The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 512, titled:
The Degree of the IC in Whole Sign Houses
With Chris Brennan and Pallas K. Augustine
Episode originally released on November 16, 2025
Original episode URL:
https://theastrologypodcast.com/2025/11/16/the-degree-of-the-ic-in-whole-sign-houses/
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released December 9th, 2025
Copyright © 2025 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Pallas K. Augustine, and we’re going to be talking about the floating IC as a sensitive point and what happens when it falls in different whole sign houses in the chart besides the 4th whole sign house and how it imports 4th house or IC significations which then double up in the whole sign house that it falls in. So hey, Pallas – thanks for joining me.
PALLAS K. AUGUSTINE: Hi. Thanks for having me.
CB: Yeah. I’m very excited to have you on the show; this is your first time on the show, and we’ve been talking about doing this for over a year now because you recently just published a book on the IC itself, right?
PKA: In 2022, when Jupiter in Pisces was conjunct my IC, we launched a Kickstarter to fund The IC: An Astrology of Coming Home. It was wildly successful, which was beautiful; I love my Kickstarter backers. And it took us a couple years to get it all together. Hugh Tran, a brilliant designer and astrologer, did the whole book too, and so it took us a couple years but we got it. It was beautiful. And then the first run after we fulfilled the Kickstarter backers’ orders sold out immediately. So it took us a while to come out with a second edition, but now we have a second edition of The IC. It’s an ebook and a print book, and it’s available, so I am talking about it more! And it was wonderful to get your invitation to talk about this topic here, because it’s one I think and talk about a lot.
CB: Yeah, definitely. And it was funny last year when we started talking about this, because your book was coming out right as I was releasing or about to release my deep dive into the 4th house in astrology. And I’d thought about doing one on the IC with you, but I wanted to finish the 5th house first, because that’s the other house where for a lot of people the IC – the floating IC – will either fall in the 4th whole sign house or the 3rd whole sign house or the 5th whole sign house. And once I recently finally did the 5th house episode, which I’ve just released over the course of the past few weeks, I finished sort of collecting a lot of example charts for those placements and feel like I have a much clearer picture now about that placement, even though I’ve understood it for almost like, 20 years now that I’ve been working with this concept of the IC as a floating point. Having demonstrated it, I feel good about now being able to have this discussion and talk about it more comprehensively, especially because one of the things that you did is we put out a survey over the past week asking people for examples. And we actually got a lot of great submissions, right?
PKA: So many, yeah! We got 245 over the course of just a couple days. And people were so vulnerable and sweet and honest, and I just want to extend a lot of gratitude to everyone who submitted. We can only talk about a handful today, but my research into this is ongoing. The IC book itself has 16 in-depth client case stories about ICs in different signs and then chart rulers in different whole sign houses as well. And so this work is just very near and dear to my heart, and it really touches me that people wanted to share, and we’ll share a few of them today.
CB: Brilliant. All right. Well, the majority of this episode will be us going through those submissions and talking about them. I’ll mention or reiterate a few of the examples that I found during the course of doing the houses series over the past year, but the main focus will be on sharing those chart examples that were submitted by listeners over the course of the past week. And then of course, people can get a hold of your book. Right now, you’re selling it exclusively through your website, right?
PKA: Through idolastellarum.com, there’s a shop there, and you can get the print and the ebook versions.
CB: Cool. All right. I’ll put the link to that in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website entry for this episode.
All right, so why don’t we set a foundation first for everything in IC language by talking about the IC and talking about the 4th house and talking about this concept that originally like, 20 years ago when I first came into astrology and like, I mean, ironically like many people I heard about the concept of whole sign houses coming in as a Placidus modern astrology use, and I was like, “That’s not a good system.” Like, “that doesn’t make any sense that the 4th house doesn’t start with the degree of the IC!” And I actually rejected the idea of whole sign houses for like, the first year after I heard from it. And it wasn’t until I learned all of Hellenistic astrology and I learned the whole system and how the system works together that I started to understand that perspective better. And now it’s been 20 years – literally 20 years – of me reviving that and using that idea that the degree of the IC can float around the bottom part of the chart as a sensitive point and import functionally like, IC or 4th house significations into whatever whole sign house it falls. But a lot of this comes back to the symbolism of what the IC and the 4th house represent, and you are the resident expert in that. So where do we start with that discussion?
