← Encyclopedia of Astrology · lesson 51/235
Asteroids
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Asteroids are small rocky bodies that orbit the Sun, most of them in a broad belt between Mars and Jupiter. Only Vesta, on rare nights, can be glimpsed with the naked eye, so the astrologers of the past never used them: the first was found only in 1801. Hundreds of thousands are now known. The largest, Ceres, has been classed as a dwarf planet since 2006.
The big four
Four were found in quick succession and named after goddesses of Rome: Ceres in 1801, Pallas in 1802, Juno in 1804 and Vesta in 1807. For nearly forty years these were the only asteroids anyone knew, and they are still the ones astrologers reach for first. Later discoveries took their names from many mythologies, and some from people and places.
How they are read
Asteroids came into astrology in the 1970s, when Eleanor Bach published the first tables of the big four's positions for astrologers, in 1973. Demetra George's Asteroid Goddesses (1986) did most to bring them into everyday practice, and J. Lee Lehman's The Ultimate Asteroid Book (1988) set out the principle many asteroid astrologers still follow: that an asteroid's name points to its meaning. A common approach since then reads each one through the figure it is named after, so the four goddesses came to stand for strands of life the classical planets say less about: nurture, wisdom, partnership and devotion. Each is read by sign, house and its contacts with the planets, much as a planet is.
They remain a modern addition. Traditional astrology does not use them, and most astrologers give them less weight than the planets: they colour a chart rather than lead it.
Viastaro computes eight — the big four, plus Hygiea, Psyche, Eros and Amor — and interprets them only when your asteroid setting asks for them: none, the big four, or all eight. A chart can also list Interamnia, one of the largest asteroids, which has only a small body of interpretation behind it. Chiron, often grouped with them, has its own entry.