Almagest

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Vesta in the fifth house

the asteroid Vesta in the fifth house, in modern Western asteroid astrology

What the tradition reads

The reading the tradition gives Vesta is modern, and the pages that give it keep to a few words: what a person is devoted to, in Wikipedia's account of asteroids in astrology; dedication, focus, warmth, devotion and a sense of purpose, with hard work, structure and tradition, in Cafe Astrology's keyword list; the keeper of the hearth, focus and dedication, mental clarity and self respect, in Always Astrology's description. The fifth house, in Alan Leo's account, is children, enterprise and speculations, gains and love affairs: offspring, the pleasurable emotions arising from the senses, and worldly enterprise and energy. In the chapter he gives it he reads the house as pleasure, society and social inclination, as the emotions and feelings, as courtships and the affections that spring from the feeling side of the nature, and as a material representation of the eleventh house, whose hopes and wishes the fifth often carries to worldly fulfilment. He assigns to it the heart and back. Of the sources consulted, none gives a reading for Vesta in the fifth house: the two delineations that treat Vesta placement by placement, Always Astrology and Astrology Club, work by sign only, and Cafe Astrology's asteroid pages give Vesta's keywords without any delineation by house, so no reading is offered here.

The story

Vesta's festival had a comic turn in it. Wikipedia's account of the Vestalia, held from 7 to 15 June, records that the donkey, the animal consecrated to Vesta, was crowned with garlands of flowers and bits of bread on 9 June, and that Ovid explains the bread necklaces as a memory of the myth in which Vesta is nearly violated by Priapus and the untimely bray of a donkey startles him into flight; before that, Ovid says, donkeys were honoured on 9 June in thanks for their work in the bakeries. Wikipedia's account of the priestesses notes that the Vestalia was attended by matrons and bakers, and the festival page adds that mothers came barefoot and dishevelled to leave offerings while the inner store stood open. Children belong to the goddess's story in a stranger way: the mythological account records that the few myths of Vesta turn on the miraculous conception of a child at her hearth, and that in some Roman traditions Romulus and Remus and the king Servius Tullius were said to have been conceived so.

Written from

Corpus key point:Vesta:house:5.