PKA: Oh, there’s so many places to start. I just did a talk for the Washington State Astrological Association, and in that one, we used the concept of mycorrhizal fungi who are basically the mycelium in the soil who have a symbiotic relationship with the plants that grow in the soil. And it’s a huge network, and it’s how so many discoveries are being made about this kind of fungal network, this mycelium facilitating not only plant communication but also plant health. It acts almost as an immune system. And to me, the IC is so similar to that. And of course it’s sort of funny to talk about the IC out of relationship with the Midheaven since they’re intertwined; they’re the same axis, right? They float together around the chart. And so to me, the Midheaven are these what gets planted, right? Like, what blooms from the IC. And the like, mycelium that are down there. And it’s very common to talk about the IC through the metaphor of roots. And it is that, for sure, both in the familial sense and also in the land sense. And of course, these are where we see the 4th house topics start to come out. But it’s even more than that. Like, in my research, time and time again, the IC connected people into not only their lineages of family and home, but also their lineages of culture and craft and vocation and place and art, right? And so when we start playing with – when we kind of liberate the IC and the Midheaven from being only associated with the 4th and 10th, we start seeing – and if we work with clients, of course, I’m a consulting astrologer – all my work and research comes from my client research. It just opens up the possibilities for what people are able to see when they look at their IC. And so many people have such complicated relationships with their families that approaching the IC with this more open interpretation which using it within a whole sign house allows us to just – it’s so much more generative for people as they look at their lives, they look at their lived experiences, and they try to track these stories. And the IC, the depts that are available there, I’ve seen it do just even a slight awareness, right? Like, connecting into it, thinking about it, kind of returning it to its place in the chart as the foundation of the chart really allowing people honestly, like, gain more confidence in their life and more understanding of their place. And when we work in a kind of even remotely deterministic model, we kind of need that to be able to understand what we’re doing here, right, and who we’re connected with. And the IC is the strongest place that I’ve found that really connects people into that.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. And I like what you said there – one of the things that you mentioned that’s interesting is like, sometimes people have the perception that whole sign houses is more simplistic and less complex when you’re not working with all of these intermediate cusps that are floating around. But ironically, when it comes to the IC floating around the bottom half of the chart and the MC floating around the top half, and then blending significations functionally of two different houses or domains or ranges of significations together, it actually creates a much more complex and specific range of significations than you might expect. So there’s actually a greater complexity to that approach that I think until you’ve had some experience working with it and talking with clients that have the IC in different houses that might be unexpected if you’re not familiar with that approach.
PKA: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things too – and we’re not doing any 4th house IC examples today since you covered much of that in your 4th house series. But there’s a way that it actually allowing the IC, even if people are working in quadrant houses, allowing the whole sign house counted from the Ascendant to be part of the delineation of the Midheaven and IC is a really powerful tool in this way. And it actually makes it more specific and special when the IC does fall in the 4th whole sign house, when it’s not just given. So sort of part of my pet theory about the whole thing in terms of connecting the work that, you know, we did in the book, and the work that I do with clients into the traditions that we’re working within is that it’s possible that the IC has taken on a lot of the 4th house significations because of its association with the 4th house cusp in quadrant systems, right? But that’s not necessarily inherent, and certainly in many of the stories that we see, it’s not an inherent connection to that familial rooting. And it’s often when it’s in a different house than the 4th, there’s often an absence of that kind of familial rooting or land or real estate or these kind of 4th house topics. Or those topics have – we’re able to reckon with 4th house topics in a way that we would reckon with any house topics, right, rather than just immediately assuming that these are people’s foundations that support their life and support their Midheaven contributions.
