Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Pallas in the second house

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

What the tradition reads

Pallas in the second house sets the strategist in the house Alan Leo gives to finance and monetary prospects, read as the outcome of the profession in remuneration and in monetary condition generally, with hereditary position added in the heading of the chapter he gives it, and as the house where the desires caused by the tenth house bear on moral growth. AstroFix's list for this placement reads it as having a financial strategy, and as keeping a battle plan for meeting survival needs. It describes a forceful intellect turned on money matters, a tracking of the patterns in what is spent and earned, and an eye on the larger economic picture rather than on the single transaction; alongside that it reads a holistic understanding of personal values, and of how those values bear on the world at large. None of this is advice about anyone's money, and the reading makes no promise of gain; it describes where the asteroid's attention is held. Astrology King's collection of the modern sense of Pallas, with its strategy, skill, creative intelligence and pattern recognition, is what the house localises here, and Wikipedia's page on asteroids in astrology gives the sparest form of the same reading, Pallas as an indicator of effort, dating the astrological use of asteroids to the 1970s.

The story

The Athena material has one famous story about property. In the founding myth of Athens, reported by Pseudo-Apollodorus, she and Poseidon each gave the Athenians a single gift, with Cecrops the king judging between them: Poseidon struck the ground and raised a salt water spring, and Athena created the first olive tree, which won her the city. The olive is listed among her major symbols, and as the patron of craft and weaving she was known as Ergane, a title about goods that are made. The asteroid has left its own name on a substance. The chemical element palladium was named after Pallas, which had been discovered just before the element, while the stony iron pallasite meteorites, despite the resemblance of the word, are named after the German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas instead. The body itself is thought to be a remnant protoplanet, its surface composition very similar to that of the Renazzo carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, which are among the most primitive meteorites known.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas:house:2.