Almagest

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Vesta in the third house

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

What the tradition reads

The tradition's reading of Vesta is a recent addition and a compact one. Wikipedia's account of asteroids in astrology holds that astrologers use Vesta to determine what a person is devoted to; Cafe Astrology's asteroid pages give its themes as dedication, focus, warmth, devotion and a sense of purpose, together with hard work, structure, tradition and righteousness; Always Astrology describes Vesta as the keeper of the hearth, as focus and dedication, and as mental clarity and self respect. The third house, in Alan Leo's account, is brethren and relatives, short journeys and the mind: relatives and kindred, travelling, the intellect derived from education and study, and the minor impressions made upon the physical brain. In the chapter he devotes to it he says that what is studied there is all that relates to movement, transition and change, and all affairs that seriously affect the mind. He counts the house cadent, the least outwardly expressed of the twelve in his scheme, and assigns to it the neck, arms and shoulders and the lungs. Of the sources consulted, none gives a reading for Vesta in the third 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 reached astronomy by correspondence. Wikipedia's article on 4 Vesta records that Olbers, after discovering Pallas in 1802, sent a letter to William Herschel proposing that Ceres and Pallas were remnants of a destroyed planet and suggesting a search near the points where their orbits crossed; that he searched from 1802 and found Vesta on 29 March 1807; and that the discovery was announced in a letter addressed to the German astronomer Johann H. Schröter dated 31 March. Because Olbers already had the credit of a planet, he handed the naming to Carl Friedrich Gauss, whose orbital calculations had confirmed Ceres and who had computed the new body's orbit in ten hours, and Gauss chose the Roman goddess and drew a symbol for her, the altar of Vesta with its sacred fire. Naming grew unmanageable as discoveries multiplied: the same page records Benjamin Apthorp Gould's proposal in 1851 that asteroids be numbered in order of discovery with the number set in a circle, which made this one the fourth, and that by 1858 the circle had become the parentheses of the form now written.

Written from

Corpus key point:Vesta:house:3.