Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Pallas in the third house

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

What the tradition reads

Pallas in the third house places the strategist in the house Alan Leo gives to relatives and kindred, to travelling, to the intellect derived from education and study, and to the lesser impressions made on the physical brain, with short journeys attached to it through its tie to the concrete or brain mind. AstroFix's list opens this placement with the strategic mind itself, then fills it with the reading of patterns in speech: patterns in conversation and in thought, knowing how one word leads to the next, and knowing how a few sentences strung together make a poem, a book, a conversation or a speech. It reads a strategy in the act of speaking, a strong mind, holistic thinking, an ear for speech patterns, and an understanding of the patterns of one's siblings. This is the house where the modern reading of Pallas as pattern recognition is most literal. Astrology King reports that Christina the Oxford Astrologer, taking pattern recognition to be a key component of astrology, examined the charts of astrologers and concluded that Pallas is the goddess of pattern. Wikipedia's page on asteroids in astrology offers the plainer reading of Pallas as an indicator of effort, of wisdom or of intelligence, and dates the astrological use of these bodies to the 1970s.

The story

The asteroid's name is a small lesson in grammar. Its adjectival form is Palladian; the d belongs to the oblique stem of the Greek name, appearing before a vowel and disappearing before the nominative ending, and the Italian Pallade and the Russian Pallada keep that oblique form. The epithet behind the name has a contested origin: Wikipedia's Athena page derives it either from a verb meaning to brandish as a weapon or, more likely, from a group of words meaning youth, young woman, and adds that once the original meaning had been forgotten the Greeks invented myths to explain it, some reported by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus and by the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus. Reading a sign correctly is the other theme here. On the night of 5 April 1779, Charles Messier recorded Pallas on a star chart he was using to track a comet, and apparently assumed it was nothing more than a star. The object sat in his own notes for twenty-three years before anyone knew what it was.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas:house:3.