Tag: houses

How to Interpret Houses in Astrology — Part 13: The Twelfth House

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At long last, we’re to the end of this journey through interpreting the houses in Western astrology.

The twelfth house is a tough one to crack.

It’s one of the four dark houses. It’s cadent. And it’s the joy of Saturn, who delights in isolation, restriction, and loneliness. For many writers in the classical Western tradition of astrology, the twelfth house was the worst of the twelve houses, and for good reason.

But just as every life must have encounters with misfortune, or encounters with forces beyond our control, so every life runs up against feelings of loss, retreat, and surrender. That said, every life also has opportunity to find gifts wreathed in shadow.

The twelfth house in astrology is the house of shadow, of enemy, of self-undoing, of isolation, of sorrow. As the joy of Saturn, the twelfth house is associated with those parts of life that limit us and bind us, those aspects of life that seem always to stand in the way of our best interests—or rather, what we perceive to be in our best interests. From an external perspective, the twelfth house is the house of unseen enemies, people who might work against us without our knowledge to prevent us from succeeding in our endeavors.

Where do the meanings of the twelfth house come from?

The twelfth house derives its meanings from three primary sources: first, it is the joy of Saturn, the Greater Malefic. Second, it’s a cadent house, meaning that planets there are moving away from an effective and powerful location on the ascendant. Third, it’s astronomically a difficult house to observe, and it’s what’s called a “dark house,” meaning that planets in the first house can’t see into it, and so the whole house lies wreathed in shadow.

As the joy of Saturn, the twelfth house inherits the full extent of Saturn’s significations (refer back to my discussion on the 3rd house and planetary joys if you need a refresher on how this works).

So as Saturn rules restrictions, harshness, coldness, limitations, people at the margins of society, boundaries, and the word “no,” so all of those slices of life become the stuff from which the twelfth house derives its meanings. Because the twelfth house is cadent, planets there are ineffective at doing their jobs, which doubles up on the “limitation” idea, too.

We must also consider the visual flavor of the twelfth house: even though planets here are rising above the horizon and are visible, atmospheric distortion prevents the observer from being able to see a planet in its true appearance.

Think of the way the Moon looks when she is full and rising over the eastern horizon at night, just as the Sun sets: huge, swollen, red, not too far off from the color she takes on during an eclipse. And consider too that tree lines and mountain ridges obstruct a clear view of the horizon. From a visual standpoint, the twelfth house is a house of distortion and shadow, even if the rising of a planet at the ascendant promises power as the planet transitions from the underworld to the heavens once again.

People and places attached to these shadowy themes become twelfth house topics, too: grief, prisons, hospitals, psychiatric units, and the concept of mental health in general (we might say “unconscious” because the twelfth house is both figuratively and literally outside the gaze of the conscious observer).

One of the names given to the twelfth house was “the bad daimon.” If you remember what I said about the eleventh house in the last post in this series, think of the opposite of “the good daimon.” This house is the part of the chart that represents all of those factors—whether internal, like the Shadow, or external, like unseen enemies—that seek to do us ill.

Meeting the Shadow

I was recently introduced to Ursula K. LeGuin’s monumental fantasy series, A Wizard of Earthsea. The story follows that of a young, dark-skinned wizard named Ged. He was the OG boy wizard of 20th century fantasy literature. Young, prodigious, curious, naive, bright. But Ged is also proud.

In one of his early lessons, he’s discussing magic with the Master Changer, a wizard who specializes in transforming objects from one appearance to another. What the Master Changer teaches Ged is useful, but it is illusory; only appearances change, not actual substance.

Ged, who is ever bright, ever curious, ever proud, presses his teacher: when are we going to learn some real magic? When are we going to turn rocks into real diamonds? The Master Changer replies, holding a pebble in his hand,

“To change this rock into a jewel, you must change its true name. And to do that, my son, even to so small a scrap of the world, is to change the world… You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow from that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power…It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow…”

Not too long after this exchange, Ged’s talent and his pride lead him, in a moment of unhinged anger, to challenge a rival student, someone he has come to hate, to a display of magical prowess. Ged boasts that he will summon the spirit of a legendary person from centuries past, and in the darkness of night he does. Blinding light sunders the world, as Ged’s classmates look on, terrified.

But to light a candle is to cast a shadow. Out from the brilliant rift between the worlds, Ged’s own Shadow—his hubris, his intoxication with his own excellence, his anger—leaps out, claws bared, and mauls him. Ged barely escapes with his life.

And from that moment, until a climactic confrontation in the final pages of the book, Ged and his Shadow chase one another, each seeking to master the other.

The brightest flames cast the darkest shadows. Those shadows, like Ged’s hubris and pride, most often lie hidden in the twelfth house, where they escape our notice until they have fermented and festered into a darkening cloud that looms over our actions. When a person whose shadow possesses them utterly acts, those actions can tend towards destruction, towards restriction, towards domination.

It’s not a place where we want to spend a lot of time, but one must look at what lies there, lest shadow loom too large.

And even though bright lights cast dark shadows, the deepest shadows in the world still have luminous treasure hidden within, if we can be so brave as to master our shadows by naming them. The treasure here is not riches or pleasure: the boon of the twelfth house is depth of experience and a deepened sense of meaning.

How to interpret the twelfth house in your natal chart

When you begin to interpret the twelfth house in your natal chart, you’re dealing with these kinds of questions:

  • What parts of my life would I rather leave unnoticed?
  • What parts of my life have the greatest potential for developing depth and meaning?
  • Where in my life do I experience distance, isolation, and sorrow?
  • How do I transmute my Shadow into a Gift?

To begin, we’ll look at two planets in particular: first, the planet that rules the twelfth house, and second, any planets placed within the twelfth house. We’ll consider the nature of the planets in question, and we’ll think about how well they’re able to do their job.

Let’s take the twelfth house ruler as our starting point.

Wherever that planet lands by house will describe places in the native’s life where they encounter misfortune and sorrow, but also where they might find depth and meaning in their life’s story. The condition of that planet will determine whether that story is one that a person can tell with ease and grace or one that requires strife and struggle (and therapy).

One important note: the planet that rules the twelfth house becomes what we call a “functional malefic.” This is because the twelfth house’s topics are generally negative, and so that planet has to be the bearer of bad news, even if it’s normally a benefic planet like Jupiter or Venus.

The questions we ask with the twelfth house ruler are, “what kind of shadow do I cast?” and “where does that shadow fall?” The planet ruling the twelfth house answers the first question. The house placement of the twelfth house ruler answers the second.

Now we move on to planets placed in the twelfth house.

A metaphor I frequently use with the twelfth house is this (I can’t remember the source, but I know it’s from somewhere—please tell me if you know!): imagine, if you will, an old Gothic cathedral, with stained glass windows on every wall facing the outside. If you pass by that cathedral during the daytime, the glass looks uninteresting. Sure, there’s some dull color, some shape, but you can’t really tell what’s going on there.

Now, drive by that same cathedral at 11:00PM on Christmas Eve, right as midnight mass is beginning: all the lights in the building are on, filling the windows with splendor and warmth. You can see all of the intricate details in the stained glass now, in full color. The building seems to pulse with life.

Planets—especially the Sun and the Moon—placed in the twelfth house have the ability to illuminate the intricate details that lie hidden in that house with uncanny insight. Planets placed in the twelfth house become very important this way, but because they are cadent, they remain outside of a person’s notice until circumstance (usually tough circumstances at that) brings those planets and their stories to the fore.

