Almagest

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Pallas in the fourth house

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

What the tradition reads

Pallas in the fourth house sets the strategist in the house Alan Leo gives to hereditary tendencies, to home and domestic life, to parentage and environment, and to the general state of things at the close of life, the house he calls the life of the householder. AstroFix's list reads this placement as picking up the patterns at home: seeing how the members of a family act on each other, understanding how a personal cultural inheritance fits into a larger picture, and holding a strong mind about where one comes from. It has such a person acting as the wise counsel of the family, reads a parent it describes as androgynous or as fiercely intellectual, notes a deferring to family or to culture, and ends with understanding the patterns of one's mother. Astrology King's collection of the modern reading supplies the wider frame of strategy, skill, creative intelligence and pattern recognition, and Wikipedia's page on asteroids in astrology the plainest version, Pallas as an indicator of effort, or of wisdom and intelligence. The practice is recent: that page dates the astrological use of asteroids to Eleanor Bach's first asteroid ephemeris in 1973.

The story

The household in the Athena story is a strange one. In Hesiod's account Zeus swallowed Metis while she was pregnant, so the daughter was raised inside his mind, and Metis, the page says, continues to give him advice as a ruler from there; when Athena grew up, Metis forged robes, armour, a shield and a spear for her. Hesiod adds that Hera was annoyed enough at Zeus for producing a child alone that she conceived and bore Hephaestus by herself, while Philostratus the Elder writes instead that Hera rejoices at Athena's birth as though Athena were her daughter also. Athena in turn raised a child not her own, Erichthonius, an important Athenian founding hero borne by Gaia after Hephaestus tried and failed to rape the goddess. Survival from a first household is the asteroid's own note. Pallas, Vesta and Ceres appear to be the only intact bodies from the earliest stage of planetary formation to have survived inside the orbit of Neptune, while most of their contemporaries were absorbed, ejected or destroyed.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas:house:4.