The library · The other points and bodies

Pallas in Taurus

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

What the tradition reads

Pallas in Taurus is read in modern asteroid practice as strategy applied to what can be held. Astrology Club's page on Pallas through the signs gives this placement the wisdom of the earth, and reads it as most concerned with the protection of assets, belongings, objects and traditions. Its figure would rather protect than fight, and is described as a formidable opponent only once prodded; problems are met with logic, analysis and tradition rather than with improvisation. The same page reads a sensual grace of movement with an artistic and creative intelligence, and locates the likely talents in the visual and tactile arts. It adds that the sense of fairness here rests on literal terms and on ideas of ownership, and that the warrior of the sign defends the earth, her bounties and her assets. None of this is old doctrine: Wikipedia's page on asteroids in astrology dates the astrological use of these bodies to the 1970s and offers Pallas plainly as an indicator of effort, while Astrology King gathers the wider modern reading of wisdom, courage, just warfare, strategy, skill, creative intelligence and pattern recognition. Taurus is the sign the Western scheme gives to Venus.

The story

The Athena material has a founding story about a material gift. In the founding myth of Athens as Wikipedia tells it, she bested Poseidon in a competition over patronage of the city by creating the first olive tree; a version reported by Pseudo-Apollodorus has each of them offer the Athenians one gift, with Cecrops, the king, judging which gift was better, and Poseidon striking the ground to raise a salt water spring. The olive tree is listed among her major symbols, alongside owls, snakes and the gorgoneion. As the patron of craft and weaving she was known as Ergane, a title about made things rather than about battles. The asteroid has its own small history of substances. The chemical element palladium was named after Pallas, which had been discovered just before the element; the stony iron pallasite meteorites, despite the resemblance, are named instead after the German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas. The asteroid itself is thought to be a remnant protoplanet with a mineral composition close to carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, a body of ordinary rock that happens to have survived.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas:sign:Taurus.