Juno
The third asteroid found, named for the queen of the gods, read as committed partnership, loyalty and fairness between two.
Meaning
Juno is an asteroid about 250 kilometres across, the third one found. It goes round the Sun in about 4.4 years; seen from the Earth it stays from under two months to nearly a year in a sign, and turns retrograde for two and a half to almost four months, about every fifteen or sixteen months.
The Roman Juno, the Greek Hera, was queen of the gods, wife of Jupiter and protector of marriage, known in myth for her jealousy of his affairs. Astrologers read the asteroid as committed partnership: what someone needs from a lasting bond, how they keep promises and expect them kept, and how they meet questions of equality, loyalty, power and jealousy between two people. Where Venus describes attraction and pleasure, Juno describes the contract, spoken or not, that holds a couple together.
Its gifts are faithfulness, a sense of fairness and the will to build something shared. Its difficulties are possessiveness, resentment over imbalances that are never named, and staying bound to a form after its meaning has gone.
In practice
- On a partnership angle: on the Descendant or in the 7th house, Juno often describes someone who cares more about loyalty and fairness than romance, and for whom a broken promise weighs heavily.
- With Venus in close aspect, the wish for love and the wish for commitment are tied together.
- Its sign describes what a lasting bond is expected to give: Juno in Taurus asks for security and constancy, in Aquarius for freedom within the bond.
- Between two charts, in synastry, one person’s Juno on the other’s Sun, Moon, Venus or Ascendant is read as a sense of partnership between them.
Origin and history
Karl Ludwig Harding found Juno on 1 September 1804 at Lilienthal, near Bremen, the third asteroid after Ceres and Pallas. It entered astrology with the other three first asteroids in the 1970s, after Eleanor Bach’s ephemeris of 1973, and Demetra George’s Asteroid Goddesses of 1986 shaped its modern reading. Traditional astrology, Indian and Chinese astrology and Human Design do not use it.
How Ulune calculates it
Ulune takes Juno 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, and its contacts with another chart appear in synastry. Ulune gives it no dignity, leaves it out of aspect patterns, and the calendar does not date its transits.
Related
- VenusThe planet of love, pleasure, beauty and what someone values, the lesser benefic of tradition.
- Seventh houseThe angular house that begins at the Descendant, read as partners of every kind, marriage, close collaboration and open rivals.
- DescendantThe degree of the zodiac setting on the western horizon at birth, read as partners and what someone seeks or meets in others.
- SynastryTwo charts compared, through the aspects between one person’s planets and the other’s and the houses where each one’s planets fall.
- CeresThe largest body of the asteroid belt, named for the grain goddess and read as nurture, care and the cycles of loss and return.
- PallasThe second asteroid found, named for the goddess of wisdom, read as strategy, pattern-seeing and creative intelligence.
- VestaThe brightest asteroid, named for the goddess of the hearth, read as focus, devotion and the inner flame someone tends.
Sources
- Eleanor Bach, Ephemerides of the Asteroids, 1973
- Demetra George and Douglas Bloch, Asteroid Goddesses, 1986