A planet placed in the twelfth house will utilize the twelfth house—restriction, isolation, sorrow, distance, margins, contemplation, and hidden enemies—to work out its purposes within the native’s life, and those purposes are, of course, determined by the house that planet rules.

It’s also important to note that any planets placed in your twelfth house were planets that were most likely in the ascendant as your mother’s labor was coming to a climax right before your birth. Because of that, planets placed in the twelfth house often describe perinatal conditions.

One example I’m very familiar with has Saturn in Libra exalted in the twelfth house. The native’s head was too big to get through her mother’s hip bones, and so after 58 hours of labor (!!!) the native had to be delivered by Cesarean section. The pressure from attempted delivery was so great that the native was severely jaundiced for the first two weeks of her life. Saturn, of course, rules both bones and pressure.

One other pattern I’ve noticed in working with clients: the twelfth house connotes distance (because it implies isolation). I’ve seen a number of charts where the fourth ruler or natural ruler of one of the parents in the chart was in the twelfth, and the native came from a household where the parents divorced while they were a child, with one of the parents remaining more distant than the other. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but it’s something to consider when thinking about planets placed in the twelfth.

Which planet is your Shadow? What luminous gift does it bear? Where does your Shadow live?

As a means of interpreting these, I’m going to have recourse to the good ol’ seven deadly sins, and their counterparts, the seven cardinal virtues. This is a platform-agnostic way of looking at our shadows and their gifts, even though this is drawn from the Christian tradition (and the Pagan traditions that flow into it). Because each planet can be the ruler of the twelfth house and therefore the ruler of our Shadow, each planet presents a unique opportunity for ruin. But each planet also presents a unique luminous gift, if you, like Ged, can take your Shadow by the hand and name it with your own True Name.

Saturn as twelfth house ruler casts the shadow of acedia (translated as “sloth,” but that’s not quite what it is): fear, depression, self-abasement, and restriction in general, but he can be a powerful ally if he is strong and placed in the twelfth house too. The luminous gift of Saturn is industria: persistence, effort, and ethical action, empowered by the steel Saturn puts in our spines when we come into right relationship with him.

Jupiter as twelfth house ruler casts the shadow of gula (“gluttony”): an insatiable need to have more, to consume, to fill a void that cannot be filled, at the detriment of one’s health and wellness. The luminous gift of Jupiter is temperantia (“temperance”): humanity, equanimity, and balance in consumption and contribution, a bold and generous giver who invites everyone to his table of plenty, regardless of their ability to pay.

Mars as the twelfth house ruler casts the shadow of ira (“wrath): violence, anger, rage without a constructive direction, that picks fights just to have something to do. The luminous gift of Mars is patientia (“patience”): forgiveness, mercy, and steadfast endurance against the storms of life. Mars made luminous is a champion for those who have none to fight for them.

The Sun as the twelfth house ruler casts the shadow of superbia (“pride”): being enamored with own’s excellence and self-aggrandizement. The luminous gift of the Sun is humilitas (“humility”), which is not false modesty but rather an honest and objective understanding of one’s own position and the bravery and reverence for all life-ways that emerge from such a firm footing.

Venus as the twelfth house ruler casts the shadow of luxuria (“lust”): viewing others as objects for the gratification of one’s own desires, to the diminishment of other people. The luminous gift of Venus is castitas (“chastity”): far from being sexless or joyless, a sex-positive “chastity” allows one to view their partners not as objects to be mastered for their own pleasure but as a Subject with freedom, agency, and ability to contribute to a mutually-enriching garden of delight.

Mercury as the twelfth house ruler casts the shadow of invidia (“envy”): constantly searching for the missing piece that will make one finally feel complete and whole, but never finding it, for such a missing piece is but a myth. The luminous gift of Mercury is humanitas (“kindness” or “humanity”): not only does Mercury rule two of the humane signs (and is triplicity ruler of all the air signs), Mercury allows one to experience shared thought and shared feeling that moves one to compassion.

The Moon as the twelfth ruler casts the shadow of avaritia (“greed”): as the Moon gathers things and people together in one place, she seldom releases them, and a shadowy Moon utilizes other people to fill an insatiable need to acquire. But the luminous gift of the Moon is caritas (“charity” or “lovingkindness”), a selfless love that is wholly devoted to the wellbeing of others and manifests in generosity and sacrifice.

And of course, we remember the overall content of the twelve houses, now that our journey is complete, to show us where our Shadow—and its luminous gifts—live in our lives.

  • Twelfth house ruler in the first house: the shadow lives in the body, in our relationship with our appearance and our physical circumstances.
  • Twelfth house ruler in the second house: the Shadow lives in our bank account and our relationship with income and expenditure.
  • Twelfth house ruler in the third house: the Shadow lives in our relationship to our peers, siblings, and day-to-day environment, as well as our relationship to communal gathering spaces.
  • Twelfth house ruler in the fourth house: the Shadow lives in our relationship to our parents, ancestors, home, and the land on which we live.
  • Twelfth house ruler in the fifth house: the Shadow lives in our relationship to creativity, procreation, enjoyment, delight, aesthetics, and feasting.
  • Twelfth house ruler in the sixth house: the Shadow lives in our relationship to labor, sickness, and responsibility to others.
  • Twelfth house ruler in the seventh house: the Shadow lives in our one-to-one relationships with other people, whether romantic, contractual, or inimical.
  • Twelfth house ruler in the eighth house: the Shadow lives in our fears about powerlessness and our need to feel some sense of control over forces that we ultimately cannot control.
  • Twelfth house ruler in the ninth house: the Shadow lives in our relationship with spirituality, learning, and enlightenment.
  • Twelfth house ruler in the tenth house: the Shadow lives in our professional undertakings and our public status.
  • Twelfth house ruler in the eleventh house: the Shadow lives among the company we keep, often preventing us from feeling truly included with those who consider us a friend.
  • Twelfth house ruler in the twelfth house: the Shadow lives right where it is supposed to, and presents its luminous gifts to us readily and handily, so long as we are paying attention to it.

So, I want to know: what kind of shadow does your life cast? Where does it live? And how are you working on manifesting its luminous gifts? I’d love to hear from you!

How to Interpret Houses in Astrology — Part 12: The Eleventh House

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We come now to the eleventh house, of boons, honors, communities, and friends.

First, some self-disclosure: of all this houses in the birth chart this is one of the houses that is most important to me, but it’s also one of the most difficult houses for me. This is where my natal Moon is, as well as my natal Saturn, in a very tight conjunction right on the cusp. The ruler of my eleventh house, Jupiter, is in his detriment in Gemini, highly active but at a loss for how to handle his circumstances.

What does all that mean? It means this: friends are vital for me. Not only are they vital for me to feel emotionally at ease and safe, they’re vital for me to feel like I’m able to continue growing and expanding in my self-knowledge. But I don’t make them easily. I don’t find groups of people to call “my people” easily.

When I do find them, I treasure them.

In the modern world, the word “friend” has lost its punchiness from overuse. Jaded bloggers have written more than enough screeds about Facebook’s devaluation of the term, so I won’t add to the noise (on that point, at least).

Friendship in the ancient world (remember astrology’s roots!) was a bigger deal than our modern concept of a pleasant acquaintance. Now, they certainly had “friendly acquantances” along the lines of Facebook-level “friends,” but they placed infinitely more value on true friendship. A true friend was akin to a guardian spirit, one with whom your soul might knit. One who would be an ally through feast and famine. One whom you might come to love.

