House

Meaning

The houses divide the sky around the place of birth into twelve sectors, fixed to its horizon and meridian, through which the whole zodiac passes once a day as the Earth turns. Where a sign describes how a planet acts, its house describes where: the field of life in which it plays out, from the self and money to home, partners, work and the inner life. The 1st house begins at the Ascendant, the degree of the zodiac rising in the east, and the others follow below the horizon and back up across the sky.

Because the zodiac passes through all twelve houses every day, the houses depend on the exact time and place of birth. About a degree of the zodiac crosses the horizon every four minutes, so a planet passes from one house to the next in roughly two hours. Two people born on the same day share most of their signs, but rarely their houses.

A house is read through three things: the sign on its cusp, the planets inside it, and its ruler, the planet that rules the cusp’s sign, wherever that planet stands. An empty house is not an empty part of life; it is read through its cusp and its ruler. Opposite houses form six axes: self and other (1st and 7th), what is mine and what is shared (2nd and 8th), near and far knowledge (3rd and 9th), private and public life (4th and 10th), personal and shared joys (5th and 11th), daily order and retreat (6th and 12th).

Tradition also sorts the houses by their place around the four angles. The angular houses, the 1st, 4th, 7th and 10th, begin at the angles and are read as the most visible and active. The succedent houses, the 2nd, 5th, 8th and 11th, follow them, and in them things build up and are kept. The cadent houses, the 3rd, 6th, 9th and 12th, fall away from the angles: they are the places of learning, adjusting and preparing. Older authors called the cadent houses weak; most astrologers now see them as quieter, not lesser.

In practice

• A planet’s house shows where its function is most at work: Venus in the 10th tends to bring grace into public life, Mars in the 4th puts its energy into home and family.
• A house ruler links two fields of life: with the ruler of the 7th in the 10th, partnership and work tend to meet.
• Several planets in one house make a stellium there, and that field becomes a theme of the chart.
• Planets passing through a house by transit, and one person’s planets in another’s houses in synastry, are read the same way.
• Without a birth time, the houses are a guess: astrologers read the signs and aspects and leave the houses aside, or read them tentatively.

Across traditions

• Jyotish calls the houses bhavas and most often counts them sign by sign from the rising sign, the lagna. Its words for the angular, succedent and cadent houses, kendra, panaphara and apoklima, are borrowed from Greek, a trace of how Hellenistic astrology reached India; it also groups the houses by triangles into the four aims of life, dharma (1, 5, 9), artha (2, 6, 10), kama (3, 7, 11) and moksha (4, 8, 12).
• Zi Wei Dou Shu, Chinese Purple Star astrology, reads twelve palaces, from Life, Siblings and Spouse to Career, Property and Parents. They are found by another method and run in another order, and are best read beside the houses, not mapped onto them.
• Human Design has no houses: its bodygraph is built from where the planets stand in the zodiac, not from the birthplace’s horizon.

Origin and history

Hellenistic astrologers called the twelve houses places, topoi, and in the earliest surviving texts they were usually counted sign by sign from the rising sign, the method now called whole sign houses. Astrologers also measured the quadrants between the angles, and over the centuries many ways of dividing them appeared: the system named after Porphyry (3rd century), Alcabitius (named after a 10th-century Arabic astrologer), Campanus (13th century), Regiomontanus (15th century), Placidus (named after the 17th-century monk Placidus de Titis, though the method is older), Morinus (17th century), and in the 1960s Topocentric and Koch. Placidus became the most widely used in the English-speaking world, helped by the printed tables of houses made for it, and whole sign houses came back into use from the 1990s, with new translations of Hellenistic texts.

The meanings shifted too. Valens, Firmicus Maternus and Lilly read the 8th for death and the 12th for enemies and hardship; 20th-century astrologers, Dane Rudhyar foremost among them, read the houses as fields of experience, the 8th as shared resources and transformation, the 12th as solitude and the inner life.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune asks Swiss Ephemeris for the twelve cusps of the moment and place of birth, in the house system chosen in the birth form’s options: Placidus by default, or Koch, Porphyry, Regiomontanus, Campanus, Alcabitius, Topocentric, Morinus, Equal (30° each from the Ascendant) or Whole sign; it can be changed later by editing the chart. Placidus and Koch have no cusps inside the polar circles; there, as for any system that cannot be drawn, Ulune builds the houses with Porphyry and a note under the chart says so.

A body belongs to the house whose cusp it has passed, counted in the order of the zodiac up to the next cusp; the angles are placed the same way, so under Equal or Whole sign houses the Midheaven can fall in the 9th or the 11th. A sign that holds no cusp is marked intercepted, in the house that contains its middle degree, and a sign on two cusps is noted too. The table gives each cusp to the arc-second, the size of each house, its ruler (the modern one, with the traditional one beside it when they differ) and the bodies inside; its balance counts bodies in angular, succedent and cadent houses, weighted as for the elements. Without a birth time the houses are cast for 12:00 and marked ~, and each house’s reading opens by saying so.

Correspondences