Almagest

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Vesta in the fourth house

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

What the tradition reads

Modern asteroid astrology reads Vesta as a point of devotion and focus. Wikipedia's account of the practice, which begins with Eleanor Bach's ephemeris of 1973, says astrologers use it to determine what a person is devoted to; Cafe Astrology's asteroid pages list dedication, focus, warmth, devotion, a sense of purpose, hard work, structure and tradition; Always Astrology calls Vesta the keeper of the hearth and the epitome of home, family, ritual and devotion. The fourth house, in Alan Leo's account, is environment, home and parents, and the end of life: hereditary tendencies, home and domestic life, parentage, and the general state of things at the close of life. He calls it the Nadir or Lower Meridian, reads it as the life of the householder together with the hidden and secret matters bound up with parentage or domestic affairs, and sums it up as the personal environment where the tenth house is the individual environment. He notes that Western astrologers commonly give one parent to this house, usually the father, where Hindu astrologers give the mother. Of the sources consulted, none gives a reading for Vesta in the fourth 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

The fire that carried Vesta's name burned in a house. Wikipedia's account of the sacred fire describes an eternal flame in ancient Rome dedicated to the goddess who protected hearth, home and family, kept in her circular temple in the Roman Forum below the Palatine Hill, its institution traditionally attributed to the legendary king Numa Pompilius in the seventh century BC. The temple was destroyed by fire on several occasions and rebuilt each time, the last reconstruction coming in AD 191. Because Vesta was understood as the hearth itself, the same account holds that her single flame stood at once for the life of every Roman household and for the vitality of the state, and that its unbroken burning was believed to guarantee her protection and Rome's endurance. Wikipedia's account of the priestesses adds that the most widely accepted tradition has Numa build the first temple of Vesta, appoint its first pair of priestesses and fund them as a collegiate priesthood, and that the Vestals were freed from every legal tie to their birth families when they entered the goddess's service.

Written from

Corpus key point:Vesta:house:4.