Origin 1807
Vesta was discovered by Heinrich Olbers in 1807, the fourth of the belt objects and the brightest of them. Carl Friedrich Gauss, who had computed its orbit, chose the name and designed the symbol, which depicts the altar of the goddess with the sacred fire burning upon it; the form in common use today is an abbreviation of that original drawing. Vesta is the Roman goddess of the hearth, Greek Hestia, and her cult centred on the perpetual flame in the Forum tended by the Vestal Virgins, priestesses sworn to chastity for the term of their service, whose duty was to keep the fire of the state alive. Astrological use dates mainly from the later twentieth century, and interpretation follows the cult rather than a narrative myth: focus and dedication, sacred work, service, the containment of sexuality, and what a person keeps burning at cost to everything else.
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 stylised hearth or altar fire. 1 Learn More
An Asteroid in Astrology
Vesta is one of the brightest asteroids, occasionally visible to the naked eye under dark skies, and one of the four main asteroids used in modern astrology, named for the Roman goddess of the hearth. At roughly 525 kilometres across it is close to Pallas in size, though its high reflectivity makes it the more conspicuous object from Earth. Vesta was the fourth of the large asteroids found, completing the group whose discovery within a single decade first suggested that a belt of minor bodies, rather than one missing planet, occupied the gap between Mars and Jupiter.
As with Ceres, Pallas and Juno, Vesta was given its own pictorial glyph at discovery, a practice astronomers abandoned for later asteroid finds once their numbers grew too large for individual symbols, but the choice preserved a distinctive emblem for Vesta that later proved essential to its adoption into twentieth-century astrological technique. Olbers, who discovered the object, handed the naming itself to Gauss in recognition of the mathematician's rapid computation of its orbit, reportedly finished within about ten hours of receiving the observations, and Gauss chose Vesta as a fitting sister name to Ceres, goddess of the hearth alongside goddess of the harvest.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Hestia directly: "Vesta is the Roman goddess of the hearth, Greek Hestia, and her cult centred on the perpetual flame in the Forum tended by the Vestal Virgins, priestesses sworn to chastity for the term of their..."
Vesta, Deities This source names Vesta directly: "Vesta was discovered by Heinrich Olbers in 1807, the fourth of the belt objects and the brightest of them."
Symbol Of
Vesta, 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.