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Vesta in the twelfth house

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

What the tradition reads

Vesta's reading is modern and compact: Wikipedia's account of asteroids in astrology 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, tradition and obsession, and Always Astrology calls Vesta the keeper of the hearth, focus and dedication, mental clarity and self respect, with insecurity and a lack of focus on its difficult side. The twelfth house, in Alan Leo's account, is the house of the occult tendencies, whose connection with the fourth he reads as a psychic inheritance of thought from the past, with joy as possible a result as sorrow; he calls it the most critical of the twelve, and in the chapter he devotes to it the most mysterious. He names it the house of confinement and of self undoing, the house of the voluntary recluse as much as of the prisoner, and the house of enemies, where a person may prove his own worst enemy, and he reports the older reputation as sorrow, enemies, imprisonment and misfortune. He counts it cadent and assigns to it the feet. Of the sources consulted, none gives a reading for Vesta in the twelfth 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 cult was built around what could not be seen and ended in silence. Wikipedia's account of the goddess records that entry to her temple was permitted only to her priestesses and that she herself was rarely depicted, being represented instead by the fire; Wikipedia's account of the Vestalia adds that the penus Vestae, the inner sanctum, was usually curtained off and opened for the only time in the year at that festival, and closed again solemnly on 15 June. The ending is recorded as sparsely. Its account of the priestesses states that after the emperor Gratian confiscated the cult's public revenues in 382 the Vestals vanished from the historical record; the last attested by inscription is Coelia Concordia in 385, and a late story in which Theodosius's niece insulted an aged Vestal said to be the last of her kind rests on a visit to Rome in 394 that Cameron, cited on the same page, doubts ever took place. Whether the cult was still functioning by then or already moribund is called unclear.

Written from

Corpus key point:Vesta:house:12.