteroid 2 Pallas, also called Pallas Athene, anywhere in a chart

What the tradition reads

Pallas, catalogued in astronomy as 2 Pallas and called Pallas Athene by the astrologers who use it, carries a reading that is recent rather than inherited, and that is worth saying plainly. Wikipedia's page on asteroids in astrology dates the astrological use of these bodies to Eleanor Bach's publication of the first asteroid ephemeris in 1973, says the first four asteroids started being recognised by astrologers in the 1970s, and records that only a minority of astrologers use asteroids in chart interpretation at all. What that minority reads is reasonably consistent. The same page offers Pallas as an indicator of effort, and adds that other astrologers take it as an indicator of wisdom, intelligence and healing, perhaps through effort. Astrology King lists the goddess's domains of wisdom, courage, just warfare, strategy and skill, and says modern astrologers have linked the asteroid to those and also to creative intelligence, political nous, pattern recognition and the relationship between father and daughter. That page attributes to Demetra George the description of Pallas as the principle of creative intelligence, and quotes Michael O'Reilly that a prominently placed Pallas can make one exceptionally skilled as a political strategist. Cafe Astrology publishes ingress tables from which the sign is read, and marks the periods when Pallas turns retrograde and re-enters the sign behind it.

The story

The body was found on 28 March 1802 by the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers, who was trying to relocate Ceres and noticed another moving object nearby, coincidentally passing close to Ceres at the time. Astronomers had already argued that a planet belonged in the gap between Mars and Jupiter, so Pallas was taken for a planet, as other asteroids were in the early nineteenth century; Gauss computed the orbit and found a period of about 4.6 years. It is now described as the third largest asteroid in the Solar System by volume and mass, and as likely a remnant protoplanet. Its old astronomical symbol, a spear or lance, is still used in astrology, and the lozenge form of that symbol was resurrected for astrological use in 1973. The name is an epithet of the Greek goddess Athena. Wikipedia's Athena page calls Pallas her most renowned epithet and derives it either from the verb meaning to brandish as a weapon or, more likely, from a group of words meaning youth, young woman; it adds that in later times, once the original meaning had been forgotten, the Greeks invented myths to explain the name. One such myth makes Pallas the daughter of the sea god Triton, killed by accident in a sparring match, whose name Athena then took in mourning.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas.