Pallas

Pallas was discovered on 28 March 1802 by Heinrich Olbers, the second asteroid found and the third largest body in the belt. Its orbit is steeply inclined, about thirty-five degrees to the ecliptic, which is unusually high and means the object spends much of its time well away from the zodiacal band; it has never been visited by a spacecraft, though Hubble imaging shows a heavily cratered and somewhat irregular body. The name is one of the epithets of Athena, Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom, craft and strategic warfare who was said to have sprung fully armed from the head of Zeus. In modern astrological use, developed from the 1970s alongside the other asteroid goddesses, Pallas is read for pattern recognition, strategy, craft, creative intelligence and the sort of wisdom that solves rather than contemplates. The dating is the same as for Ceres: this is a symbolism of the last half-century.

Pallas also shares in a piece of history that is usually told only about Pluto. For roughly half a century after their discovery, Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta were counted as planets and printed as such in textbooks and almanacs, making eleven in the solar system. The count held until the 1840s and 1850s, when Astraea and then a rapid succession of further bodies made it clear that these were members of a populous belt rather than planets of the old kind, and the whole group was reclassified. The parallel with the 2006 decision on Pluto is exact, including the reasoning, which makes Pallas an early case of a definitional demotion rather than a discovery being undone.

Pallas orbits at about 2.77 astronomical units with a period near 4.6 years, so it averages roughly four and a half months in each sign, with a retrograde loop each year around opposition. Its eccentricity is high for a main belt body, about 0.23.

The number that matters for astrology is the inclination of about 34.8 degrees, the steepest of any large asteroid. The zodiac as the ancients drew it is a band about eight or nine degrees either side of the ecliptic, wide enough to contain the Moon and all seven classical planets. Pallas leaves it entirely. For much of its orbit the body is tens of degrees north or south of the ecliptic, far outside the twelve constellations, and it can pass within a few degrees of the ecliptic poles as seen from Earth.

So a Pallas placement is a longitude and only a longitude: the projection of the body onto the ecliptic, taken as though it were there. That is a legitimate coordinate and every asteroid ephemeris supplies it, but it should not be confused with the body being in the sign. Pallas is never seen among the stars of the sign it is reported in.

The same projection is applied to every body in a chart, and for the Moon at five degrees of latitude or for Vesta at seven it is a small correction. For Pallas it is not small, and it is the reason a reader should treat its sign placement as a convention rather than an observation.

Pallas was the second asteroid discovered, found by Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers in 1802. Its glyph is a stylised spear, the weapon of the goddess, credited to Baron Franz Xaver von Zach, the astronomer who had coordinated the search effort that led to Olbers's discovery. Olbers, writing to von Zach shortly afterward, endorsed the proposed spear symbol, and it was adopted into the astronomical literature of the period alongside the sickle and scepter already assigned to Ceres and Juno.

As with the other three, Pallas's astronomical glyph fell out of professional astronomical use once Johann Franz Encke's numbered-circle system took hold at mid century, but it survived in reference works and was carried forward into astrology when Eleanor Bach's 1973 asteroid ephemeris brought Pallas back into practicing astrologers' charts. That publication is generally credited with beginning the sustained astrological use of the four major asteroids and their traditional symbols in the decades since. Olbers found Pallas while re-observing the position where Ceres had briefly appeared the previous year, one of several coincidences that convinced the wider "celestial police" network organised by von Zach that more than a single missing planet occupied the gap, and it was that same collaborative search effort, rather than any one astronomer working alone, that produced the run of new bodies and their accompanying glyphs across the first decade of the nineteenth century.