Asteroids in the chart

Ceres in astrology: the sickle, the myth and your chart

Ceres is the largest body in the asteroid belt and the one astrologers reach for when a chart is about feeding, tending and raising. This page covers the glyph, the Demeter story, and what Ceres by sign, house and aspect tends to describe.

The symbol

The glyph for Ceres is a stylized sickle: a crescent of receptivity resting on the cross of matter. A sickle is a short-handled crescent blade for cutting grass and grain, which puts the harvest right into the symbol. An alternative design, five stalks of grain, was proposed when the asteroids were first catalogued but never caught on. In the Unicode standard the astrological Ceres sign has its own code point, U+26B3, so it can be typed in plain text rather than drawn.

Compare it with the Venus glyph, a circle over a cross. The circle on the Ceres glyph is cut away into a crescent. Astrologers who work with asteroids read the two together: Venus is what we want, Ceres is what we need to grow and eat.

Discovery and orbit

Ceres was the first asteroid found. Giuseppe Piazzi spotted it from Palermo on January 1, 1801, with Ceres at 23 degrees of Taurus and retrograde, like Vesta at its own discovery. The object was lost in the Sun's glare and recovered at the end of 1801 with the help of Carl Friedrich Gauss, whose new orbital mathematics predicted where to look. By then Ceres stood at the last degree of Virgo. In 2006 it was reclassified as a dwarf planet, and the Dawn spacecraft orbited it from 2015 to 2018, so the small world astrologers have used for two centuries now has photographs.

Ceres takes about 4.6 years to go around the zodiac, spends roughly four to five months in a sign, and turns retrograde for about three months at intervals of 15 to 16 months. In other words it stays retrograde for a season, which fits the story below rather well.

The myth: Demeter and the seasons

Ceres is the Roman name for Demeter, the Greek grain goddess and daughter of Gaia, who taught people to farm. The myth everyone knows is the abduction of her daughter Persephone by Hades. In her grief Demeter let the earth go barren, and the settlement was that Persephone would spend the growing months with her mother and part of each year underground with her husband. The dormant soil of winter is the mother's mourning.

A descent to the underworld turns up in most feminine myths, including the Venus goddesses Inanna and Aphrodite. It is the feminine archetype that goes into the dark to bring someone back. Ceres is also one of the twelve Olympians, usually shown holding grain, which is the same picture we use for the sign Virgo. Her domain is nourishment, nutrition, chores, nursing and looking after others.

What Ceres describes in a chart

By element, Ceres belongs to earth and most of all to Virgo, the sign of refining and improving what already exists. It was in Taurus when discovered and in Virgo when its orbit was confirmed. Ceres in Taurus or in the second house gives a chart an extra dose of earth even when no planet sits in an earth sign: it is about having basic needs met rather than luxuries. Ceres gives us what we need, not everything we desire. The desiring is Venus.

Ceres and fertility

Fertility is usually assigned to Venus and the Moon, but the grain goddess belongs in that conversation. Astrologers who track conception charts report Ceres in close aspect to natal Venus or the Moon at the time of conception, and poorly placed Ceres when a wanted pregnancy did not happen. The sample is small and the observation is anecdotal, but if you are asked about good times to conceive, adding Ceres to the planets you check costs nothing.

How to find Ceres in your chart

Most chart calculators include the four major asteroids, Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta, as an option. Switch them on, then look at three things: the sign Ceres is in (the style of care), the house (the area of life you keep fed) and any tight aspect to the Sun, Moon, Venus or the angles (how visible that role is). A Ceres with no close aspects stays quiet; a Ceres on an angle runs the show.

The companion article on Vesta, the keeper of the flame, covers the houses in more detail and the other three major asteroids.

Common questions

This page is an updated version of an article first published on Astrologically Speaking in 2004. The text has been rewritten and the orbital data brought up to date.