Sometimes we say to our friends, “I love you,” with all the sincerity of a partner. (The hunky Christian boys at my college were especially guilty of this, throwing out “I love you, bro!” with impunity—twisting my little closeted gay heart into knots all the while!)

Of course, in English we only have one word for “love,” a word that has to do yeoman’s work for all of its different meanings. We say “love” when we mean “appreciate,” we say “love” when we mean “enjoy,” we say “love” when we mean “I like the content you’re putting out on social media because it’s delightful but tbh I don’t know if I’d really want to spend much time with you otherwise.” It’s a word that, like “friend,” overuse dilutes.

But the Greek and Latin world had different words to describe the different flavors of love.

(Can you believe I just made a Flavor Flav reference in 2019?)

When we think “love” as in romantic love, we’re probably thinking of, eros, erotic love such as between lovers. But there was also storgē, the love of a parent for their child, or between siblings, or between relatives. A third love was called philia, such as we see in the word philadelphia, what we render in English as “brotherly love.” The Greek word philon means “friend” in the general sense, too.

But the crown of all love was agapē, the love of people who have no reason to be with one another but for the fact that their souls are knit.

The four loves—erōs, storgē, philia, and agapē—aren’t mutually exclusive, and they blend and shift, creating harmony and discord. But agapē, being the purest form of love, was considered the goal of all relationships. It is the love that unbinds and unchains people from isolation. It levels social distinctions. And the ancients believed that agapē was especially present in the noble friendships of legend.

But why in the love of friends, like Achilles and Patroclus, and not lovers, like Orpheus and Eurydice? It’s hard to say. Regardless, a true friend is a boon beyond measure.

The Roman orator Cicero writes the following on friendship:

“…Friendship offers advantages almost beyond any power to describe. In the first place, how can life be what Ennius calls “the life worth living,” if it does not repose on the mutual goodwill of a friend? What is sweeter than to have someone with whom you may dare discuss anything as if you were communing with yourself? How could your enjoyment in times of prosperity be so great if you did not have someone whose joy in them would be equal to your own?

“Adversity would indeed be hard to bear, without him to whom the burden would be heavier even than to yourself. In short, all other objects of desire are each, for the most part, adapted to a single end — riches, for spending; influence, for honour; public office, for reputation; pleasures, for sensual enjoyment; and health, for freedom from pain and full use of the bodily functions; but friendship embraces innumerable ends; turn where you will it is ever at your side; no barrier shuts it out; it is never untimely and never in the way.

“…I am not now speaking of the ordinary and commonplace friendship — delightful and profitable as it is — but of that pure and faultless kind, such as was that of the few whose friendships are known to fame. For friendship adds a brighter radiance to prosperity and lessens the burden of adversity by dividing and sharing it.” (De amicitia, VI.22-23, trans. Falconer)

When we arrive at the eleventh house in astrology, we’re talking about friends specifically because true friendship was one of the most important boons that a person could gain throughout their life. A life with amicitia, with agapē, was a life truly worth living, regardless of one’s fate or fortune. But where does the idea of “boon” come from?

Where do the meanings of the eleventh house come from?

The eleventh house in astrology gets its meaning from the fact that this is where Jupiter delights to be. Jupiter tends towards warmth, moisture, and uplift; planets in this part of the sky are sailing upward to their heights, to the tenth house, where they will culminate.

Planets in the eleventh house have escaped the visual obscurity of the twelfth house, and if they rise before the sun, they’ve escaped the burning beams and rise bright as morning stars over the horizon. As they rise higher in the night sky, planets in the eleventh house cause us to swell with delight, with expectation, with hope—all naturally Jupiterian interests.

All of Jupiter’s natural significations wind up here: good fortune, good times, affinities, and communities of people that gather around shared interest, rather than shared geography.

And here’s the rule in the ancient world: the more friends you have, the more fortunate you are. Even though life might be falling apart around you, having people with whom you can share the load makes it possible to enjoy what goodness life still has. Moreover, to enjoy success, you need a team. You need groups of people who support your work, on whom you can depend: groups who come together around shared affinity and purpose. You need people who pull for you even when circumstance gets rough.

I’m thinking of the line the Jets sing in chorus near the beginning of West Side Story:

“You’re never alone,
you’re never disconnected!
You’re home with your own—
when company’s expected,
You’re well-protected!”

The eleventh house is also known as the “house of the Good Daimōn.” If you remember Philip Pullman’s book series His Dark Materials, the Daimōn serves as a guardian spirit that is a projection of its human’s soul in physical form.

This is not unlike the way the ancients conceived of the Good Daimon. The philosopher Socrates spoke of it in terms we might call “conscience.” And you might know the sound of the Good Daimon’s voice, too: the still, small voice who speaks to you in quiet moments. It whispers, “hey, maybe there’s a better way to handle this problem” as you raise a sixth Krispy Kreme donut to your lips following a rough breakup.

We can think of the Good Daimon as part of us, a facet of our soul. Remember that this is the house of friendship, too: the truest friends we can have are those people—friends!—who act like Good Daimons to us. These Good Daimons come to our lives through affinity, and often more powerfully through shared experiences of crisis (remember that planets in the eleventh rise out of the twelfth house of suffering).

A true friend feels almost fated, in a way, as though there’s someone pulling the strings of the universe to cause your paths to cross. It might just be the Good Daimon at work.

How to interpret the eleventh house in your natal chart

When you begin to interpret the eleventh house in your natal chart, what you’re dealing with are these questions:

  • What are the types of people you have natural affinity with?
  • What are the situations of people you might find friends among?
  • How important are groups and communities to your overall success?
  • How easy or difficult is it for you to find true friends?

Of course, if you’ve followed the houses series to this point, you know what the next steps are.

Look at the sign where the eleventh house cusp falls, and its nature, and the nature of its ruler, and the placement of its ruler by house. Remember that the ruler of the eleventh exercises its agenda through the topics of the house where it’s placed, and according to the nature of the sign it’s placed in.

Saturn-ruled signs point towards affinity with older people, people who experience some form of marginalization, communities of older or more conservative tendencies. People who are steadfast, loyal, unchanging, principled. It also signifies a tendency toward isolation in general.

Jupiter-ruled signs point towards affinity with religious or spiritual people, lawyers, scholars, teachers; belonging in a community of shared faith or ritual practice also becomes an important theme. People you can dream with. (I have Sagittarius as my 11th sign, and most of my best friends are clergy or religion-adjacent.)

Mars-ruled signs point towards affinity with people who fall into the category of “athlete,” “soldier,” or “surgeon,” other such children of Mars. This isn’t literal, of course. But expect there to be fire and heat when you’re with your people.

Leo on the eleventh house cusp signifies affinity with people in authority, well-known individuals, influencers, brand ambassadors, people with big hair.

Venus-ruled signs point towards affinity with beautiful women, entertainers, hospitalliers, folks who love a good time and who have an eye for beauty. Cultivating social connections around ideas (Libra) and around shared embodied practice—and food too—(Taurus) is also a factor here.

Mercury-ruled signs point toward an affinity with people who are younger than you, as well as with writers, scribes, salespeople, travelers, all those naturally ruled by Mercury.

Cancer on the eleventh house cusp signifies affinity with women (broadly speaking), and ordinary, salt-of-the earth people, the kind of folk we call in Kentucky “good ol’ boys.” This is amplified if the third ruler is involved with the eleventh in some way.

