Equal houses

Meaning

Equal houses start from the exact degree rising in the east, the Ascendant, and count twelve arcs of 30° along the zodiac. With the Ascendant at 12° Gemini, the 2nd house begins at 12° Cancer, the 3rd at 12° Leo, and the 7th at 12° Sagittarius, the Descendant.

Precisely: the cusp of house n lies 30° × (n − 1) after the Ascendant in zodiac order. The 1st and 7th cusps are the Ascendant and the Descendant; the 10th cusp, 270° after the Ascendant, is square to it, which in general is not the Midheaven. The houses do not depend on the latitude or on the slant of the zodiac, only on the rising degree.

Equal houses sit between two other ideas. Like whole sign houses, they give every house the same size, so no sign is ever intercepted sign and no house stretches at high latitudes. Like the quadrant systems, they keep the exact rising degree as the start of the 1st house.

What they set aside is the meridian. The Midheaven floats free of the 10th cusp and can fall in the 9th, the 10th or the 11th house. Astrologers who use equal houses read it as a point of its own. It is still the top of the chart and the direction of public life, but not the door of a house.

In practice

• The Midheaven as a separate point. Its sign, its aspects and the house it falls in are read on their own. With the Midheaven in the 9th, for example, vocation is often read through study, teaching or travel.
• Births far north or south. Equal houses stay regular at every latitude, which makes them a practical choice for births in Scandinavia, northern Canada or Patagonia, where quadrant houses grow lopsided.
• A clear 1st house. The 30° after the Ascendant are read as the zone of the body and of first impressions, the same width in every chart.
• Planets near the Ascendant. A planet a few degrees above the rising degree is in the 12th house, one a few degrees below it in the 1st, as in the quadrant systems.

Across traditions

• Hellenistic astrology knew counting from the rising degree beside counting by whole signs.
• Jyotish usually counts its houses by whole signs from the rising sign, rather than from its degree.

Origin and history

Equal division from the rising degree is old. In the Tetrabiblos, in the chapter on the length of life, Ptolemy counts the place of the Ascendant from 5° above the horizon to 25° below it. These thirty degrees, measured from the rising degree, look to many readers like an equal house. Through the Middle Ages and the early modern period, quadrant systems such as Alcabitius and Regiomontanus took the lead in Europe.

The system came back in 20th-century Britain. Margaret Hone, in The Modern Text-Book of Astrology (1951), argued for equal houses, and the teaching she shaped spread the habit among British astrologers. It remains a minority choice elsewhere, valued for its simplicity and for working at every latitude.

How Ulune calculates it

Choose Equal in the birth form’s options. The Swiss Ephemeris computes the cusps with its code E: the Ascendant, then every 30°. Equal houses are computed at every latitude, so the polar fallback to Porphyry never applies to them, and no sign is ever intercepted.

Ulune places the Midheaven by the cusps like any other point, so it can fall in the 9th, 10th or 11th house, and the reading follows that house. In a composite chart in equal houses, the 1st cusp is the composite Ascendant and the others follow every 30°; the composite Midheaven floats in the same way. Without a birth time, the Ascendant is only a noon stand-in, and the cusps and houses are marked ~.

Correspondences