A Look at Each House
If you operate from the premise that the soul chooses all facets of the circumstances into which it is born, then your chart becomes the voice of your soul speaking to you. Since there are twelve houses, and each house is well-defined in the coming pages, you need to study your chart to find out about yourself, as well as about those who you partner well with and can rely on.
First House (Ascendant): Your Mask
Natural sign: Aries
Natural ruler: Mars
All of us are mixtures of intellectual and emotional needs, talents, memories, desires, dreams, fears, and triumphs. These characteristics are streamlined and rolled into our personalities, the face we present to others, our masks. The first house is our social mask.
This house, ruled by the ascendant, also governs our physical appearance and the general state of our physical health. The head and face are governed by the first house. (When looking for health issues in a chart, always look to the first house, as well as to the sixth and the eighth.) In this house, the source of illness can be due to an inability to impact the world in the way or to the degree that we want. Consider the following descriptions of the ascendant in each of the signs as personality signatures.
Aries. People under this sign have a need to succeed at everything. They're impulsive, impatient, driven, fiercely independent, and decisive.
Taurus. People under this sign are marked by determination, patience, practicality, and appreciation of beauty. It takes a lot to anger them, but once they're provoked, watch out! People with Taurus rising are often physically attractive and identifiable by short, strong necks.
Gemini. People under this sign need versatility and diverse experiences. These people are mentally quick and perceptive. They are often slender, with long arms and fingers, and walk quickly.
Cancer. People under this sign drive to establish some sort of foundation or home base that defines who they are. They're intuitive and capable of deep feeling. With Cancer rising, the face is often round. They tend toward stoutness in middle age.
Leo. Think drama, pride, and ambition with this rising sign. People under this sign have an excellent ability to organize and direct others, and understand children very well. Physically, these people are handsome and large-boned with thick, beautiful hair.
Virgo. People under this sign possess keen powers of observation and have a fastidious nature. They generally are dedicated to service of others, have a concern for health, and can be very intuitive. Slender bodies and oval faces with a certain softness and charm mark these people.
Libra. People under this sign define themselves through social relationships. They seek harmony and fairness in all they undertake and often are so concerned with being fair that they are indecisive. Physically, Libra rising often produces nearly perfectly formed bodies and physical beauty.
Scorpio. Born under this sign, these people exhibit intensity, passion, strong sexuality, and a profound perception into the secret nature of life. They are deeply intuitive and possess the ability to drastically alter their personal environment. They tend to have dark hair that is wavy and thick and prominent brows.
Sagittarius. These people have an adventurous spirit, bluntness in speech, and deep independence. They have excellent foresight, a respect for all spiritual thought, and a love of animals. Their bodies are usually tall and slender, with a stoop to the shoulders.
Capricorn. They're concerned about status, self-discipline, and ambition. Impulsive activity is generally restrained. They're good at recognizing and defining the overall structure of a problem or challenge. Physically they can be thin and bony, with prominent features.
Aquarius. They are humanitarians, and also possess unusual or eccentric modes of self-expression. People with this rising sign tend to go against the established order and seek their own truths. They have strong, well-formed bodies, with a tendency to plumpness in middle age.
Pisces. Few rising signs possess more emotional sensitivity and profound perception. People under this sign are often mystically inclined and impressionable, with multifaceted self-expression. They have exquisitely shaped hands and feet and usually have compelling eyes.
Second House: Your Material Goods
Natural sign: Taurus
Natural ruler: Venus
If the planets are aspects to the ascendant and the first house creates issues about self-esteem and self-doubt, the second house can be where we attempt to work them out. This can manifest in any type of behavior that draws attention to our personal material resources. In other words, our self-doubt impels us to prove our own worth through money and possessions.
The second house deals with money and moveable property (not real estate) and our attitudes toward wealth and material possessions. This house also tells us something about our earning capacity, how we meet our financial obligations, and how we save and budget.
Third House: Your Mind
Natural sign: Gemini
Natural ruler: Mercury
A lot of issues are lumped into this house: the intellect, communication, brothers and sisters, short journeys, conscious thinking, neighbors, and relatives. But this house actually represents daily activities in our lives, things we do automatically. The mental energy is analytical.
A short journey is a commute to work as opposed to a trip to Europe. Brothers, sisters, neighbors, and relatives refer to our experience of these people, not with the people themselves. It implies an unconscious ease that exists between people who have something in common.
Fourth House (IC): Your Roots
Natural sign: Cancer
Natural ruler: Moon
This house symbolizes emotional and physical security. For all of us, this begins with our family, homes, parents, and our sense of belonging.
Some discrepancy exists among astrologers as to whether the fourth house represents the mother or the father. It is often used to symbolize the primary nurturing parent; the primary provider and authoritarian figure is found in the tenth house. Over the course of a lifetime parents often exchange roles, but generally one will be more nurturing and the other more authoritarian. In later life, this house indicates how we support others.
Quite often, in doing family charts, the Sun sign of a parent or even a grandparent appears on the cusp of the fourth or tenth house. Or the Moon shows up in this house, in the parent's Sun sign. Sometimes, you may find that the Sun sign of a woman's spouse appears on the IC. When rectifying a chart, this is one of the things to look for.
In the fourth house, we also find issues related to real estate, the collective unconscious, and information regarding the last twenty years or so of a person's life.
Fifth House: Your Pleasures
Natural sign: Leo
Natural ruler: Sun
Pleasure is the core meaning of the fifth house, but because pleasure is something different to all of us, this can include creativity, children, love affairs, sex, gambling, meditating, running, parties, a nature walk, celebrations, gazing at a piece of art, or reading a book.
The children part of this house also refers to the act of creating them.
In this sense, Saturn placed here can indicate a possible stillbirth, abortion, or miscarriage, possibly involving the firstborn. But it can just as easily indicate a restriction or limitation on the pursuit of pleasure — someone too serious to have fun. The interpretation would depend on whose chart you're reading and the aspects to the house.
Sixth House: Health and Work
Natural sign: Virgo
Natural ruler: Mercury
Centuries ago, one of the definitions of this house concerned servants: handmaidens, stable boys, cooks, and maids — in other words, the chattel. In today's world it refers to the way we extend ourselves for others, and the services we perform without any thought of remuneration. It also refers to our general work conditions.
Health issues are also included here. But the illnesses associated with the sixth house are often linked to your work or job. Anything that stifles growth and self-expression — overwork, despising what you do, working just to pay the bills — can lead to illness.
Ultimately, the illness may trigger a transformation in consciousness that forces you to take a vacation, quit your dead-end job, or re-evaluate what you're doing. When that happens, health and hygiene awareness usually increases. In the healing period, it's important to follow your own intuition.
Seventh House (Descendant): Partnerships
Natural sign: Libra
Natural ruler: Venus
This house is about marriage and close partnerships of all kinds. It concerns how you relate to a significant other and how, in doing so, you often deal with an unexpressed aspect of yourself.
What is special about the seventh house?
This house refers to a partnership founded on mutual chemistry, on “magic.” While planets found in this house generally don't describe the significant other, they do, however, indicate a great deal about the type of person that would suit you.
When you love someone, you identify with that person. This is the kind of intimate relationship the seventh house addresses — a relationship that implies commitment. It can also refer to business partnerships where a commitment is made.
Eighth House: Your Instincts
Natural sign: Scorpio
Natural ruler: Pluto and Mars
This house is loaded. It's obsessed with death, sex, and taxes — with the occult tossed in just to muddle things. More specifically, it also includes death benefits, insurance, the partner's earning capacity, alimony, joint finances of any kind, and the recycling of goods.
Traditionally, it's known as the house of death. If that strikes you as bleak, then think of the eighth house as one of transformation. Death is one kind of transformation; sexuality is another; psychic and occult matters are yet another. The house is emotionally loaded because it deals with issues that most of us don't like to dwell on. This emotional impact, however, is why eighth-house events often feel fated or destined. This house relates to the internal energy that seeks outward growth, expansion, and experience.
Ninth House: Higher Mind
Natural sign: Sagittarius
Natural ruler: Jupiter
As the opposite of the third house, the ninth concerns higher ideals, the higher mind, philosophy, religion and spirituality, the law, foreign cultures, and long journeys. Through the ninth house we seek to understand the whole picture and our place in it. We reach out to experience and then try to assimilate the experience into a worldview, a belief system. This can be done through reading, education, and travel — all ninth-house pursuits.
Some astrologers assign higher education to the ninth house, but all educational pursuits fit into this house. The planets found here bear their unique individual stamp on how we experience and assimilate associated issues. The bottom line is that, through this house, we break out of old thought patterns and habits and take chances.
Tenth House (Midheaven): External Achievements
Natural sign: Capricorn
Natural ruler: Saturn
Where the sixth house covers what you do to earn a living, the tenth concerns your career or profession, work that provides a social role in the larger world. It's the work with which we identify ourselves and by which others identify us.
Clerical work, for instance, probably falls into the sixth house unless the individual identifies closely with the job. But if the clerical worker is a nationally known antique car collector who identifies and is identified in that field, then this would fall into the tenth house. This house also represents the authoritarian parent as well as our experience of authority figures.
Astrologer Robert Hand notes that the tenth house often indicates the direction in which a person must evolve toward transcendence. “The tenth can be a calling beyond the mere calling of how we make a living … how an individual can grow on the spiritual as well as the mental plane.”
Eleventh House: Friends and Ambitions
Natural sign: Aquarius
Natural ruler: Uranus
This house is about manifestation, about the power of manifestation through a group or collective consciousness. It took me a long time to understand about this.
In the eleventh house, we don't just get along with certain types of people; there are some people with whom we click immediately. Part of their belief system overlaps and parallels our own. With these people, we have an especially strong affinity and from this affinity rises a certain kind of power: the group of collective mind, the mind that works toward a common end, a shared ideal, and a particular goal.
This house can entail all kinds of networking: group charity work, a theater group, a sewing circle, a writers' group, a group of astrologers or psychics, or bridge players. It also entails computer networking. In each group, the collective mind helps us to stabilize our goals.
Signs and planets in this house offer clues about the types of friends and associations that not only benefit us but whom we might benefit as well. As astrologer Steven Forrest writes: “Establish goals. Find people who support them. Then live in the present moment. That is the secret of successful eleventh house navigation.”
Twelfth House: Your Personal Unconscious
Natural sign: Pisces
Natural ruler: Neptune
This house is typically considered to be negative and dark, the psychic garbage pail of the zodiac. In Medieval times, it was known as the house of troubles and indicated possibilities of imprisonment, illness, secret enemies, poverty, and dire misfortune. While such possibilities exist with this house, its core meaning is deeper.
The twelfth house represents the personal unconscious, the parts of ourselves that we've disowned — all that is hidden from our conscious perception. Here lie the dregs of early defeats and disillusionments, which ultimately were repressed and not integrated into the rest of our personality. Here, too, are aspects of ourselves that for one reason or another we don't want to express openly to others. These hidden parts of ourselves often come out later in life, surfacing as fears, weaknesses, or phobias that work against us.
Sometimes, these repressed aspects find expression in our most intimate relationships. The daughter of an alcoholic parent, for instance, may find herself confronting her childhood experiences in her relationship with an alcoholic spouse.
On a higher level, the twelfth house can embody spiritual, psychic, and mystical experiences that deepen our connection with the divine.