The condition of planets in, and the planet ruling, the eleventh house also impacts its expression. A planet placed in the eleventh house while ruling another house means that planet carries out its agenda in the field of friends, groups, and communities.

For example, say someone’s eleventh house falls in Aquarius. That makes Saturn the ruler of the eleventh house, and with Aquarian Saturn’s principled stand undergirding this person’s experience of community this will be a person for whom solidarity with a group will be extremely important.

If, in this case, Saturn is in his fall in Aries in the first house, this person’s social networks will be burdensome to him, but the kind of burden that gives them a deep sense of who they are and who they are meant to be. Since he’s the eleventh ruler, Saturn is still representative of boons, even though he won’t be able to bring them about as effectively in this placement, and so a person’s experience of good friends might run a little dim.

Meanwhile if Saturn instead is in Libra, in his exaltation, in the seventh house, this signifies boons coming from partnership, and perhaps a partner who is like a true friend to the individual, and likely older.

Another example: say someone’s eleventh house falls in Leo. This person will have a natural affinity for people who are in positions of authority, and furthermore, their solar purpose will be tied to matters of friendship (for the Sun always represents vitality and the hidden core of a person’s desires). Since this person would have Libra rising most likely, imagine their Sun is in Scorpio in the second house: this person’s friends are a source of firm support to him, perhaps without saying very much, and able to keep the strictest confidences (Scorpio being mute and secret) as well as providing financial support to him.

If, however, the Sun were instead in Aquarius in the fifth house, boons come to the native through sensory pleasure and aesthetics with people of status who aren’t in “socially acceptable” positions. This might be, perhaps, someone who has many friends who are drag queens (maybe Venus is involved with this Sun?), or someone who has deep affinity with a group of people who enjoy marginalized activities involving old topics as fun, like (and I’m being florid here) LARPing in the local park.

So, y’all—who are your people? Who are your friends? Who are the people you choose to keep company with? Who are your Good Daimons?

Photo by Phil Coffman via Unsplash

How to Interpret Houses in Astrology — Part 7: The Sixth House

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The sixth house in astrology is a fun one, if you’re into discipline.

Let’s just get this out of the way up front: the sixth house is one of the places that reminds us that a balanced life is one that has crummy parts to it, but amidst the garbage we can still find diamonds in the rough.

A few weeks ago, I had a dream that was straightforward in its imagery but powerful in its implications. The dream found me in a conference room somewhere in the electric wilds of Tokyo (Akihabara, to be specific) delivering a lecture on horary astrology to a room full of entertainment executives who had flown me in to train individuals on their staff in the art of horary and elections for business purposes.

Final Fantasy creator Shironobu Hakaguchi was in the room, taking copious notes and asking an endless stream of questions. By the end of the dream he was so taken with the lecture that he invited me to elect the launch date and time of the next entry in the Final Fantasy series. It was a fun dream, to be sure, but this dream was made even more interesting by the fact that it was entirely in Japanese.

Now, in the waking world, my ability with Japanese is rudimentary, despite having been enamored with it since, oh, 1999. When I made that first puerile attempt to pick up the language I had no idea what I was getting into and the fervor of a young weeaboo could only take me so far. The only point of contact I had with learning a language was the old Berlitz “Japanese for Travel” cassette and phrase book sets that I could get from the library. I knew how to say good morning and ask where the bathroom was, but beyond that, I had no idea what a part of speech was, or how to conjugate, or what to do with word order.

Everywhere I turned I hit a brick wall, defeated, disappointed.

Twenty years on I now have the chops to learn a language, and those chops come from years of study, practice, and discipline. Ever since that dream, I’ve been throwing myself into the rigor, tedium, and reward of learning a difficult language from the ground up. 結果は成功しますよ。The work is bearing fruit, but that doesn’t make memorizing thousands of kanji or drilling conjugation forms any less labor-intensive.

This is our first point of contact for the sixth house in astrology.

I joked on Twitter the other day that the sixth house is “big D energy:” disease, drudgery, duty, discipline, and drive. This collection of meanings comes from a confluence of factors, just as we saw with the fifth house.

First, because the sixth house is cadent and in aversion to the ascendant, not only is it considered “ineffective,” but it also can’t connect with the place of the chart associated with life and vitality. For that reason, it has natural connections to illness, disease, and the process of falling away from vitality and activity.

Not everything can be sunshine and daffodils all the time, as much as the “love and light” folks want to make it out to be. Sometimes we get sick, y’all. We’re squishy organisms in a universe that, by and large, is not conducive to life unless you’ve got lead plating for skin. Disease is part and parcel of being human. We have to acknowledge that we have limitations, and the sixth house reminds us of the physical elements of these limits.

The second is that the sixth house is named the “house of Bad Fortune,” according to ancient authorities. The idea of “bad fortune” acknowledges that the accidents we suffer are not the effect of us “manifesting” ill fortune for ourselves; sometimes, shit happens. Chaos is part of the package of existing in a universe where chance and probability is an operating assumption, and there come times in your life where the odds are not in your favor.

However, bad fortune, illness, and injury are sometimes the result of us making poor decisions, using our authority, agency, and drive to put our health and wholeness into jeopardy. When we’re not exerting energy in a disciplined, focused, and honed manner, we’re often toeing the line of disaster. In this way, the sixth house is the part of the chart that describes the risks that are ready to strike when we’re not taking proper precautions, or when we’re a little too confident in our ability to avert fate.

People who were in “bad fortune” situations in the ancient world were often the unlucky people who had been captured and sold into slavery in Hellenistic society. Remember that slavery in the ancient world was quite unlike chattel slavery in the Americas (it was still slavery, though). In the Greco-Roman slavery model, masters had a moral and legal obligation to attend responsibly to the needs of the individuals who were part of their household, working on their masters’ behalf.

If we port this into a 21st century context, the connection here becomes obvious: people who work for us and workers themselves belong to the sixth house. It’s the house of the proletariat. It’s also the house of people for whom we are responsible who are not otherwise related to us by blood. The power dynamic is baked in.

The third factor is that the sixth house is the joy of Mars. Mars is naturally associated with illness, accidents, injuries, and explosive disasters: of all the planets who are wont to cause problems, Mars especially delights in discord, bringing it with him into battle wherever he shows up. For us to avert Mars’ disastrous impact through the lens of the sixth house, we need to build a relationship with his energies that is focused, disciplined, humbled, and honed through diligent application of effort and tedious practice.

Think about it this way: Mars, the ruler of fire and iron, delights to be in the forge. A forge is a hot, sweaty, sooty, dangerous, and tedious place to be; the blacksmith’s hammer pounds away into the night as they shape a chunk of crude iron into something that can be used. With each shower of sparks that flies off the glowing metal, the form of the tool comes more clearly into focus. What will it be? Will it be the blade of a sword? Of a kitchen knife? Will it be a blade at all—what if it’s a nail, or a horseshoe, or a key blank? We won’t know until the blacksmith has finished the work at the anvil and plunged the finished tool into a trough of water, after which the final form will be revealed in a burst of steam.

Even then, the work isn’t finished yet. The blade must be honed on a whetstone. The horseshoe must be fitted to the horse. The key blank must be fit to its lock.

