Almagest

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Pallas in the ninth house

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

What the tradition reads

Pallas in the ninth house places the strategist in the house Alan Leo gives to the higher mentality with its scientific, philosophic and religious tendencies, and to long journeys, dreams and what he calls the image making power. AstroFix's list reads this placement as keeping a battle plan for higher education and academic achievement, and a plan for religion, personal belief or metaphysics, so that even conviction is approached with a design. It reads a strong philosophical mind, a holistic view of other countries with their peoples, customs and belief systems, and a holistic grasp of foreign languages that it extends to becoming fluent in several; it gives the figures of the ambassador and the emissary, and of one who acts as wise counsel to foreign countries. That last reading is where the modern sense of the asteroid and the house meet, since Astrology King's account gathers political nous and negotiating skill among the things astrologers have attached to Pallas, quoting Michael O'Reilly that a prominently placed Pallas can make one exceptionally skilled as a political strategist. Wikipedia's page offers the plainest reading, Pallas as an indicator of effort, of wisdom or of intelligence.

The story

Athena's part in the old stories is usually the part of the counsellor on a journey. She was the patron goddess of heroic endeavour, said to have aided Perseus, Heracles, Bellerophon and Jason; according to Pseudo-Apollodorus she advised Argos, the builder of the Argo, and helped in the ship's construction. In the Odyssey she is the tutelary deity of Odysseus, and under the epithet Aethyia, a word for a diving bird and figuratively for a ship, her name is read as referring to the teaching of shipbuilding or navigation. The asteroid travels oddly for so large a body. Its orbit is inclined about 34.8 degrees to the plane of the asteroid belt and is moderately eccentric, and that inclination carries it where the planets cannot go: on 9 October 2022 Pallas passed only 8.5 arcminutes south of Sirius, while no planet can come within 30 degrees of that star. Gauss determined the orbit and found a period of about 4.6 years, close to that of Ceres.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas:house:9.