← Encyclopedia of Astrology · lesson 60/235
Interamnia
Interamnia, asteroid number 704, was discovered by Vincenzo Cerulli at his observatory in Teramo, in central Italy, on 2 October 1910. It is one of the largest bodies in the asteroid belt — about 330 kilometres across, the fifth largest after Ceres, Vesta, Pallas and Hygiea — and so round that some astronomers count it as a possible dwarf planet. It is dark and faint, takes a little over five years to go round the Sun, and remained little studied for most of the century after its discovery.
The name
Unlike the asteroids named after goddesses, Interamnia is named after a place. Cerulli gave it the Latin name of his own town, Teramo: Interamnia, "between the rivers", because the town stands where two streams, the Tordino and the Vezzola, come together. The Roman writers Varro and Festus already explained the name that way. So the asteroid carries two ideas at once: the confluence, where two currents meet and become one, and a home town honoured by someone who loved it.
In a chart
Interamnia is a recent addition to astrology with only a small body of interpretation behind it, far less than the goddess asteroids, and astrologers who use it are still working out what it shows. Most follow the principle, set out by J. Lee Lehman and widely shared among asteroid astrologers, that an asteroid's name points to its meaning. Read that way, Interamnia describes the space between: where a person stands between two worlds, two loyalties or two ways of life, and how they bring them together — the bridge-builder, the one who belongs to two places, the meeting point of currents that might otherwise stay apart. Some also read it through its origin, as a sense of home ground and of the place a person comes from.
Its sign is read as the style of that bridging, and its house as the area of life where two streams meet. Interamnia in Gemini might describe someone who moves easily between two languages or circles; in the 4th house, a home or family that joins two traditions. Because the tradition is thin, it is best used only when it sits within a degree or so of a planet or angle, and as a question to ask of the chart rather than an answer: if it rings true, it adds a small, precise note; if not, nothing else in the reading depends on it.