Origin 1804
Juno was discovered by Karl Ludwig Harding in 1804, the third of the belt objects. Harding proposed both the name and the symbol, a sceptre topped with a star, an emblem of the sovereign authority of Juno, Roman queen of the gods and wife of Jupiter, whose Greek counterpart is Hera. As with Ceres and Pallas the sign is an attribute of the deity and its adoption by its discoverer is documented rather than inferred. Juno presides over marriage and the married woman, and the mythic tradition dwells at length on her jealousy and on the long conflict with an unfaithful husband. Astrological use is largely a development of the later twentieth century and follows the myth closely: the body is read for partnership and the marriage contract, commitment, fidelity and betrayal, jealousy, and the terms on which a person agrees to be bound to another.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Place of OriginDiscovered in Europe (Germany); used in modern Western astrology. 2 Form
Type of SymbolAstral figure: sun, moon or planet 1 Geometric FormA sceptre crowned with a star. 1 Learn More
An Asteroid in Astrology
Juno is one of the four principal asteroids of modern astrology, named for the Roman queen of the gods and goddess of marriage. It is considerably smaller than Ceres, Pallas or Vesta, roughly 230 kilometres across, and orbits within the same main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Juno was the third of the large asteroids to be found, arriving two years after Pallas and continuing the run of discoveries that convinced astronomers a whole population of small bodies occupied the gap Johann Bode's spacing rule had predicted for a missing planet.
Like Ceres and Pallas before it, Juno was assigned its own pictorial glyph on discovery rather than a bare number, a practice that continued only through the fourth of these bodies before the growing tally of new asteroid finds made individual symbols impractical for astronomers, though the four survived into later astrological use precisely because they had been given distinct emblems tied to their mythological names. Harding, who made the discovery while serving as assistant at Johann Hieronymus Schröter's private observatory in Lilienthal, was one of the twenty-four astronomers in von Zach's coordinated search network, sometimes called the celestial police, whose members between them accounted for the discovery of all four of the asteroids that would later anchor the astrological use of these bodies.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Ceres, Deities This source names Ceres directly: "As with Ceres and Pallas the sign is an attribute of the deity and its adoption by its discoverer is documented rather than inferred."
Hera, Deities This source names Hera directly: "of Jupiter, whose Greek counterpart is Hera."
Juno, Deities This source names Juno directly: "Juno was discovered by Karl Ludwig Harding in 1804, the third of the belt objects."
This source names Jupiter directly: "Roman queen of the gods and wife of Jupiter, whose Greek counterpart is Hera."
This source names Pallas directly: "As with Ceres and Pallas the sign is an attribute of the deity and its adoption by its discoverer is documented rather than inferred."
Symbol Of
Juno, Planets The symbol's own cited description identifies its glyph as that of this planet.
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.