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Pallas in Aquarius

the asteroid 2 Pallas in Aquarius, in modern Western asteroid practice

What the tradition reads

Pallas in Aquarius is read as strategy spent on whoever is outside the walls. Astrology Club's delineation has this placement defending the defenceless, the underdogs and the hidden, and calls the creative intelligence and practical wisdom progressive, unique and spontaneous. The artistic and visionary talents are placed either in an expressive modern style or in a very antiquated one, and the page reads gifts of empathy directed at the mind and at thought processes rather than at feeling. It locates the courage in an unbound optimism and in a belief in the equality of all, which is the sign's characteristic form of the asteroid's justice. Astrology King's gathering of the modern reading runs alongside this, with just warfare, strategy, political sense and pattern recognition attached to Pallas, and with diplomacy preferred to force. Wikipedia's page on asteroids in astrology supplies the cautious version, Pallas as an indicator of effort, or of wisdom and intelligence, and notes that only a minority of astrologers use asteroids in chart interpretation. Aquarius is ruled classically by Saturn, and by Uranus in the scheme that spread in the twentieth century.

The story

Pallas has the shortest astrological history of any body a chart is likely to name, and the honest version of it belongs in a sign associated with what is new. The asteroid was discovered on 28 March 1802 and was taken for a planet, as other asteroids were then. After 1845 so many more were found that minor planets came to be listed separately from major ones, and the realisation in the 1950s that such small bodies had not formed the way planets did led astronomers to drop the term minor planet in favour of asteroid, or planetoid for the larger ones. Astrological use came much later still: Wikipedia dates it to Eleanor Bach's publication of the first asteroid ephemeris in 1973, the same year the old lozenge symbol for Pallas was resurrected for astrological use, and says the first four asteroids started being recognised by astrologers in the 1970s. Grouping came late too. In 1917 Kiyotsugu Hirayama plotted mean orbital motion, inclination and eccentricity and found distinct groupings, later reporting three asteroids associated with Pallas; since 1994 more than ten members of that family have been identified.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas:sign:Aquarius.