Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Pallas in the eighth house

the asteroid 2 Pallas in the eighth house, in modern Western asteroid practice

What the tradition reads

Pallas in the eighth house sets the strategist in the house Alan Leo gives to death and to all matters pertaining to legacies or affairs connected with death, and which he calls an occult house for its relation to the fourth, reading regeneration and rebirth by it as well, the raising of a faculty to what he calls a higher octave, and heading the chapter he gives it death and the dream consciousness. AstroFix's list reads this placement as holding a strategy for dealing with the unknown and a plan for tangling with one's own unconscious, and as reading patterns where other people keep what they do not say: patterns in the emotional baggage of others, in crisis, in death and dying, in the occult, and in taxes. It gives the figures of the debt counsellor and of the intimate, trusted advisor, and reads wise counsel offered to others generally and to those closest. The same list records a holistic view of sexuality and calls the placement sexually androgynous. None of this is guidance about anyone's debts or estate; it is a record of where the asteroid's strategy is read to work. Astrology King's collection supplies the wider modern reading of just warfare, strategy and pattern recognition, and Wikipedia's page offers Pallas as an indicator of effort, dating the astrological use of asteroids to the 1970s.

The story

The Athena material keeps its darkest pieces close to the name itself. Wikipedia records a version in which Pallas was a Giant, slain by Athena during the Gigantomachy and flayed so that his skin became her cloak, worn as a victory trophy, and an alternative variation in which Pallas was her father, who attempted to assault his own daughter and was killed and skinned for it. Her symbols include the gorgoneion, the head of Medusa, whom Ovid says she transformed into the Gorgon after witnessing the young woman being raped by Poseidon in the goddess's temple, and the aegis she wore to war bore fear, strife, defence and assault. The asteroid wears its own damage. It appears saturated with craters and has more large ones than either Vesta or Ceres, since its high inclination and eccentricity make average impacts about twice as fast and so far more energetic; a suspected basin at the south pole ejected some 6 percent of the body's volume, and the craters are named after ancient weapons.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas:house:8.