Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Pallas in the sixth house

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

What the tradition reads

Pallas in the sixth house sets the strategist in the house Alan Leo gives to service and to the attachments that arise from it, and so to servants and helpers and to those he calls inferiors in social rank, the house of employment in his scheme, which he also calls the house of phenomenal magic. AstroFix's list reads this placement as holding a strategy for daily activities and routines and a battle plan at work, and as seeing how regimen, food and exercise fit into a larger picture rather than treating them one by one; it also reads a holistic understanding of working conditions and labour, and a strategy for working with animals. Those are the source's own headings for what the placement is read to organise, and they are recorded as such: nothing here describes any condition of a body or recommends any regimen. Astrology King's collection of the modern reading gives the frame of strategy, skill and pattern recognition, and Wikipedia's page on asteroids in astrology adds the version most at home in this house, Pallas as an indicator of effort, and as an indicator of wisdom, intelligence and healing, perhaps through effort.

The story

One of Athena's minor titles belongs to the work of building. Plutarch describes Pericles dedicating a statue to her as Athena Hygieia, meaning Health, after she inspired in a dream his successful treatment of a man injured during the construction of the gateway to the Acropolis. The story is a piece of history about a building site and a dedication, not a claim about medicine. Her other working titles run the same way: Ergane for craft and weaving, Mechanitis for skill in inventing, Hippia for the invention of the bit, bridle, chariot and wagon. The asteroid's own record is one of patient, unglamorous work by many hands. Its diameter was first calculated accurately from an occultation of a star observed by 140 observers on 29 May 1983, the best observed of all asteroid occultation events, and its mass has been estimated from the tiny perturbations it induces in the motion of Mars, measured through radio signals from spacecraft at that planet.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas:house:6.