Athena

Since i started doing astrology (hey, if you're reading this, I may have done your chart, ask me about it if you haven't already), I've noticed that the asteroid Pallas Athena tends to be prominently placed in the natal charts of graduate students and, presumably academics. So much so that--since the preponderance of my friends are academic or otherwise bookish--I usually make it a special point to check for the placement of Pallas as much as for Chiron.

The difficulty is that haven't been very clear on how to interpret Pallas's meaning. She seems less remarked upon by astrologers than the others, perhaps because interpretation of the four asteroids was introduced in order to mitigate the built-up 'male bias' of the other symbols.

Fortunately, today I found the website of Jessica Murray, who states that

Pallas Athene is the civilizing asteroid.

She was for the Greeks the patroness of arts and healing, crafts and trades; a great warrior and strategist, who refused to be married. She was the one without a mother: Homer describes her as springing out of Zeus's head full-blown, his favorite child. Astrologically she seems to be associated with politics and social causes.

This shed quite a bit of light for me on why Pallas should be the sign of an academic. Beside having generally been the goddess of wisdom and patroness of the most philosophical city that ever existed, mythologically she refused to be married because she was too busy thinking -- of strategy-- which is the general predilection of academics. Being without a mother might be symbolic of the break with traditional familty ties and the economic order of reproduction that Western academics have traditionally made: the Europeans fused or confused this ideal with the invention of Christian monastic life, as did the Benedictines, Augustinians and later religious orders; and modern graduate students are, alas, not significantly more likely to marry or have children, or even, has recent sociological studies indicate, have sex all that much. . Politics, social causes, and also education --the stabilization of civic life -- would be the substitutes for the traditional familial community.

Murray follows Demetria George in noting that the intelligence associated with Pallas is "not logical in the usual sense of the word, it is holistic and inventive: George associates it with whole-pattern recognition," and this is a more 'feminine' sort of intelligence. The conclusion is that Pallas, as opposed to the other asteroids, represents career women.

Also, Murray and George remark that some stories about Athena seem to be cultural remnants of the struggle and defeat by
the patriarchal/patrilineal Hellenistic tribes of the earlier matriarchal order (Minoan?) that had prevailed in the Ionian region.