CB: Okay, yeah. Well, let’s talk about that, because that’s something for me… For me, it’s like, there’s two ways to go about researching this and approaching it and two ways that you really see it come up in practice. And one of those is just by looking at natal charts and looking at examples of charts where you have the 4th whole sign house and then you have the IC when it falls in usually either like, let’s say the 5th house or the 3rd whole sign house. And that’s one way of like, approaching researching this topic. And then the second way of approaching researching it is the same thing, but instead looking at the sequence of what happens with the transits. So for example, let’s say the IC is in the 5th whole sign house. That means, for example, a person will get a Saturn transit that’ll go through their 4th whole sign house for two or three years. And then immediately following that, they’ll get a Saturn transit that will go through their 5th whole sign house, but it will also pass over their IC. And one of the things I’ve always shown is how you’ll see a continuation of for lack of a better word like, 4th house topics that go across the 4th whole sign house and the 5th whole sign house because of the presence of the IC extending some of those 4th house significations into the next sign. And that’s one of the best ways to test this and show and see for yourself that it really does work, especially when you experience a transit like that. But for me, as a result of that, I don’t make a lot of symbolic distinction between or I see a lot of overlap between the 4th whole sign house having similar 4th house significations and the IC having or importing similar 4th house significations. Do you see it the same, or do you see it differently than how I’ve stated it there?
PKA: Yeah, no, I think that’s absolutely true. I mean, it happens with profections as well where you’ll have a 4th house year, and that will bring in the ruler’s significations of that. And then if you have your IC in the 5th, when you move into that house year, you’re going to have IC activations as well, and there’s a piece there where it’s – I mean, this is part of the fun, and this is part of the research of figuring out and especially when you’re talking to clients and doing this work with clients and bringing this in, or you come across an IC activation and it’s in a different if it’s in the 3rd or it’s the 5th. And being able to help them parse apart like, what is the 4th house versus what is the IC, and what assumptions have we brought into that? And how does our IC function in relationship with our 4th house, no matter where the IC is? Because that’s a huge issue. And that comes out in many of the examples, right? It’s like, people – we actually, one of the funny things about the submissions is that I had to dig and dig and dig to find an IC ruler in the 4th house example. And the one that I did find, it’s someone who just doesn’t get it. Just doesn’t see the difference, because 4th house stuff for them is like, really crappy. And their IC is in Taurus, and it should be like, a little bit better, but their IC ruler’s in Aries, and so they’re wrapped up together in this weird way. But if you kind of pull it out, you look at the 5th house significations, you look at the exaltation ruler of the IC as well as the domicile ruler – this is such a potent piece of the puzzle. And then you see that the 3rd house gets pulled in, and Pisces gets pulled in, and their Ascendant does, and there’s this whole story that their 4th house is kind of literally hot and painful to the touch. Right? But when you pull out the IC and you reckon with it alongside 4th house stuff – when you’re like, okay, this is painful; this is literally part of your IC signature that 4th house stuff is painful. Right? And then it just opens it up so you can find connections in all the other ways and the ways that the houses relate together through their rulers and yeah, it’s juicy.
CB: Yeah, totally. So let’s – before we get into the examples, maybe let’s give some significations and some meanings of the 4th house and the IC in order to ground the basic and most fundamental symbolic meanings of those things in astrology and therefore what sort of things we would expect to find if this technique works once we start seeing the IC importing those significations into different whole sign houses. So what are some of our primary topics? I mean, for me, it’s primarily like, the parents traditionally and themes of family, and then secondarily the home and the living situation, and also finally the private life because the 4th is opposite to the 10th, which is the most visible and public part of the chart. So the 4th is like, the most hidden part of the chart, and symbolically it’s also the place that is under the earth below our feet from our perspective astronomically. So a lot of the significations come from there.
PKA: Yeah. When you’re thinking about the geometry of it, there’s the IC and then there’s the point that’s square the Ascendant-Descendant is always going to be in the 4th and the 10th, and I think that that’s like, a really helpful way to sort of think about it. The question that we asked in our survey is, “Considering the IC as our home, parents, roots, tethers, ancestors, source, familial stories, and experiences, how do you see the IC importing those topics into the whole sign house that it falls in your chart?” And then “Are there any significant overlaps?” And I feel like that’s – like, for a lot of people, their roots and their tethers and this sort of supportive mycelium soil is in their biological family lineages – or adoptive, of course, but the family lineages of the 4th house. But sometimes the family that ends up being important, that ends up being the actual nourishing, connective force in their life is not their bio family. Right? It is not the people they grew up with. Often with 5th house topics – and so this is just sort of expanding the keywords that we might think about, right – is like, chosen family comes up so much when it comes to 5th house ICs. And ancestors of culture, say, right? So if someone is an artist, say they’re a dancer, the lineage of dancers before them ends up being really important to their life. And 3rd house, it’s the siblings is certainly a huge one that constantly comes up. But those siblings take on that like, familial 4th house-y kind of root system. Right? So so many of the 3rd house IC examples that we received – are people who in some way were parentified. Right? Like, they became a parent, or there was one of their siblings kind of became their parent while they were growing up. And that’s very common for that 3rd house IC topic. And also that one, one thing that really comes up – and I think this has to do with the fact that throughout history, our places of worship, like where we gathered together to worship and experience devotion and togetherness in that way, religion and spirituality, were in our neighborhood. Right? Like, we went to the church because the church was within walking distance for the kids, right? And I think the 3rd house so often, and 3rd house ICs especially, people end up connecting to that familial root system sort of that we associate with the 4th house that is a 4th house topic ends up in part being within their religious traditions and within their spiritual connections. And that’s also something that when we kind of expand out these keywords, they are – like, those things can be 4th house too if they overlap, right? And then also they are so just IC stuff, because that can – the way that it moves through, it really adds to our grab bag of topics.