That’s the real blessing of the sixth house: it’s our point of contact for the crappy, random things that happen in life. However, our response to those ill-fated accidents draws out some of the best of us, when we apply our energy appropriately. The situations and people that get filed in the slice of life that is the sixth house in astrology are elements that require us to step up to the plate and embody responsible effort on their behalf. They form the anvil on which we’re shaped into effective people.

Enduring the heat, soot, sweat, and labor of the sixth house forges us into stronger, more effective individuals.

How to interpret the sixth house

As always, there’s a series of questions to be asked when it comes to interpreting the sixth house in astrology, and the answer are determined by the planet ruling the sixth house, its placement and condition by house and sign, its connection to other planets, as well as any planets placed within the sixth itself. The usual suspects.

Here are the questions to ask:

  • What parts of life become especially difficult for this person?
  • To which kinds of diseases and injuries is this person especially susceptible?
  • Where might a person best expend labor and responsibility to forge and hone themselves into more effective people?
  • To whom or what is a person naturally responsible? What humbles them?

Let’s consider this example: a person has their sixth house cusp falling in the sign Cancer, meaning that the Moon is the ruler of their sixth. Their Moon is in late Sagittarius on the 11th house cusp, peregrine, applying to the conjunction of Saturn in Saturn’s term and face (for advanced readers, this means that there is some very light reception happening here, nothing too strong). We can answer the questions as follows, knowing that the Moon is also naturally the ruler of a person’s emotional center of gravity and coping skills.

  • For this person, finding a place to call “home” relative to groups, friends, association, and community becomes especially fraught with difficulty. Not impossible, but it will take this person quite a bit of time to land in a community or circle of friends where they feel like they fit in and are able to form secure bonds.
  • Sagittarius rules the hips, thighs, and buttocks (what I like to call “ye olde haunches”). This person will be susceptible to bone and joint problems in this part of the body, because of the sixth ruler’s conjunction to Saturn—and these will likely be injuries due to stiffness and lack of flexibility, or from wear and tear.
  • This person can best expend their labor and responsibility to forge themselves into a more effective person through disciplining their interior emotional state and impulse to get the hell out of dodge (Sagittarius Moon) any time things start to go pear shaped. Being able to see things through to the end is a crucial growth point for them.
  • This person is naturally responsible to their sense of identity within a collective setting (sixth ruler in the eleventh house in a fire sign). There’s an ideological and spiritual responsibility here too, considering the nature of Sagittarius as ruled by Jupiter. Because of the nature of the Moon-Saturn conjunction this responsibility is one that matures the native by driving them to nurture, protect, and bolster the people in their circles. They’re a consummate dad friend.

For the purposes of getting you started with the sixth ruler, let’s look at the ruler of the sixth house through each of the other houses. The question here is the third one in the list above: Where can I best expend labor and responsibility to forge myself into a more effective person?

I best forge myself into a more effective person through applying rigor and discipline to and through:

  • Ruler of the sixth house in the first house: …my health, appearance, and overall circumstances. The disciplines of intense physical training are absolutely vital for my well-being and I become my best self through my body..
  • Ruler of the sixth house in the second house: …my finances, resources, and ability to generate income for myself. I must learn how to keep a budget.
  • Ruler of the sixth house in the third house: …my day to day environment, my siblings, relatives, and ability to keep my word. Learning to use something like a bullet journal and remembering to check in on my “lateral contemporaries” will keep me on the straight and narrow.
  • Ruler of the sixth house in the fourth house: …my relationship with my parents and my efforts in maintaining a stable home environment, regardless of what “home” looks like in my case.
  • Ruler of the sixth house in the fifth house: …my artistic endeavors and my “children,” whatever I’m putting out into the world that adds more energy and joy to life. “Enjoy responsibly” is my catchphrase.
  • Ruler of the sixth house in the sixth house: …my ability to cultivate effective disciplines across all parts of my life, not just the particularities of other houses. Having another life to be responsible for, like a plant or a pet, will keep me focused.
  • Ruler of the sixth house in the seventh house: …my relationship to those with whom I’m in formal one-on-one relationships, whether they are my romantic partner, business partner, or person with whom I’m in open conflict.
  • Ruler of the sixth house in the eighth house: …my relationship with spending money and managing the resources of other people. I must learn to be responsible in where the outflow of my resources is directed.
  • Ruler of the sixth house in the ninth house: …my search for illumination through higher education, learning, travel, and spirituality. A daily spiritual discipline such as prayer, meditation, lectio divina, or fasting can be tremendous for my overall well-being. Maybe try learning Japanese while you’re at it, too.
  • Ruler of the sixth house in the tenth house: …my responsible use of power on behalf of those under my care in my professional life, and through ensuring that the impact I have on others is always in the best interests of my subordinates and the people I serve.
  • Ruler of the sixth house in the eleventh house: …my connection to friends, groups, and associations, ensuring that I am responsible to the collective witness of my communities and chosen family.
  • Ruler of the sixth house in the twelfth house: …my relationship to people who are suffering, isolated, or mired in sorrow, as well as my relationship with my own unconscious challenges or limiting beliefs. I must discipline my internal narratives.

Where are the places that you’re being asked to discipline yourself? How do you feel about that? It’s not fun, but we’re all in this together—I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Featured image by Robert van der Sluijs via Unsplash

How to Interpret Houses in Astrology — Part 6: The Fifth House

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I knew that as soon as we approached the subject of the fifth house I’d be wading into the treacherous waters of a slowly roiling controversy among astrologers, especially those on the Internet.

Somewhere in the development of the modern psychological approach to astrology, matters related to sex got assigned to the eighth house. There’s a strong case that can be made if we are approaching this from the Freudian framework that conceptually joins sex and death. Of course, the French euphemism la petite mort immediately comes to mind.

I’m one of the holdouts that insists on sexuality belonging to the fifth house. I wanted to rip that bandage off at the beginning, because I think there’s a solid reason for that peculiar topic to take its rightful place in the fifth along the other matters that fall within the gilded halls of the fifth house.

Remember that the houses either take the bulk of their meanings from their astronomical characteristics, as is the case with the four angles as well as the second and eighth houses, or from the significations of the planets that have their “joys” there. When a planet is in the house in which it rejoices, it’s a little bit happier. All other factors being equal, it at least gets to be involved in something it actually enjoys instead of being stuck managing something it has no interest in.

Deborah Houlding’s book Houses: Temples of the Sky (affiliate link ahoy) compiles and interprets historical sources on the origin and nature of planetary joys, which is a fabulous discussion of the subject in addition to being The Book on houses. Likewise, astrologer Chris Brennan wrote a wonderful article exploring the influence of the planetary joys in house rulership throughout the astrological tradition. I don’t want to go too far into the weeds here as to why planets rejoice to be in the houses that they do; just remember that this is where the bulk of house meanings get drawn from prior to 1900 AD. Those resources are the ones you want to have on hand if you decide to do a deep dive into this subject.

When we come to interpreting the fifth house in astrology, it’s best to know that we’re dealing with three primary elements that import their influence into the meaning of this house. These influences inform the questions that we need to ask here.

First off, this house is the joy of Venus. In fact, most of the meanings of the fifth house emerge from this influence alone. To get there, let’s consider the nature of the planet Venus to begin with.

Venus and Mars both represent interior, intuitive, nocturnal influences that cause us to move and to act in accordance with instinctual nature. This is because they’re part of the night team, the “nocturnal sect” of planets that operate on a subconscious level. Together, Venus and Mars form a polarity of energies that we see manifest in our behaviors and pursuits: while Mars’ function is to drive us (which we will explore more next week when we address the sixth house), Venus’ function is to draw us.

