The Houses

A chart with Venus in Taurus says something about how you love. Put that Venus in the second house and it is about money and what you hold onto. Put it in the seventh and it is about marriage. Same planet, same sign, a very different Tuesday.

What a house is

The twelve houses are twelve slices of the sky as seen from the place you were born, at the minute you were born. The signs belong to the sky and are the same for everyone born that day. The houses belong to the horizon, and they turn right round once every twenty four hours. That is why two people born on the same date in the same town can have the same planets in the same signs and completely different lives. The houses moved between the morning birth and the evening one.

Each house covers a department of living. Money, home, work, partnership, health, friends, and so on round the wheel. A planet in a house brings its energy to that department. A sign on the cusp of a house, the line where the house begins, colours how that department tends to run.

Two systems, and why I check both

There is more than one way to cut the sky into twelve, and astrologers have argued about it for two thousand years. I use Placidus as my primary system. It is the one most Western astrologers use, it is the one most chart software gives you by default, and it has served me well. It divides the sky by time, so the houses are different sizes, and in a chart from a high latitude they can be very uneven indeed.

Whole Sign is the older system, and the simpler one. Whichever sign is rising becomes the whole of the first house, the next sign is the whole of the second, and so on. Every house is exactly one sign wide.

On every reading I build, I run both and compare them. Most planets land in the same house either way and there is nothing to discuss. The ones I watch are the planets within about three degrees of a Placidus cusp. When a planet sits that close to the line and the two systems put it in different houses, I do not pick one and pretend the other does not exist. I read both houses and I tell the client I am doing it. In my experience the person sitting opposite me usually knows straight away which house is the truer one, and quite often the answer is both. A planet on a cusp has one foot in each room.

The four angles

Four of the twelve cusps carry more weight than the rest, and they are called the angles. The Ascendant is the cusp of the first house, the degree of the zodiac that was rising on the eastern horizon when you were born. Its sign is your Rising sign. Opposite it, on the western horizon, is the Descendant, the cusp of the seventh. The Midheaven, which astrologers shorten to MC, is the highest point of the chart and the cusp of the tenth house. Opposite it, at the bottom, is the IC, the cusp of the fourth.

The angles are the skeleton of the chart. A planet sitting on one of them, within a few degrees, speaks louder than it would anywhere else. Someone born near sunrise has the Sun on the Ascendant. Someone born around midday has it near the Midheaven. You can often pick those people out of a room.

The first house

The self, the body, and the face you show the world before you have said a word. This is the house of the Ascendant, and the sign on it is how people meet you. Planets here are front and centre in your personality, whether you asked them to be or not.

The second house

Money, possessions, and what you value. Your relationship with having and holding. Also your own sense of worth, which is not a separate subject from money as often as we would like it to be. The second house shows how you earn, how you keep, and what you cannot bear to let go of.

The third house

The mind in everyday use. Talking, writing, learning, short trips, the neighbourhood, and your brothers and sisters. Mercury's natural home. A busy third house belongs to someone who is always reading something, telling someone, or on the way somewhere.

The fourth house

Home, family, your roots, and the parent who shaped your inner world. The IC sits at the bottom of this house, the foundation everything else stands on. The fourth is where you go when you shut the door. It also carries the end of life, in the sense of where you come to rest.

The fifth house

Pleasure, creativity, romance, play, and children. The fifth house is the Sun's natural home and it is about what you make for the joy of making it. Whatever you do here, you do because you want to, and the people who know this side of you are lucky.

The sixth house

Work, in the daily sense, and health. Routines, duties, the body as something you maintain, the job you turn up to, the people who work alongside or for you, and the pets. Not glamorous, and the whole life falls over without it. Chop wood, carry water.

The seventh house

Partnership. Marriage, business partners, and the people you meet as equals, including the ones you cannot stand. The Descendant is its cusp, directly opposite the Ascendant, and the sign there describes what you look for in another person, which is very often the part of yourself you have not claimed yet.

The eighth house

Shared money, inheritance, sex, death, and the parts of life that transform you whether you consented or not. This house has a dark reputation and I think it is unfair. The eighth is where you go deep, where you let something end so something else can begin. Planets here are a piece of work, and the people who do the work tend to come out of it with a depth you cannot fake.

The ninth house

The long view. Higher learning, philosophy, religion, publishing, foreign places and long trips, and the search for what it all means. Jupiter's natural home. The ninth house asks the big questions and is content to spend a lifetime on the answers.

The tenth house

Career, reputation, public standing, and the parent who pushed you out into the world. The Midheaven is its cusp. This is what you are known for, and what you build over decades. A planet here tends to be visible to everyone, which is wonderful if you like the planet and less so if you do not.

The eleventh house

Friends, groups, causes, and your hopes for the future. The wider circle beyond your partner and family. Where you belong to something bigger than yourself, and what you would like the world to look like when you are done with it.

The twelfth house

The hidden, the inner, and what came before. Dreams, solitude, retreat, the unconscious, the help you give quietly and the help you need and do not ask for. The twelfth is the other house with a frightening reputation, and again I think it is a mirror rather than a sentence. Planets here work behind the curtain. Learn to listen to them and they become the most interesting part of the chart.

The natural rulers

Each house has a sign that belongs to it by nature, in zodiac order round the wheel. Aries goes with the first house, Taurus the second, Gemini the third, and so on to Pisces at the twelfth. That is why the sixth house feels like Virgo and the eighth like Scorpio even in a chart where neither sign is anywhere near them. If you know the twelve signs, you already half know the twelve houses.

Empty houses

Ten planets, twelve houses. Every chart has at least two empty houses and most have more. An empty house is not an empty life. It means that department runs without much drama, and you read it from the sign on its cusp and from the planet that rules that sign. Someone with nothing in the seventh house is not doomed to be single. They may simply not make partnership the battleground that someone with three planets there does.

The Ascendant and your birth time

Everything on this page depends on the time of birth. The Ascendant moves about one degree every four minutes and changes sign roughly every two hours, so the houses need the time to within about fifteen minutes. "About 2 am" is not good enough. A chart built on a guessed time is a different chart, with different houses, and quite possibly a different Rising sign, and I would rather tell you that plainly than read you a life that belongs to someone born an hour later. If you do not know your time, the planets in their signs still have a great deal to say, and The Birth Chart page explains what can and cannot be trusted without it.

Which house in your own chart is the busiest? That is usually where life has been asking the most of you.

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.