The library · The other points and bodies

Pallas in Cancer

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

What the tradition reads

Pallas in Cancer is read as strategy bent towards keeping people safe. Astrology Club's page on Pallas through the signs has this placement battling for the safety of home and of those loved, and solving problems with an intelligence it calls empathic and intuitive rather than analytical. Fairness, on that reading, is measured as give and take inside the intimate environment: the page says such a person is less concerned with what is owned or possessed than with what is shared emotionally, and that the warrior of this sign protects the right to be loved unconditionally. Its creative gift is described as the ability to make a thing with warmth, connectivity and heart, and the page adds that knowing or feeling that others are unloved is intolerable here. The wider frame is modern and modest. Wikipedia's page on asteroids in astrology dates the use of these bodies in charts to the 1970s and offers Pallas as an indicator of effort, or of wisdom, intelligence and healing perhaps through effort, while Astrology King collects the fuller modern reading of strategy, skill, creative intelligence and pattern recognition. The body itself was found on 28 March 1802 by Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers and was counted a planet at first. Cancer is the sign the Western scheme gives to the Moon.

The story

Behind the armed daughter stands a swallowed mother. In Hesiod's account, Zeus swallowed Metis while she was pregnant, and Athena was born from his forehead; Metis raised the child inside his mind, where, the page says, she continues to give him advice as a ruler. When Athena grew up, Metis forged robes, armour, a shield and a spear for her daughter, so the equipment of the warrior comes from the mother who is nowhere visible. Hesiod adds that Hera was annoyed enough at Zeus for having produced a child on his own that she conceived and bore Hephaestus by herself, while the third century rhetorician Philostratus the Elder writes instead that Hera rejoices at Athena's birth as though Athena were her daughter also. Athena also raised a child not her own: in an archaic Attic myth, after Hephaestus tried and failed to rape her, Gaia bore Erichthonius, an important Athenian founding hero whom Athena brought up. Household, concealment and inherited protection run through all of it, which is the register a Cancer reading of Pallas draws on.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas:sign:Cancer.