Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Pallas in the fifth house

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

What the tradition reads

Pallas in the fifth house places the strategist in the house Alan Leo gives to offspring, to worldly enterprise and energy, and to the sensations and pleasurable emotions that arise from the senses, the chapter he gives it headed children, enterprise, speculations, gains and love affairs. AstroFix's list reads this placement as picking up artistic patterns and seeing how a creative project can unfold, as understanding how art acts on the world at large, and as understanding the development of children. It reads a creative strategy rather than a creative impulse, a battle plan in sport, an interest in strategic games, and the plain figure of the party planner. The same list includes a taste for androgynous love interests, or a preference for abstaining from love affairs altogether, and a deferring to children or to romantic interests. Nothing in it predicts a life; the entries are readings of where the asteroid's kind of intelligence is spent. Astrology King collects the wider modern reading of creative intelligence, strategy, skill and pattern recognition, which Demetra George, as quoted there, calls the principle of creative intelligence. Wikipedia's page on asteroids in astrology offers Pallas as an indicator of effort and dates the practice to the 1970s, well over a century after the body itself was discovered by Olbers on 28 March 1802.

The story

The fifth house story of Athena is a story about a contest in craft. In the later writings of Ovid she competed against the mortal Arachne in a weaving competition and afterwards transformed her into the first spider. As the patron of craft and weaving she was Ergane; as Parthenos, Athena the Virgin, she was believed, like Artemis and Hestia, to remain perpetually a virgin, and her most famous temple, the Parthenon, takes its name from that title. Her civic festival, the Panathenaia, was celebrated in midsummer and prominently featured displays of athletic and military prowess, so games and skill sat inside the worship itself. Children appear in the story sideways. Athena bore none, but she raised Erichthonius, an Athenian founding hero borne by Gaia, and Ovid also says she saved the mortal maiden Corone from Poseidon by turning her into a crow. Rescue and transformation, rather than parentage, are how the goddess enters the house of children.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas:house:5.