What is a house in astrology?

By Yusuf Karaca

A house is one of twelve divisions of the sky around you at a particular moment and a particular place on earth, measured from the horizon rather than from the zodiac. Each one covers a department of life — money, work, marriage, home, children. Which sign falls on which house depends entirely on the time you were born.

What is a house in astrology?

Houses divide the sky you were standing under, not the band of constellations the planets move through. The starting point is the eastern horizon at your birth: the degree coming up over it is the Ascendant, and the first house begins there. The rest follow in order, down under the earth and back up again, until the twelve close the circle.

The practical consequence is that houses are local. Two people born at the same instant in Istanbul and in Buenos Aires share a zodiac — the planets are in the same signs, at the same degrees — but the sky is doing something different over each horizon, so the houses fall differently. One has Jupiter overhead at the Midheaven; the other, nearly a quarter of the way round the world, has it still climbing the eastern sky.

Signs tell you what a planet is like. Houses tell you what part of life it is operating in. A planet in the tenth house is concerned with standing and public work wherever it sits in the zodiac, and the sign only describes the manner of it.

What are the twelve houses and what do they mean?

Classical topics, as they appear in Hellenistic and medieval sources. Modern practice has added to several of these and quietly dropped a few of the older assignments.

Each of the twelve has a fuller page of its own here, including the arguments about where the modern readings came from and which classical topics have been left behind.

Why do you need a birth time to have houses?

Because houses are measured from the horizon, and the horizon turns. The earth rotates once in roughly twenty-four hours, which moves the Ascendant through the entire zodiac in the same period — about one degree every four minutes, and a whole sign every two hours or so.

Everything else in a chart is slow by comparison. The Moon changes sign every two and a half days. The Sun takes a month. If you know only your birth date, you still know your Sun sign and almost certainly your Venus and Mars, and that information is real. What you do not have is the frame — which house anything falls in, and what your rising sign is. A chart without a birth time is usually drawn with the Sun on the Ascendant, a convention called a solar chart, and it is honest work as far as it goes, but the houses in it are a placeholder rather than a measurement.

A time to the nearest few minutes is enough for most purposes. A time to the nearest hour will give you the right houses more often than not, and the wrong ones when you were born near a sign boundary.

How are houses different from zodiac signs?

Signs are twelve divisions of the ecliptic — the path the Sun appears to trace against the stars over a year. They are the same for everybody alive at a given moment. Houses are twelve divisions of the sky over one spot on the ground, and they are different for every place and every minute.

Confusion between the two is common and it has a specific cause. Twentieth-century astrology, following Alan Leo and the theosophical writers who came after him, began teaching the houses as though each corresponded to a sign: the first house as the Aries house, the second as the Venusian house, and so on round the wheel. The scheme is tidy and it is a teaching aid, but it is not classical. Hellenistic authors derived house meanings from position relative to the Ascendant, not from analogy with a sign. The eleventh house does not mean friendship because Aquarius is sociable; it means friendship because it is the place of the Good Spirit, where Jupiter was held to rejoice.

Why are some houses considered better than others?

Position relative to the Ascendant is what determined a house's reputation in the older material, and the geometry is specific. From the rising degree, the signs that form an aspect to it — trine, square, sextile, opposition — were held to be in relationship with the life. The ones that form no aspect at all were not.

The second, sixth, eighth and twelfth houses are the ones that make no aspect to the first. Valens, writing around 150 AD, calls the sixth and twelfth bad fortune and bad spirit, and the eighth simply idle. Firmicus Maternus in the fourth century keeps the same scheme. The unaspected houses were considered places where matters proceed without being seen or governed.

Separately, houses are sorted by their relation to the four angles:

• Angular — 1st, 4th, 7th, 10th. The strongest positions. A planet here acts, and acts visibly.
• Succedent — 2nd, 5th, 8th, 11th. Moderate. Planets here hold and sustain.
• Cadent — 3rd, 6th, 9th, 12th. Weakest by the classical reckoning. Planets here are falling away from the angle.

Modern astrology has softened the judgement considerably, and treats the twelfth and the eighth in particular as houses of interior and psychological work rather than misfortune. Both readings are in current use. The older one is more specific; the newer one is kinder.

Which house system should you use?

There is no settled answer, and the disagreement is genuine rather than a matter of taste.

Whole sign houses make each house exactly one sign. If Libra rises, Libra is the whole of the first house, Scorpio the whole of the second, and so on. The Ascendant sits somewhere inside the first house rather than at its start. Whole sign is the oldest system in evidence — it is what Valens and Dorotheus use, and what the Indian tradition kept continuously — and it was reintroduced to Western practice in the 1990s through the translation work of Project Hindsight.

Quadrant systems divide the space between the four angles, so houses come out unequal in size. The Ascendant always begins the first house and the Midheaven always begins the tenth, which whole sign does not guarantee. Porphyry is the earliest, attributed to the third century though the attribution is disputed — Valens describes the method a century before Porphyry was born; Alcabitius was standard in the medieval Arabic and Latin world; Regiomontanus was what William Lilly used in 1647; Placidus, devised by the Italian monk Placido de Titi in the seventeenth century, became the default in English-language astrology largely because the tables were the ones printed.

Equal house gives every house thirty degrees starting from the Ascendant degree, which keeps the angle exact and the sizes uniform at the cost of detaching the Midheaven from the tenth cusp.

At high latitudes — Scandinavia, northern Scotland — the time- and space-based quadrant systems distort badly, producing houses of sixty degrees and others of five, and above roughly sixty-six degrees of latitude some of them fail outright. Whole sign, equal house and Porphyry, which trisects arcs of the ecliptic rather than of time, do not have the problem. Astrologers who work with clients in those places often use whole sign for that reason alone.

Most practitioners settle on one and stay with it. Comparing the same chart in two systems is a reasonable exercise, and it will usually move two or three planets into neighbouring houses.

How do you read a house with no planets in it?

By its ruler. Most houses in most charts are empty — there are seven traditional planets and twelve houses, so at least five will be vacant, and often more. An empty house is not a dormant area of life.

The traditional method is to find the sign on the house, identify the planet that rules that sign, and then read the condition of that planet wherever it has landed. If Taurus is on the second house, Venus rules the money, and the question becomes how Venus is doing: what sign it is in, whether it has dignity there, whether it is angular or cadent, and what is aspecting it. The ruler is the significator of the matter. A well-placed ruler of an empty house says more about the topic than a badly-placed planet sitting inside it.

Rulerships in the traditional scheme are the seven visible planets only: Mars over Aries and Scorpio, Venus over Taurus and Libra, Mercury over Gemini and Virgo, the Moon over Cancer, the Sun over Leo, Jupiter over Sagittarius and Pisces, Saturn over Capricorn and Aquarius. Modern practice assigns Scorpio to Pluto, Aquarius to Uranus and Pisces to Neptune, which leaves Mars, Saturn and Jupiter with one sign each. Both sets are in use, and the choice changes which planet you go looking for.

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