Astrological use of Ceres and the other large asteroids began in earnest with the publication of ephemerides for them in 1973 by Eleanor Bach, and the interpretive framework was developed through the later 1970s and 1980s, above all in Demetra George and Douglas Bloch's Asteroid Goddesses (1986), explicitly as an attempt to bring a wider range of feminine significations into a chart whose classical bodies offered only the Moon and Venus. Ceres, named for the Roman goddess of grain and the equivalent of the Greek Demeter, is read for nurture, food, the mother and child bond, loss and return, drawing on the myth of Demeter and Persephone. The symbolism therefore rests on the mythological name assigned at discovery and is about fifty years old. That does not make it useless, but it is not an ancient doctrine and should never be presented as one.
Eleanor Bach's 1973 ephemerides for Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta were a grassroots, self-published effort rather than an initiative of any major astrological institution, and their availability is what made the wider asteroid-goddess movement of the following decade possible at all, since without published positions astrologers had no practical way to place the bodies in a chart; the choice of these first four asteroids for early ephemeris work was simply a function of which objects were brightest and best-tracked at the time, not a claim that they were astrologically more significant than others discovered later.