In her bid to join and harmonize us with one another and with the natural world, Venus inflames the hearts of humans with a desire to merge. Consider the last time that you’ve been absolutely captivated by something of tremendous natural beauty, whether a sunset, or a landscape, or a flower, or a birdsong, or a flavor, or perhaps even another human. The intoxicating factor here is the Venus principle at work.

Aesthetic beauty has the peculiar property of drawing us to it. Throughout history humans have made attempts to imitate and replicate this beauty with their own hands, skill, and intellect, crafting art to reflect reality in rarefied, idealized form. Aesthetic beauty isn’t the only thing that draws us; writ large, the principle here is pleasure. Anything that pleases our senses has the ability to draw us to it quite apart from our intentions or better judgment at times. Venus, then, has rulership over anything that brings sensory pleasure to us and draws us out of ourselves into richer engagement and union with the world of matter.

None of the senses are immune from her inexorable draw: sight, taste, touch, hearing, and smell all are susceptible to Venus’ indolent vacuum. The simplest reason for sex belonging to the fifth house is due to the sheer fact that it’s a pleasurable experience (or at least it’s supposed to be; I know this is tragically not the case for many). For the bulk of human history, sex was the sine qua non of having children, and so naturally children and pregnancy also belong to matters of the fifth house. Venus, of course, is conducive to life and is implicated in cycles of fertility—which reminds me, have you bought Nicola Smuts-Allsop’s game-changing book on fertility astrology yet? (It’s an affiliate link, Harry.)

But along with sex and sexuality come all the other sensory pleasures: flavors and aromas, colors and forms, harmonies and melodies that transfix us and give us a taste of the transcendent beauty of the world in material form (remember that the fifth house is also configured to the ninth house by trine as much as it is configured to the first). For that reason, any activity, person, or environment where these drawing elements are placed at the fore belongs to fifth house.

Second, the fifth house is referred to as the house of Good Fortune. There’s a reason that gambling is addictive: just as one can become addicted to any kind of sensory pleasure that draws us, one can also become addicted to the emotional thrill of inviting good fortune into our lives. “You have to play to win,” says the person who buys scratch-off tickets by the dozen. So the fifth house, then, rules games and any activity that joins us to Fortune, and any happy accidents that happen along the way.

(By the way, if you have the Moon applying to Jupiter in Cancer with the Part of Fortune all in the fifth house, playing the lottery might not be the worst decision for you—but your mileage may vary.)

Third, the fifth house is configured to the first house by trine. Astrologer Sam Reynolds explains this configuration makes the fifth house the house of “swagger.” The flowing partnership between the first and the fifth creates a space for the energies of the first house to express themselves.

Note too that this is a superior trine from the first: planets in the first have a direct impact on anything happening in the fifth and determine the outcomes here. Joined to the aesthetic sensibilities of Venus, there’s a strong case for this house and its ruler being implicated in a person’s style and self-expression through their aesthetic choices, dress, preferences, and performance. Child-bearing is also a natural part of this narrative: what’s more “expressing yourself” than making another human who looks like you?

How to interpret the fifth house in astrology

When it comes to interpreting the fifth house in astrology, we of course need to begin with the ruler of the fifth house to determine which area of life the person’s tastes and desirous factors work themselves out in. Likewise, we also need to determine how the planets placed within the fifth house express themselves.

SOAPBOX ALERT: I have, in my relatively brief time practicing professionally, encountered more than one client who has been told that they will not have children because they have no planets in the fifth house. This is patently wrong, and I will happily die on this hill. This approach to delineation ignores the fact that the fifth ruler might be wildly well-placed.

For example, say we have the fifth house cusp in Pisces in a day chart with nothing in the fifth, making Jupiter the ruler of the fifth (and very likely Venus as the almuten). Jupiter in this case is in Taurus in the seventh, with the Sun and Venus applying to Jupiter by sextile from Cancer in the 9th. If someone with a chart like this came into my practice and asked whether they would have kids, I’d have to ask them how many they already had.

That said, if Mars or Saturn were implicated somehow by hard aspect in this configuration, I’d expect there to be some difficulties depending on where they are afflicting Jupiter or any of the other planets involved from. Say Saturn were in an overcoming square to Venus from Aries in this same example, the issue might not be the native at all, but it might have to do with the fertility of their partner and we’d need to explore some medical interventions to help that out (since Saturn is in the sixth).

The most important thing to do in these instances, I’ve found, is not to pronounce an interpretation with finality one way or another but investigate all the factors that need to be considered and work with the client to discern solutions that they might not otherwise consider.

All that said, here’s a series of questions that we need to ask in analyzing the fifth house.

  • What is the individual’s relationship with pleasure, fun, and aesthetic sensibilities?
  • How can they bring more joie de vivre into their daily experience?
  • What is the impact of the native’s creations and creativity in this life?
  • How will the native’s creativity express itself naturally?

Taking the same example from above, we have Jupiter in Taurus in the seventh house as the fifth ruler, supported wonderfully by sextiles from the Sun and Venus in Cancer the ninth, not otherwise afflicted. In this instance, the native’s creative work will be wondrously fertile, their aesthetics are richly Venusian and tend towards the comfortable and classically elegant. Their creative priorities are pulled towards engagement one-on-one with other people. There’ll be a natural pull of this person to do creative work that renders physical objects that beautify their surroundings, and there’s a strong chance that this individual will become a parent, or otherwise have children as a significant part of their life if they choose not to have children of their own.

Since the fifth house is so multifaceted and expresses so much to do with style, attending to the sign in which the fifth ruler is placed is especially important. Signs determine the style in which planets express themselves. That said, by looking at the house position of the fifth ruler, we can determine what life priorities attune a person’s aesthetic compass. Is it a “beauty will save the world” situation? Or is someone’s draw the sensual allure of history? Of romance? Of death? Of their hometown?

Interpreting the fifth house ruler through the houses

  • Fifth house ruler in the first house: that which draws you is you, in the most basic way of phrasing it. Aesthetic sensibilities, pleasure, and creative output have their hand on the wheel in this case and form one of the guiding principles through which you live out your life narrative.
  • Fifth house ruler in the second house: pleasure-seeking activities and creative output are tied to your bank account and understanding the role they play in your life becomes important in improving your overall financial portfolio. These aspects of life function as a resource in your back pocket, if you nurture them well.
  • Fifth house ruler in the third house: the joy of gathering together with your local community and the beauty of everyday pleasures are important influences for you to nurture.
  • Fifth house ruler in the fourth house: the allure of history, legend, inheritance, and the land itself draws you to it and desires expression. Your tastes are likely strongly aligned with those of your family, for better or for worse.
  • Fifth house ruler in the fifth house: creation for its own sake is a crucial plotline in your life. If your fifth ruler is in its own sign, you can expect, in general, quite a bit of ease in enjoying anything to which you’re drawn.
  • Fifth house ruler in the sixth house: creativity is a labor for you, and chances are that your tastes are aggressively pragmatic. Anything requiring discipline and habitual effort becomes, in its own strange way, fun for you.
  • Fifth house ruler in the seventh house: there is a certain pleasure you derive from engaging one on one with other humans. If there’s any placement that signifies bids to win people over (or settle arguments) through an appeal to beauty—entrancing your beloved with art in their honor, or holding a stereo up outside their window—it’s probably this one.
  • Fifth house ruler in the eighth house: art must change you, if it doesn’t terrify you. Every opportunity to engage with a creative act has the opportunity to draw you into deeper engagement with the cycles of life and death. Sex can be a fearsome thing (in both the positive and negative connotations of that word). And, you might just really dislike being around children.
  • Fifth house ruler in the ninth house: creativity, performance, and pleasure for you are windows into the sacred and the transcendent, and the connection to Dostoyevsky’s position is stronger for you than most.
  • Fifth house ruler in the tenth house: aesthetics aren’t just an extracurricular activity for you. Creative work, pleasure, or any of the other fifth house factors are part and parcel of the impact you make in the world as you live your life, and can become a career story for you as well.
  • Fifth house ruler in the eleventh house: chances are if this is the case, your fifth ruler is in detriment, and you’ll be investing a lot of effort into drawing a community of friends around you to meet whichever sensual and social needs are going unmet throughout your life. Used well, this impulse can be tremendously beneficial for your friends and audiences.
  • Fifth house ruler in the twelfth house: the darkened glass of the unconscious and the forgotten areas of life become rich fodder for your bids at self-expression.

