Fourth house

Meaning

The 4th house lies at the bottom of the chart, around the point of the zodiac that was culminating beneath the Earth at birth, the Imum Coeli. Astrologers read it as home and roots: the family one comes from and the one one makes, the house and the land, ancestry, and the private ground a life stands on.

It is an angular house, and planets here are read as strong, though they tend to show in private life more than in public. Its opposite is the 10th house, and the axis they form is that of private and public life, of roots and reputation, of where one comes from and where one is going.

Tradition gave this house to the father, and the 10th to the mother; many modern astrologers give it to the mother or to the parent who made the home, and many simply read the two houses as the two parents, whoever they were. It was also read as the end of matters, the way an affair turns out.

In practice

• Saturn in the 4th is often read as early responsibility at home and a base built slowly and solidly; Venus in the 4th, as a home made beautiful and a strong wish for family harmony; the Sun in the 4th, as an identity rooted in family, place or private life.
• The sign on the cusp describes the feel of home and of one’s roots, and its ruler shows where the need for a base plays out.
• Moves, renovations, family changes: astrologers often watch planets passing through the 4th by transit for times when home is in question.
• An empty 4th house is common; home and family still matter, and are read through the cusp and its ruler.

Across traditions

• Jyotish calls this house sukha, happiness and comfort, and reads it for the mother, the home, land, vehicles and inner contentment; it is an angular house, a kendra, and a house of moksha, release.
• Zi Wei Dou Shu splits these themes between two of its twelve palaces, Property and Parents, found by another method and read on their own terms.

Origin and history

Hellenistic astrologers called this place the Subterranean, hypogeion, the part of the sky under the Earth. Lilly read the 4th for the father, for lands, houses and inheritance, the tilling of the earth and hidden treasure. Modern astrology, following the sign of the same number, Cancer, made it above all the house of home, belonging and emotional foundations.

How Ulune calculates it

In Placidus, Ulune’s default, and in the other quadrant systems, the cusp of the 4th house is the IC itself. In Equal houses the cusp lies 90° after the Ascendant, which is generally not the IC; in Whole sign houses the 4th is the fourth sign from the rising sign; in Morinus the cusp is not tied to the IC. Ulune places the IC by the cusps like any other point, so under Equal or Whole sign houses it can fall in the 3rd, the 4th or the 5th. Without a birth time the IC and the house are only a stand-in for 12:00, and are marked ~.

Correspondences