Pallas

Meaning

Pallas is one of the largest asteroids, about 510 kilometres across, on an orbit tilted some 35° to the plane of the planets, steeper than any other large body of the belt. It goes round the Sun in about 4.6 years; seen from the Earth it stays from under two months to almost a year in a sign, and is retrograde for two and a half to four months roughly every fifteen months.

It takes its name from Pallas Athena, the goddess born fully armed from the head of Zeus, the Roman Jupiter: patron of wisdom, strategy, crafts and the city’s justice. Astrologers read it as practical intelligence, a strategist beside the quick wits of Mercury: seeing the pattern in a mass of details, planning several moves ahead, solving problems with invention, and a sense of fairness that suits negotiation or the defence of a cause.

Its gifts are clear thinking, craft and a talent for strategy. Its difficulties are a head that overrules the heart, and a life lived more as a campaign than as an experience.

In practice

• With Mercury in close aspect, Pallas often belongs to someone who spots the logic in messy data or designs a system others end up using.
• Its house shows where strategy is applied: in the 7th, negotiation and partnership; in the 10th, a career built on expertise.
• Its sign describes the style of thinking, from Gemini’s quick links to Capricorn’s long-term plans.
• Between two charts, one person’s Pallas on the other’s Mercury or Sun is read as a meeting of minds, a good sign for working together.

Origin and history

Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers found Pallas from Bremen on 28 March 1802, while following Ceres; it was the second asteroid discovered, and the element palladium, isolated the same year, was named after it. With Ceres, Juno and Vesta it entered astrology 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 Pallas 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.