The final point on the fifth house I need to make is this: fun is not frivolous. The deeply utilitarian nature of most modern economic discourse is, in my humble opinion, a load of bullsh*t. I believe, body and soul, that aesthetic beauty and enjoyment of sensual pleasure, as well as the process of creativity, is wholly a holy end unto itself and does not need to be placed in the service of some “higher” priority.

Just because something belongs to the realm of “fun and games” does not mean it can be dispensed with; a soulful and purposeful life depends on nurturing the Venus principle within us. Understanding the matters she rejoices in are critical to the thriving of our souls.

Dostoyevsky was right: beauty will save the world.

(In related news, my fifth ruler Mercury is in the eighth house, ninth sign, in Libra.)

Where’s your fifth ruler at? How does your fifth house ruler influence your tastes and your approach to creativity, enjoyment, fun, sensuality, and the rest of it all? Let me know in the comments!

Featured image by Yutacar via Unsplash

How to Interpret Houses in Astrology — Part 4: The Third House

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Admittedly, my posture towards the third house has been one of, “…well, we can get to that later.”

On the surface, it’s such a grab-bag of significations throughout the astrological tradition that doesn’t lend itself well to focused interpretation in the way that, say, the second house does with money matters, or the tenth house does with career.

It never feels certain which direction to go when interpreting third house matters in the situation that a person presents you with in a nativity or in a horary question. Whenever we come to this part of the chart I have to take a beat and figure out how to use words again, because they often fail me.

Are we looking at siblings? Family? Paperwork? A short trip? What if the person doesn’t have siblings? What do we do with the third house then? Or if a concern is about a communication between a person and their relatives: what’s the issue with the third house here—is it communication, or is it relatives?

But in preparing this article I’ve come to a deeper understanding of what the third house is actually about, and if we break it away from the “third house equals Gemini equals communication” model that is prevalent in most of the beginner astrology books out there, it takes on a particular richness that is easily missed if one stays purely at the surface level.

Then again, that’s to be expected from a house that is cadent and under the earth: it’s easy to overlook.

The starting point for understanding the meaning of the third house is this: this house is known as “the joy of the Moon.” In the classical astrological tradition the joys of the planets were particular parts of the sky where it was understood that each planet “rejoices” to be in.

For example, Sun rejoices to be in the ninth house because when the Sun moves through the ninth house during the day his heat and brilliance are at their maximums. Mercury rejoices to be in the first house because it is the bridge between the realms of the invisible and the visible, the mundane and the sacred, the alembic in which the deep alchemy of life manifests its elixir.

For the Moon, this is the third house—the house which opposes the Sun’s joy in the ninth. If we break apart the tradition to look at how the third house sausage is made, we see quickly how the signification of a planet being “in its joy” imported that planet’s meanings into the house where it rejoices.

So, let’s start talking about the third house by not talking about the third house at all; let’s start with the Moon instead.

What then, is the Moon?

Deborah Houlding includes a compelling discussion on this subject in her book, Houses: Temples of the Sky (affiliate link) that I think bears drawing out here for sure. She describes the nature of tribal and community experiences in the ancient world as being deeply tied to the cycles of the moon, a facet of life together that most Westerners have lost touch with.

But consider: for the major world religions, the lunar cycle is one of the most important calendrical features, working in concert with the Sun to describe shared communal experiences of fasting and feasting. The dates of the Islamic month of Ramadan, the Jewish feast of Passover, and the Christian celebration of Pascha/Easter are all determined in large part by the Moon. And it is during these fasts and feasts that we see much more emphasis being placed on community togetherness and tribal celebration.

In my own tradition it’s something of a joke that Easter is the best-attended Sunday of the liturgical calendar. But if we take a step back to consider this from an astrological perspective, it’s almost as though this phenomenon is a literal manifestation of the symbolism here. This feast is carved into the wheel of the year by the Moon herself bringing people together as a tribe to celebrate an important component of tribal identity. The same is true of similar lunar feasts in other traditions. While this is an anomaly to the contemporary Westerner, in the ancient world these cycles of the Moon were part and parcel of living in communities with one another as individuals whose survival depended on maintaining tribal cohesion and identity.

We see that one of the first functions of the Moon is to gather and unite in a community what Deborah Houlding describes as “lateral contemporaries.” In the ancient world, your immediate lateral contemporaries were your siblings and relatives. They served as your peers, your colleagues, your coworkers, and the social medium in which you grew up and came to understand the world.

The second major function of the moon is to transfer, translate, and transmit: the prefix “trans-“ in all of these words suggests crossing lines to facilitate communication between parties who have no other means of talking to one another. Another application of this principle is the fact that the Moon, throughout traditional astrological literature, is viewed as “the transmitter of celestial influences,” with Guido Bonatti going so far as to call the Moon a “mediatrix”—a title Catholics know as one of the epithets of the Virgin Mary, who very quickly got packaged in lunar symbolism as Christianity expanded through the Middle East and into eastern Europe.

The reason for the moon’s status as celestial go-between is twofold: one, the Moon is changeable, adaptable, and fast as hell compared to the other seven visible planets, taking only 28 days to make it around the wheel of the zodiac once compared to the average year that it takes the next fastest planet, Mercury. She can get around. As she does, she picks up the influence of the planets she aspects and transfers that influence to everything else she encounters. She also serves as the intermediary between the realms of heaven and earth, and any celestial influence must get through her. Her carrying and gathering nature, combined with her immediacy, changeability, and direct visibility make her a fabulous medium.

The Moon as one of the natural significators of communication and the mind is one of the planets that we look at to describe a person’s ability to intuit information. In Egyptian mythology, the ibis-headed deity Thoth was associated not with the planet Mercury, but the Moon, and Thoth himself was regarded as the god of writing, magic, and wisdom. In like manner, the Moon performs these roles exceptionally; we often see the Moon placed well in the charts of individuals who are notable writers or communicators.

I’ll go off-script to note here that, yes, Mercury is associated with the mind as well, but primarily with the rational, thinking functions of the mind that discern, label, and assemble information into cognitive constructs. The Moon functions differently, instead representing the gathering and dissemination of information itself, often by force of intuition.

With all of this in mind, I want to suggest that the basic signification of the third house is “medium.”

