By Dorian Grimault, astrologer · Published · updated
Pallas, the second asteroid ever discovered, is named after Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, strategy and the arts of weaving. In modern astrology, she describes a particular kind of intelligence: the kind that spots patterns, anticipates, and finds the elegant solution where others force their way. In your AstralPro report, Pallas does not get a portrait of her own. She appears in the positions table and is read in a single domain, the one devoted to the way you think and learn.
The myth tells that Athena sprang from the head of Zeus, adult and armed, after he had swallowed Metis, the goddess of cunning and counsel. She therefore has no childhood, no visible mother, and remains her whole life her father's favourite daughter. She protects cities, advises heroes (Odysseus owes her several of his ruses), arbitrates conflicts and teaches the arts: weaving, pottery, shipbuilding. According to the account handed down by Apollodorus, she accidentally killed a childhood companion, Pallas, daughter of Triton, and made a statue in her likeness in her memory, the Palladium.
From this story astrologers retain a rare blend: a practical, action-oriented intelligence, a strategy that prefers tactics to brute force, and a complex relationship with the masculine and the feminine, since Athena is a goddess moving through a world of warriors.
Pallas was discovered in 1802 by Heinrich Olbers. Like Ceres, she only entered astrological practice from 1973, with Eleanor Bach's ephemeris, and then through the work of Demetra George in the 1980s. Her reading therefore belongs entirely to modern astrology.
Where Mercury describes the way you process information and communicate it, Pallas describes the way you see the whole picture:
Some authors also read in her a person's relationship with their own intelligence: the recognition they did or did not receive for it as a child, and the place they give it.
Pallas has her line in the positions table of the natal report, with her position, sign and house. The Dignity column shows a dash: AstralPro gives the asteroids no domicile, detriment, exaltation or fall, and does not call them peregrine either. That word is reserved for the planets that have a system of dignities.
Pallas has no block in chapter I, and the complete aspect grid does not include her: it only calculates the aspects of the ten planets, the North Node, Lilith, Chiron, the Ascendant and the Midheaven. She is read in chapter IV, Life Domains, under Mind & learning, alongside Mercury, its dispositor, House 3, and Uranus or Saturn if they touch Mercury. This is the only domain where she is read, from the angle of strategy and practical intelligence.
For Camille Morel, AstralPro's sample chart (fictional data), the positions table places Pallas at 24°10′ Aquarius, in house 3. This is a particularly telling placement for the Mind & learning domain, since house 3 is precisely one of the pieces of that domain. Aquarius gives this intelligence a systemic colour: seeing structures, thinking in networks, loving ideas that change the framework rather than those that rearrange it.
Pallas is not alone in this house: Saturn sits at 23°53′ Aquarius, house 3, a few minutes of arc away. The report does not turn this closeness into a numbered aspect, since the grid does not contain Pallas, but it keeps it in view while reading the domain. The domain starts from Mercury, in Scorpio, house 12 and retrograde, whose dispositor is Pluto (in Scorpio, house 1). For Camille, the text therefore brings together a mind that digs in silence (Mercury), a demanding framework that structures learning (Saturn) and a Pallas that looks for the overall pattern. The aspect assigned to this rubric in her data is Sun square Saturn, orb 1°58′.
Start with her sign: it shows the style of your strategy (patient in Earth, intuitive in Water, conceptual in Air, offensive in Fire). Her house shows where this intelligence works most naturally: house 3 for study and exchange, house 10 for career, house 7 for negotiation and partnerships. Then place her next to Mercury, as your report does: Mercury says how you think, Pallas what your thinking is trying to build.
Pallas goes around the zodiac in a little over four and a half years. Her sign is therefore shared by many people born in the same year, and it is her house and her neighbours in your chart that give her a singular meaning.
These entries describe astrology for everyone. Your birth chart, though, is unique: discover what your birth sky reveals about you.
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