The library · The other points and bodies

Pallas in Aries

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

What the tradition reads

Pallas in Aries sets the strategist's mind in the sign the tradition gives to Mars, and the reading belongs to the modern asteroid practice that took up these bodies in the 1970s rather than to any older doctrine. Astrology Club's delineation of Pallas through the signs opens this placement by saying that the god of war merges with its goddess: the fight is for the right to seek adventure, new horizons and personal freedom of expression, and the wisdom described is one of innocence and creativity rather than of long deliberation. That page reads the placement as imaginative intelligence, calls such a person an adept strategist, holds that competition itself kindles the wish to conquer and can be turned into motive for change, and says the personal right to experience, to explore and to choose a direction is defended both in oneself and for others nearby. Artistic flair and imagination are listed with it. Set beside the general reading Astrology King gathers, which is wisdom, courage, just warfare, strategy, skill, creative intelligence and pattern recognition, the Aries placement is the version that moves first and thinks while moving. Wikipedia's page on asteroids in astrology, more cautiously, offers Pallas simply as an indicator of effort.

The story

Athena arrived armed. Hesiod's Theogony has Zeus marry Metis, described there as the wisest among gods and mortal men, and then, warned by a prophecy that she would bear a son wiser and more powerful than his father, trick her into letting him swallow her; she had already conceived, and the daughter was raised inside his mind. When the headache came, Zeus ordered his head cleaved open with the labrys, the double headed Minoan axe, and Athena leaped out, often described as fully grown and armed. Pindar's seventh Olympian Ode says she cried aloud with a mighty shout and that the Sky and mother Earth shuddered before her, and the first Homeric Hymn to Athena has the gods awestruck at her appearance, with Helios stopping his chariot in the sky. Art usually shows her in a helmet, holding a spear, and the old astronomical symbol of the asteroid that carries her epithet is a spear or lance, still used in astrology. A figure who appears at once, fully equipped, before any instruction or apprenticeship, is the part of the Athena material that an Aries reading of Pallas keeps, and the sign's ruler in the Western scheme is Mars.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas:sign:Aries.