Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Pallas in the twelfth house

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

What the tradition reads

Pallas in the twelfth house sets the strategist in the house Alan Leo gives to occult tendencies, read through its connection with the fourth as a psychic thought inheritance from the past whose result is either joy or sorrow, and which he calls the house of confinement and of self undoing. AstroFix's list reads this placement as dropping out of the mainstream as part of a larger strategy, and as keeping an escape plan; it reads a battle plan for helping the underprivileged, a holistic perception of the unknowable, and a holistic understanding of dreams, with one dream taken as part of a larger pattern in the whole dream world, and a perception of an overarching spiritual realm. It adds the half joking figure of devising a plan to catch ghosts, which is the register of the list rather than a claim. Astrology King's collection of the modern reading supplies the frame of strategy, creative intelligence and pattern recognition, and Wikipedia's page on asteroids in astrology the sparest form, Pallas as an indicator of effort, or of wisdom, intelligence and healing perhaps through effort.

The story

Pallas is the least seen of the large bodies. Charles Messier recorded it on a star chart on the night of 5 April 1779 while tracking a comet, and apparently assumed it was nothing more than a star; it was another twenty-three years before Olbers, hunting Ceres, saw that the object moved. No spacecraft has ever visited it. A flyby during the Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres was discussed but proved impossible because of the asteroid's high orbital inclination, and a proposed small satellite mission named Athena, which would have flown past Pallas, was not funded; the authors of that proposal called Pallas the largest unexplored protoplanet of the main belt. Its own light and dark are extreme. The axial tilt is about 84 degrees, so through each Palladian summer and winter large parts of the surface lie in constant sunlight or constant darkness for something on the order of an Earth year, and near the poles the sunlight can last as long as two years.

Written from

Corpus key point:Pallas:house:12.