Eleventh house

Meaning

The 11th house is the house of the people one chooses to build things with: friends and allies, groups, networks and communities, patrons and supporters, and the hopes and plans one carries towards the future. Astrologers read it as the help that comes through others, and as the place where personal aims meet shared ones.

It is a succedent house, following the angle of the 10th, and it is read as what a public life brings back: contacts, support, the fruits of one’s standing. Its opposite is the 5th house, and the axis they form is that of personal and shared joys: one’s own creation and love on one side, friendship and common causes on the other.

Tradition counted it among the most fortunate places of the chart, a house through which help arrives; modern astrologers add the sense of belonging, and the ideals a person shares with others.

In practice

• Jupiter in the 11th, in its joy, is often read as generous friends and support that arrives when needed; Mars in the 11th, as energy given to groups, teams and causes; the Moon in the 11th, as friends who feel like family, and a need to belong somewhere.
• The sign on the cusp describes how a person fits into groups, and its ruler shows where allies and future plans are found: with the ruler of the 11th in the 6th, among colleagues.
• Several planets in the 11th often go with a life lived through networks and collective projects.
• An empty 11th house says nothing about having few friends; it is read through its cusp and its ruler.

Across traditions

• Jyotish calls this house labha, gains, and reads it for income, fulfilled wishes, elder siblings and friends; it is the most favoured of the upachayas, the houses that improve with time, and a house of kama, desire.
• Zi Wei Dou Shu has a palace of Friends among its twelve palaces; it is found by another method and read on its own terms.

Origin and history

Hellenistic astrologers called this place the Good Spirit, agathos daimōn, the guardian spirit of good fortune, and made it the joy of Jupiter, the great benefic. Lilly read the 11th for friends and friendship, for hope, trust and confidence, for the praise or blame given to someone and for the faithfulness of friends. Modern astrology, following the sign of the same number, Aquarius, made it above all the house of groups, ideals and the future.

How Ulune calculates it

The cusp of the 11th comes from Swiss Ephemeris in the chosen system: in Placidus, Ulune’s default, the cusps of the 11th and 12th divide by time the passage of degrees between the top of the sky and the eastern horizon; in Porphyry, the arc of the zodiac from the Midheaven to the Ascendant is cut into three equal parts; in Equal houses the cusp lies 300° after the Ascendant, and in Whole sign houses the 11th is the eleventh sign from the rising sign. Under Equal or Whole sign houses, the Midheaven can fall in the 11th. A body counts in the 11th from this cusp to the cusp of the 12th.

Correspondences