The library · The other points and bodies

Vesta in Leo

the asteroid Vesta in the sign Leo, in modern Western asteroid astrology

What the tradition reads

Both modern delineations consulted here read Vesta in Leo as devotion that must be visible to be honest. Always Astrology reads the placement as working best in creative and original territory, artistic, full of enthusiasm, with a passion for self expression and a talent for finding the creative or dramatic side of any circumstance; it reads such a person as a natural romantic, proud and always willing to give from the heart, and warns that the same position can turn egotistical when unloved, zealous when unchecked, and unwilling to weigh the opinions of others. Astrology Club reads the same placement as protecting the flame of joy, love and healthy ego, its focus on becoming everything a person can become and on finding the conviction to stand in one's own talents, with a mission to teach others the need for self belief and leadership. By that page's consistent pattern, what is guarded is also what gets withheld: the right to believe in one's own gifts is what a person is likely to deny themselves, wearing what it calls a cloak of utter humility that hides their own light, until a settled place is reached where the gifts are accepted and held no higher and no lower than anyone else's.

The story

Vesta's fire was, for a long stretch of Roman history, an imperial concern. Wikipedia's account of the goddess records that Roman tradition required the state's leading priest, the pontifex maximus, to live in a publicly owned house, and that Augustus, on taking that office in 12 BC, gave part of his private house to the Vestals as public property and built a new shrine of Vesta within it. The old shrine stayed in the temple in the Forum, but the gift tied the public hearth of the state to the official home of the chief priest and to the emperor's own residence on the Palatine, so that the office of pontifex maximus became bound to the title of emperor and emperors were automatically priests of Vesta. The same account notes that the pontiffs were sometimes called pontifices Vestae, priests of Vesta, that various emperors led official revivals and promotions of the Vestals' cult, and that a coin issued under Nero showed the cult statue of Vesta holding a patera and a sceptre inside her hexastyle temple. Dedications in the Atrium of Vesta, mostly from AD 200 to 300, name several chief Vestals by title.

Written from

Corpus key point:Vesta:sign:Leo.