Sailor Ceres

Ceres is the largest body in the asteroid belt and the only one round enough to be called a dwarf planet. She is named for the Roman goddess of grain and growing things. For astrologers she stands for the harvest and for nurture, meaning what feeds us and what we tend, and for the slow cycle in which a thing is planted, blooms, is lost and comes back. The flower senshi of the Quartet is the one named for her. Sailor Ceres works in petals, vines and blossoms, and her power lies in tending a small living thing until it opens.

When she first appears as CereCere she shows none of that softness. She is vain in the theatrical way of a circus act and fond of her own reflection, elegant and a little imperious, and she glides into a scene balanced on top of a crystal ball. She comes across as the eldest of the four and the nearest thing the Quartet has to a leader, and she is the one who sets the tone. The flowers that follow her come from the harvest goddess she is named for, though at first they can look like decoration, a pretty theme for a pretty girl.

The anime and the manga tell her story differently. In the anime she is a villain, one of Zirconia’s mischievous servants in the Dead Moon Circus. She harries the heroes in the hunt for Pegasus until she is freed and finds her way back to something innocent. In the manga she is close to the opposite. She is a sleeping guardian, an asteroid senshi who was always meant to protect, and the Dead Moon borrows and corrupts her, so that she is taken for an enemy until she is woken to her true self. In both versions she is the same girl on the same crystal ball.

Ceres’ myth is the myth of Demeter and Persephone, of a bond that survives loss and returns with the spring. Of the two versions of her story, the manga’s is the one that matches her asteroid. There the Sailor Quartet are destined to guard Chibiusa in the far future, and they are put to sleep, taken, mourned as lost and then brought back into the light as themselves. When CereCere awakens as Sailor Ceres, she remembers a power she already had.

Whether she is a redeemed villain or a reawakened protector, CereCere ends up as the one in the group who tends the others. She nurtures and coaxes and keeps things growing, and her vanity turns out to have been an early stage of devotion. She is one of the guardians promised to the future’s child.