Not “medium” as in the size, or a bleach-blonde woman from Long Island, but rather “medium” as in the field that facilitates communication, exchange of knowledge, and shared tribal experience. That is, what is meant by the word “media” in “social media.” For example: Twitter is a social medium.

Think of the average person in the ancient world: they lived a tribal existence, found their identity as part of a communal experience governed by the cycles of fasting and feasting dictated by the Moon, and were educated in such a way as to maintain tribal cohesion. The main people with whom they exchanged words, ideas, and concepts were their peers, namely their siblings, cousins, and neighbors (who were often one and the same).

We can see now how the third house has accreted this peculiar cluster of significations, then: as the Moon rejoices to be here, so matters of the third house take on her priorities. She travels quickly, gathering people into a community as she does so, using words, concepts, and daily activities to stir us into a shared experience. As she whips around the Earth she causes the ebb and flow of water across the planet, that medium without which no life as we know it can exist. All the while, she serves as a mediatrix between the immense and unknowable wisdom of the cosmos and the blessedly mundane situations we encounter in our day to day lives.

Now, let’s land the plane.

How to interpret the third house

Interpreting houses in astrology effectively is a matter of asking the right questions at the right time. Just as we asked, “who is driving the boat, where are they steering it to, and how good of a job can they do?” with the first house, we asked “where is the golden vein, and how easy is it to access?” with the second house. In like manner, we need to figure out what the right questions to ask with the third house are, but because of the span of this house’s meanings, we can go in several different directions.

When we’re looking at the third house in astrology, we’re asking this core question: What describes the medium in which you find the narrative of your life story unfolding? Think of what the Moon in her joy is doing: what processes of gathering, transferring, fluctuating, and communicating are playing out with you, and where are they taking place?

If you don’t have siblings in your life, who are your “bros?” Who are your neighbors? What kind of people are they?

What describes the media, both in terms of platform and style, with which you choose to communicate your own ideas and experiences?

Which aspects of your life find themselves occupying the collective mental energies of your zip code?

Which concerns fade into the background of your day to day life, shaping it from the shadows?

Because of the variable nature of the third house in astrology, it’ll be a little bit more difficult to give line-by-line delineations of the third house ruler throughout the houses, and your individual context is going to give shape and nuance to these interpretations that just isn’t possible within a blog post. But I’m going to give it my best college try!

Just to remind you of the significations again, the third house describes:

  • your local zip (postal) code, your neighborhood, and places within commuting distance or “there and back in a day”
  • people who live in your local zip code
  • your siblings and close relatives, or people who fill those roles for you
  • your day-to-day environment and its background processes
  • communication style and priorities
  • the fasting and feasting cycles of your local community, aka the tribal religion

Let’s think through an example. Say a person has their third house cusp in Taurus, with no other planets in the third house. The third ruler is Venus in this case, and Venus is in Pisces in the person’s first house in good condition in a night chart (so, Sun in Aries in the 2nd, this makes Venus a morning star and she’s bright, fast, visible, not afflicted by malefics, etc.).

  • This person’s local zip code and neighborhood is a place of comfort and peace for them and they feel most “themselves” when they’re on their old stomping grounds.
  • This person has strong relationships with the people who live in their neighborhood and delights in building relationships with their neighbors. They’re the kind of person who brings cookies or casseroles to new families on the block.
  • This person, if they have siblings, enjoys a close and supportive relationship with them or with the individuals who fill that role in their life. They also feel that their siblings’ input is extremely important in helping them to “steer the boat” in the direction of successful overall outcomes.
  • This person probably has a rich and luxurious day-to-day environment with a lot of comfort and ease in their background processes.
  • This person has a communication style that is geared towards gentleness, pleasure, ease, and matters of the heart and spirit.
  • This person probably maintains a strong connection to the faith tradition of their upbringing, even if they have gone through a deconstruction phase. Their practice of the tribal religion is sincere.

I’m kind of jealous of this fictive person, to be honest!

But remember that, because of the geometry of the zodiac, Venus is probably also their eighth house ruler, and so part of their experience of abundance and ease in life may be due to having come through to the other side of some deeply challenging experiences relative to death and poverty.

Suppose that this Mary Sue of an exemplar has Saturn in Libra in a night chart afflicting that Sun in Aries by an opposition. That’ll make things squirrelly for them during their Saturn returns; it’s likely that they had some serious engagement with poverty, or possibly had a serious illness (since Leo would most likely be the sixth house ruler here), and it’s as though this person has chosen to embrace the goodness of life because of the meaning and depth that experiences with suffering and loss gave them.

But I think this example illustrates the richness of the third house in astrology, one which it is so easy to overlook if we just leave it at “third house equals Gemini equals communication.” It sets the milieu for a person’s experience of daily living, and that’s not something to be minimized. There’s a narrative component here.

To move forward with interpretation, let’s bring it back to the idea of narrative and the story you’re telling through the medium of your life. This is tentative, so your mileage may vary:

The planet that rules the third house placed through the houses: what are the priorities of the local community in which your narrative takes place?

Planets placed within the third house: which aspects of your life demand that you share your experience of them with your local community?

  • Third house ruler in the first house: the priorities of the local community in which your narrative takes place fall on you, the individual in question. Whether this takes the form of support or strife is dependent on the nature and condition of the planet, as always!
  • Third house ruler in the second house: the priorities of the local community in which your narrative takes place fall on matters of material resources and financial security; in other words, ensuring that there’s enough to go around.
  • Third house ruler in the third house: the priorities of the local community in which your narrative takes place fall within maintenance of the community itself and preservation of tribal practices, narratives, and identity.
  • Third house ruler in the fourth house: these priorities fall within maintaining lineage and leaving a legacy, honoring forebears, or establishing a locally rooted place. Your siblings will stay close to home here and there’s a strong center of gravity pulling you towards home.
  • Third house ruler in the fifth house: these priorities fall within the realm of creativity, sensuality, generation, children, and nurturing new things. The words “artists’ commune” come to mind.
  • Third house ruler in the sixth house: priorities fall within maintaining physical integrity and health, and a sense of responsible service to those in positions of power.
  • Third house ruler in the seventh house: priorities fall within establishing and maintaining individual relationships.
  • Third house ruler in the eighth house: priorities fall within dealing with the unavoidable factors of death, debt, fear, and taxes. This placement could suggest the loss of a sibling or the loss of connection to a local community.
  • Third house ruler in the ninth house: priorities fall within the usual ninth house suspects: travel, expansion of horizons, philosophy. You might have a sibling or relative who is a clergy person, or a professor, or who moves to a foreign country. Or, home for you might be a place you moved far away from.
  • Third house ruler in the tenth house: priorities of the local community fall within the realm of achievement and performance. One way to spin this is working in communications, but another way to understand this placement is that your immediate associations are focused on high achievement (I’m thinking of what we call “gifted education” in the States).
  • Third house ruler in the eleventh house: priorities of the local community fall within the realm of friends and good fortune. It may be that you identify your friends as more akin to siblings than your actual siblings, if you have them.
  • Third house ruler in the twelfth house: this one is tricky, as always. What I’m imagining here is that when you think of “local community” or your experiences with your neighborhood there’s a sense of imprisonment and limitation in how you understand them, but it may be that such a limitation exists in your life as an avenue for integration. It may also just mean that you and your siblings don’t have a relationship to speak of.

What’s the milieu for your story? What’s the medium in which your plot unfolds? Let me know in the comments!

Featured image by Ferenc Horvath via Unsplash