Second house

Meaning

The 2nd house follows the 1st below the eastern horizon, and astrologers read it as what a person has and uses: money and possessions, earnings, savings and spending, but also talents, time and the resources one can draw on. Modern astrology adds what one values and the sense of one’s own worth, which is often what lies behind the way money is handled.

It is a succedent house, following an angle, and like the other succedent houses it is read as building up and keeping what the angle begins. Its opposite is the 8th house, and the axis they form is that of what is one’s own and what is shared: earning and owning on one side, debts, gifts and joint resources on the other.

Traditional astrologers called it the house of livelihood. A planet here does not foretell wealth or want; it describes how resources come and go, and what feels like security.

In practice

• Jupiter in the 2nd is often read as generosity with resources and a confident relationship with money, more at ease with spending than with counting; Mars in the 2nd, as income earned by effort and spent quickly; the Moon in the 2nd, as security tied to feelings, and comfort found in having enough.
• The sign on the cusp describes the style of earning and spending, and the house where its ruler stands often shows where income comes from: with the ruler of the 2nd in the 6th, through daily work and skill.
• An empty 2nd house says nothing about being short of money; it is read through its cusp and its ruler.

Across traditions

• Jyotish calls this house dhana, wealth, and reads it for money and possessions, but also for speech, food and the family one is born into; it is a house of artha, the means of life.
• Zi Wei Dou Shu has a palace of Wealth among its twelve palaces; it is found by another method and read on its own terms.

Origin and history

Hellenistic astrologers called the 2nd place the Gate of Hades, a name whose sense is not fully clear, and they counted it among the places that make no classical aspect to the rising sign, so that it was read as less active. Lilly read the 2nd for a person’s estate, their movable goods, money lent, profit and loss, and, in a lawsuit, the friends who stand by them. In the 20th century, Dane Rudhyar and the psychological astrologers after him read it as the house of values and of what a person feels to be their own.

How Ulune calculates it

The cusp of the 2nd comes from Swiss Ephemeris in the chosen system. In Placidus, Ulune’s default, the cusps of the 2nd and 3rd divide by time the passage of each degree between the eastern horizon and the lowest point of the sky; in Porphyry, the arc of the zodiac between the Ascendant and the IC is cut into three equal parts; in Equal houses the cusp lies 30° after the Ascendant, and in Whole sign houses the 2nd is simply the sign after the rising sign. The 2nd can therefore be far smaller or larger than 30°, especially far from the equator, and the table gives its size. A body counts in the 2nd from this cusp to the cusp of the 3rd.

Correspondences