Ceres

Meaning

Ceres is the largest body in the asteroid belt, a round world of some 940 kilometres between Mars and Jupiter, and a dwarf planet since 2006. It goes round the Sun in about 4.6 years; seen from the Earth it usually spends two to six months in a sign, longer around its retrograde periods, which last about three months and come roughly every fifteen months.

Its name is that of the Roman goddess of grain and harvest, the Greek Demeter, whose daughter Proserpina was carried off to the underworld; in her grief the earth stopped bearing fruit, and the seasons came from the bargain that brought the daughter back for part of each year. Astrologers read Ceres as nurture, close in spirit to the Moon: how someone feeds and cares for others and wishes to be cared for, the bond between parent and child, food, the body’s needs, and the cycles of loss, letting go and return.

Its gifts are attentiveness, generosity and a feeling for growth in its own time. Its difficulties are care that clings, worry, and grief that has not found its season. Some modern astrologers link Ceres with Virgo or Taurus; there is no agreement, and tradition, which never knew it, gives it no dignity.

In practice

• With the Moon in close aspect, Ceres describes a language of care: someone may show love by feeding people and keeping track of everyone’s well-being.
• Its house shows where care is given and asked for: in the 4th, family and home; in the 6th, daily tending of work, body and routines.
• Its sign colours the style of nurture, from Aries’s encouragement of independence to Cancer’s protective closeness.

Origin and history

Giuseppe Piazzi found Ceres from Palermo on 1 January 1801, the first night of the century, and named it Ceres Ferdinandea, after the patron goddess of Sicily and its king. Lost in the Sun’s glare, it was found again at the end of 1801 where the young Carl Friedrich Gauss had calculated it would be. For half a century it was counted among the planets, the element cerium was named after it, and the space probe Dawn orbited it from 2015 to 2018. Astrologers took up Ceres, with the three asteroids found after it, once Eleanor Bach published her ephemeris in 1973, and Demetra George’s Asteroid Goddesses of 1986 made them widely read.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune takes Ceres from the Swiss Ephemeris’s asteroid files, which cover 600 BC to AD 2400, as the planets’ do. It is marked retrograde when its daily motion runs backwards and is aspected with the same orbs as the planets. Ulune gives it no dignity, leaves it out of aspect patterns, and the calendar does not date its transits.