Pholus in astrology: the centaur of the small trigger

Pholus is a centaur apart: where his kind are seen as wild, he lives in a cave on Mount Pholoe and receives his guests with courtesy. When Heracles stops at his home, on his way to the Erymanthian boar, Pholus serves him cooked meat. Heracles asks for wine. There is only one jar, a gift from Dionysus that belongs to all the centaurs in common. Pholus ends up opening it.

The smell of the wine draws the other centaurs, mad with rage, and the battle breaks out. Heracles drives them back and pursues them with his arrows poisoned with the Hydra's venom; one of them strikes Chiron himself, with whom the fugitives have taken refuge, inflicting a wound that will never heal. After the fight, Pholus pulls an arrow from a corpse and marvels that such a small object could bring down such creatures. The arrow slips from his hands, falls on his foot, and he dies of it.

Two tiny gestures, opening a jar and dropping an arrow, and a chain of events out of all proportion. That is the whole symbolism of Pholus.

Pholus was discovered on January 9, 1992 by the Spacewatch program at the Kitt Peak observatory. It is the second centaur identified, fifteen years after Chiron. Its highly elongated orbit takes it from the vicinity of Saturn to beyond Neptune, in about 91 years.

Its diameter is estimated at about a hundred kilometers from measurements by the Herschel space telescope published in 2014; older estimates went as high as 190 kilometers. Above all, Pholus struck astronomers with its colour: its surface, where water ice and methanol have been detected, is among the reddest in the Solar System. A dark, reddish body coming from the outer reaches to cross the region of the visible planets: the image has fed its astrological reading.

AstralPro sums Pholus up in two ideas: small trigger, big consequences; transgenerational thread. The first comes straight from the myth: a detail, a decision that seems trivial, can release what had been held in for a long time. The second comes from the jar itself: a common good, kept by a whole lineage, which once opened can no longer be closed. Astrologers who work with centaurs thus link Pholus to family stories that resurface, to inherited patterns that are suddenly revealed.

Pholus does not announce an event. It describes a sensitivity: in your case, a gesture or a word can have a reach that goes beyond your intention, and this reach shows itself in the register of the body it touches.

Pholus is one of the five celestial points that stay silent without a contact, along with Hygiea, Éris, Sedna and Vertex. No life domain names it, and AstralPro never gives a position along with a meaning when nothing connects it to the rest of the chart: that would be an invitation to embroider on a point that says nothing.

To appear, Pholus must form a major aspect (conjunction, sextile, square, trine, opposition) within 2° at most of the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, the Ascendant or the Midheaven. It then appears in the positions table, its contact is copied into the “Aspects of the celestial points” sub-grid, and the report gives it two or three sentences in the block of the body it touches, in chapter I. If it touches several targets, it is only covered once, in the block of the tightest contact. A contact to the Midheaven is read in the Ascendant block.

Pholus is not affected by the under-18 rule.

For Camille Morel, AstralPro's sample chart (fictional data), Pholus sits at 3°48′ Virgo, in house 10. It forms a square to Mars (3°38′ Sagittarius, house 1) with an orb of 0°11′: it is the tightest contact among her celestial points, at the top of the sub-grid. The report therefore covers it in the Mars block, in chapter I.

The reading is built from Mars: a Mars in Sagittarius, conjunct the North Node, that sets off fast and far. The square from Pholus adds a nuance: an impulse launched without thinking can open up chains of events wider than expected, especially in the area of house 10, that of social standing and vocation. It is a lead for understanding, not a prediction.

Note also that Pholus is close to Camille's Midheaven (0°15′ Virgo), but more than 2° away: no conjunction is retained, and the report says nothing about it.