The Week in Goddesses

by Lisa Roberts

This week the four major asteroid Goddesses: Juno, Pallas, Vesta and Ceres, all change signs. Juno led the way, conjunct the fixed star Regulus, when she entered Virgo at 11:43 p.m. Pacific time last Saturday, Oct. 2 (Sunday 6:43 UT). Here she will complete a retrograde cycle entirely in the sign of Virgo (Jan. 19, 2011-May 1, 2011). She doesn’t leave for Libra until July 27, 2011, thus spending a whopping 10 months in Virgo!

Compare this to her customary average of two months in a sign. Juno symbolizes our values about partnership in marriage. She can represent a partner, or a relationship, or ideas about a relationship; in Virgo she’s going to be focusing on the details. Juno has a reputation as scorekeeper, so we may want to watch that tendency, with Virgo involved.

Thursday, Oct. 7, about four hours prior to the New Moon in Libra, Pallas Athena made her way forward through the zodiac into the sign of the centaur, Sagittarius. She just got off a long, deep journey through Scorpio, which began in mid-December, and where she completed a retrograde cycle entirely in that sign.

Pallas symbolizes political finesse, strategy and intellect. This has been fitting for an election season that has been dominated by ideas about sex, or rather, about how supposedly ‘straight’ people feel about lesbian and gay people. Pallas has a non-sex quality — she was born from her father’s head, in full armor. It would be nice if politics followed suit and expanded to the more broad-minded, less emotionally involved territory of Sagittarius.

About seven hours later, Vesta entered Scorpio, right as Pallas made her exit. Vesta symbolizes devotion to one’s core creativity and sexuality. She has a knack for addressing themes of guilt and shame. There are times when she represents celibacy, be it voluntary or involuntary, but it would be the kind of experience that comes with a sense of purpose. With Vesta, we always have a sense of purpose and meaning, which would translate into the sex we have as well as the sex we don’t have. She will be, I suspect, very effective in this fixed water sign during her stay through Dec 1. Approximately five hours later, Venus stationed retrograde in Scorpio. Wonder if Venus and Vesta will meet up and talk about Mars? She has been following close behind the Venus-Mars pairing for months. Venus and Vesta do make a conjunction in Scorpio overnight from Oct. 23 to 24.

Finally, the biggest asteroid and first ever discovered, Ceres, now considered a dwarf planet, is the mother goddess. On Friday evening she stepped once again into cardinal earth sign Capricorn. She was there in June and retrograded back into Sagittarius, making a series of conjunctions to the Galactic Center.

The moment Ceres set foot on this ground again, we got a nice little bi-sextile altar to welcome her.  Moon conjunct Vesta in Scorpio (associated with Pluto) forms sextiles each to Pluto and Juno.  Pluto in Capricorn (god of the Underworld, with whom Ceres negotiates for her kidnapped daughter Persephone) awaits Ceres to conjoin him on Oct. 19, 2010 16:01 UT. Even in a year of enormous astrology, this is a meaningful conjunction. There is something here about our relationship to the Earth, to food, and to the need to transform our ideas about food out of the corporate mentality often represented by Capricorn.

— with Eric Francis