Origin 1801
Ceres was discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi on the first night of the nineteenth century, in January 1801, the first object found in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it was counted a planet for some decades before being reclassified as an asteroid and, in 2006, as a dwarf planet. Its symbol is a sickle, chosen for the goddess of grain and agriculture whose Roman festival and priesthood were among the oldest in the city and whose Greek counterpart is Demeter. The reaping hook is thus a straightforward attribute emblem, and its adoption is documented rather than reconstructed. Astrologically Ceres was taken up chiefly from the later twentieth century, and interpretation follows the myth of Demeter and the loss of Persephone: nurture and its withdrawal, food and the body, mothering, grief, and the negotiated cycles of separation and return between parent and child.
Facts
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseIt remains one of the four main asteroids in astrological use 3 Contested or Appropriated Modern UseSince 2006 Ceres has been classed by astronomers as a dwarf planet 3 Origins
Origin Period Place of OriginDiscovered in Europe (Sicily); used in modern Western astrology. 2 Form
Type of SymbolAstral figure: sun, moon or planet 1 Geometric Form Learn More
An Asteroid in Astrology
Ceres is the largest body in the asteroid belt, roughly 940 kilometres across, and since 2006 has been formally classed as both an asteroid and a dwarf planet, the only object to hold both designations. It is one of the four principal asteroids used in modern astrology, taking its name from the Roman goddess of grain and the harvest. When Ceres was found in 1801 astronomers briefly counted it among the planets, and it and the three that followed were each given individual glyphs in the style of the planetary symbols already in use, rather than the numbered-circle notation later adopted for the swelling ranks of asteroids discovered from the 1850s onward. That older convention of dedicated glyphs is what let Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta carry distinctive symbols into twentieth-century astrological practice, long after most other asteroids had been reduced to a number in a circle.
William Herschel proposed the term asteroid, meaning starlike, for these new bodies because even through a telescope they showed as points of light rather than resolvable discs, unlike the planets they were first grouped with. Piazzi originally styled his find Ceres Ferdinandea, honouring both the Sicilian grain goddess and his patron King Ferdinand III, though astronomers elsewhere declined to adopt the royal half and only Ceres endured internationally. Modern measurements show Ceres alone accounts for roughly a third of the estimated total mass of the entire asteroid belt, and its 2006 promotion to dwarf planet came from the same International Astronomical Union meeting that famously demoted Pluto.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Ceres, Deities This source names Ceres directly: "Ceres was discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi on the first night of the nineteenth century, in January 1801, the first object found in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it was counted a planet for..."
This source names Jupiter directly: "found in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it was counted a planet for some decades before being reclassified as an asteroid and, in 2006, as a dwarf planet."
Mars, Deities This source names Mars directly: "first object found in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it was counted a planet for some decades before being reclassified as an asteroid and, in 2006, as a dwarf planet."
Symbol Of
Ceres, Planets The symbol's own cited description identifies its glyph as that of this planet.
Sources
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