The centaur planet Nessus and the asteroid Ceres, which played integral roles in Tuesday’s Full Moon, are keeping our focus. Today it’s Mercury that is entering the opposition aspect, by conjoining Ceres in Leo (exact at about 10:46 am EDT) — just hours before the Sun’s ingress of Virgo at 7:02 pm EDT. Along with the immediate questions about ‘what’s in our industrially produced food?’ suggested by a Nessus-Ceres opposition, Mercury is also bringing to mind our modern attitudes toward ‘caretaking’.
First, a little extra info on Ceres. Most of us are familiar with her themes of protective motherhood, mother-daughter relationships, the seasons and agriculture from her roots in the Demeter/Persephone myth.
Apparently, however, Ceres was in charge of much more in Roman mythology and society.
The oldest Roman goddess, she seems to have come out of the transition from hunter/gatherer societies to agrarian life. Ceres ‘supervised’ a group of 17 other gods and goddesses, and was involved with fecundity in all forms (grain, reproduction), initiation rituals, rituals after returning to society after some form of absence or exile, working-class people of all sorts (plebes), upper class women and political propaganda.
Ceres is old and complex, though in Leo there is a particular affinity with both the harvest themes (in the northern hemisphere, Leo is the height of summer) and the idea of ‘taking care of’ (Leo is concerned with the good of humanity, the heart and the life-giving/life-sustaining Sun).
We often speak of Nessus in terms of its overtones of sexual abuse patterns, but the idea of ‘abuse’ can be broadened in this case. A commenter going by “mimik” mentioned the following about Nessus under the Full Moon blog post: