Third house

Meaning

The 3rd house is the near world: brothers and sisters, cousins and neighbours, the street and the town, messages, conversations, reading and writing, early schooling and the short journeys of everyday life. Astrologers read it as the way a person takes in and passes on information, the ordinary traffic of the mind.

It is a cadent house, falling away from an angle, and like the other cadent houses it is read as learning, adjusting and exchanging. Its opposite is the 9th house, and the axis they form is that of near and far knowledge: the facts of the day and the meaning of a life, the local and the foreign, the classroom and the university.

Many astrologers also read it as the habits of the mind: how a person learns, what they notice first, the tone of their everyday speech. A busy 3rd house often shows in a life full of messages, errands and conversations, and in a gift for explaining things.

In practice

• Venus in the 3rd is often read as a gift for pleasant speech and warm ties with siblings and neighbours; Saturn in the 3rd, as careful, deliberate thinking and learning that is slow but thorough; Jupiter in the 3rd, as a wide circle of contacts and a taste for short trips.
• The Moon in the 3rd, in its joy, often brings a lively, changeable mind that needs talk and movement.
• The ruler of the 3rd shows where curiosity and communication lead: in the 10th, perhaps to work built on words.
• An empty 3rd house does not mean little to say; the cusp’s sign describes the everyday way of thinking and talking.

Across traditions

• Jyotish calls this house sahaja, “born together”, the house of younger siblings, and also parakrama, courage and effort; it is counted among the houses that improve with time, the upachayas, and among the houses of kama, desire.
• Zi Wei Dou Shu has a palace of Siblings among its twelve palaces; it is found by another method and read on its own terms.

Origin and history

Hellenistic astrologers called the 3rd place the Goddess, thea, and made it the joy of the Moon; opposite, the 9th was the God, the joy of the Sun, and both places were linked to religion and worship. Lilly read the 3rd for brothers, sisters, kindred and neighbours, short inland journeys, letters, rumours and messengers. Modern astrology, following the sign of the same number, Gemini, made it above all the house of the everyday mind and of communication.

How Ulune calculates it

The cusp of the 3rd comes from Swiss Ephemeris in the chosen system: in Placidus, Ulune’s default, it is the second of the two time divisions between the eastern horizon and the lowest point of the sky; in Porphyry, two thirds of the zodiac arc from the Ascendant to the IC; in Equal houses, 60° after the Ascendant; in Whole sign houses, the third sign from the rising sign. Its opposite cusp is always that of the 9th. In the table’s balance, the bodies in the 3rd count among the cadent houses, weighted as for the elements.

Correspondences