The library · The other points and bodies

Pallas in Gemini

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

What the tradition reads

Pallas in Gemini is read as the mind used as the instrument of defence. Astrology Club's delineation says that in this sign the fighting and protecting are done with the mind and its sharpened intellectual weapons, that the creativity is progressive, thought oriented and exploratory, and that the things valued are thoughts, ideas, new horizons and communications. It reads such a person as making equality in intellectual circles by sharing wisdom and knowledge freely, as most protective of freedom of movement and of speech, and as carrying a wisdom it calls ingenious, mentally oriented and fast moving, with a likely talent in the literary field. This sits close to what several modern astrologers treat as the asteroid's signature. Astrology King reports that pattern recognition is widely attached to Pallas, noting that Christina the Oxford Astrologer took pattern recognition as a key component of astrology, examined the charts of astrologers, and concluded that Pallas is the goddess of pattern. The practice itself is recent: Wikipedia dates the astrological use of asteroids to the 1970s and offers Pallas as an indicator of effort, or of wisdom and intelligence. Gemini is the sign the Western scheme gives to Mercury.

The story

The name Pallas is itself a problem of reading. Wikipedia's Athena page calls it her most renowned epithet and gives two candidate derivations, one from a verb meaning to brandish as a weapon and one, considered more likely, from a group of words meaning youth, young woman; it then says that in later times, after the original meaning of the name had been forgotten, the Greeks invented myths to explain its origins, some of them reported by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus and by the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus. Her most common epithet in Homer is Glaukopis, usually translated as bright eyed or with gleaming eyes, and as patroness of heroes she is said to have favoured those who used cunning and intelligence rather than brute strength. The asteroid's name carries its own grammar. The adjectival form is Palladian, the d belonging to the oblique stem of the Greek name, which appears before a vowel and disappears before the nominative ending; the Italian Pallade and the Russian Pallada preserve that oblique form. A body seen once and misread also belongs here: Charles Messier recorded Pallas on a star chart on the night of 5 April 1779 and apparently took it for a star.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas:sign:Gemini.