Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Pallas in the first house

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

What the tradition reads

Pallas in the first house puts the strategist in the house Alan Leo gives to the personality and the natural disposition, to the general outlook on the world, and to physical experience as it comes through the five senses, the house he reads for the quality of the life forces and for what is brought to the front. AstroFix's account of Pallas through the houses, written as a run of short images rather than as a verdict, reads this placement as having a strategy for living at all: approaching life with a battle plan, and keeping a plan even for growing old. Behaviour is taken as part of a larger story and physical presence as something that sends ripples outward, while the plan itself is named as one of the first things other people notice, along with the rational mind behind it; the same list includes an androgynous appearance and a manner of thinking it calls masculine. Its closing line, that noticing patterns is how such a person deals with life, ties the placement to what Astrology King gathers as the modern sense of the asteroid: strategy, skill, creative intelligence and pattern recognition, which several astrologers quoted there treat as its signature. Wikipedia's page on asteroids in astrology gives the plainest version, Pallas as an indicator of effort, and dates the astrological use of asteroids to the 1970s.

The story

A first house reading is about how a thing shows itself, and Pallas shows itself modestly. Its mean opposition magnitude is +8.0, well within the range of ten by fifty binoculars, but it is farther from Earth and much darker than Vesta, so it looks dimmer, and at small elongations it can fall to +10.6 and need better instruments. Only at rare perihelic oppositions does it reach +6.4, right on the edge of naked-eye visibility. Even its size took a long time to settle: early estimates after the 1802 discovery ran as high as 3,380 kilometres across, and as recently as 1979 it was put at 673 kilometres, 26 percent greater than the value accepted now. The goddess whose epithet it carries is easier to recognise. Wikipedia's Athena page says she is generally depicted in art wearing a helmet and holding a spear, and the asteroid's old astronomical symbol, still used in astrology, is a spear or lance, most often drawn with a lozenge blade.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas:house:1.