The library · The other points and bodies

Pallas in Pisces

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

What the tradition reads

Pallas in Pisces is read as strategy in defence of what cannot be proved. Astrology Club's delineation names this the warrior who protects dreams, and calls the talents poetic, visionary and spiritual, able when brought out into the world to let others picture a realm lying beyond the mundane and the merely mental. Problem solving here is described as working through unconditional love and acceptance rather than through tactics, and the page reads a resonance with what it calls the music of the soul and of the universe, together with a fight for that music to keep its place in ordinary life. Set against the general modern reading Astrology King gathers, which leans on strategy, political sense and pattern recognition, the Pisces placement is the softest version of the asteroid on offer, and the one least concerned with winning. Wikipedia's page on asteroids in astrology offers the plain form, Pallas as an indicator of effort, or of wisdom, intelligence and healing perhaps through effort, and dates the astrological use of asteroids to the 1970s. The body carrying the name was found on 28 March 1802 and is now reckoned the third largest asteroid in the Solar System by volume and mass. Pisces is ruled classically by Jupiter, and by Neptune in the scheme that spread in the twentieth century.

The story

The story behind the name is a story of grief and of an image. In one version reported on Wikipedia's Athena page, Pallas was the daughter of the sea god Triton and a childhood friend of Athena; Zeus, watching a friendly sparring match and not wanting his daughter to lose, flapped his aegis to distract Pallas, whom Athena then impaled by accident. Distraught, Athena took the name Pallas for herself as a sign of grief and as tribute to her friend, and Zeus gave her the aegis as an apology. What followed was a statue. The palladium was an image of Athena said to have stood in her temple on the Trojan acropolis, carved by the goddess herself in the likeness of her dead friend, and credited with talisman-like properties: while it remained in the city, Troy could not fall. Wikipedia's page on asteroids in astrology tells the same episode with Zeus dropping the wooden statue to the land of Troy, where a temple was built in its honour. Wikipedia's list of the mythological figures called Pallas holds several more, among them a Titan, a Giant, and a son of Lycaon said to have taught Athena, so the name mourned here was never only one person's.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas:sign:Pisces.