CB: Sure. Yeah. So and then I know we’re gonna go through each house, so maybe we’ll present a synthesis of significations at the top of each house. But I just wanna make sure we’re really clear about so our primary significations for the IC in this episode as we’re talking about home, parents, roots, tethers, ancestors, source, familial stories and experiences, and then I would add the private life. Actually, I need to add a couple other ones that really came up in the 4th house one, which is sometimes matters surrounding the end of life or even death and mortality can come up in the 4th/IC more often than you might think – like, endings. And then the final one was – what was the final one? I guess it’s just, yeah, that idea of that which is not just private but also ideas of that which is hidden or even ideas of secrecy can come up because it is that lowest, most hidden part of the chart that’s under the feet astronomically and therefore not visible. So sometimes it’s that which is behind the scenes and not visible even though it’s sometimes playing a very important role in managing things.
PKA: Yeah, for sure. There is definitely the hiddenness is – I mean, we literally – you can’t see the IC. And I mean, I had – Christina Manthanin, who is a practicing astrologer in Finland who’s practiced for 40 years. She pointed out to me while we were doing this research that in certain very, very northern places in Scandinavia or basically places that are circumpolar, the IC can actually go above the horizon because it is those days that the midsummer or the solstice days where the Sun doesn’t even go above the horizon or doesn’t set. Right? And so there’s —
CB: Right.
PKA: — these really extreme moments where even when it’s above the horizon, it’s still not visible because the horizon is not visible at those moments in the sky that we’re actually looking at. And so I think understanding the IC as this place – I often talk about it like you can’t actually even really look at it. And this is part of why, you know, there’s not that much in the literature on it! There’s not that much being done on it is because it’s kind of like feeling around in the dark and seeing what you bump up against, right, rather than being able to. So as much as like the technique gives us these magical, mysterious ways to be able to access the IC like we’re doing today in order to understand these narratives, at the same time, the IC itself is this place of mystery. It is this place of secrets, and it’s often things that… I say in the book it’s like this partially, you know, there’s some demons down there. I mean, there’s demons everywhere in the chart, but there’s like, some rough ones down there. And a lot of people are kind of scared to look down there, and sometimes for good reason. But oftentimes those stories that come with the IC – those really scary ones – they’re also protective in this sort of mycelium immune system kind of way that supports our whole being and all the experiences we go through.
CB: Right. Yeah, for sure. There was – I remember in the big 4th house episode we did last year, there was one story of a famous person who was trans but they were a musician and they wanted to play in musician circles so they had to pass as a man. And they grew up their entire life essentially trying to passing as a man. And then when they passed away, their family discovered they were trans, which was a surprise and made a media sensation at the time. But they had a lot of stuff going on in their 4th house. And so it was a really tangible example of that idea of secrets or that which is hidden sometimes being really important in a person’s life because sometimes in that instance, there was like, you know, wanting to achieve their career dreams and their passion for music, and only one way to do that was to keep that like, a part of themself secret, for example, and to hide that, because they otherwise could either not be able to pursue their passion and their dreams or otherwise could face dangers – like, actual threats to their life. So that was a really stunning example I remember in the 4th house episode that impressed on me sometimes the importance of the hidden aspect of things occasionally.
PKA: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it can literally scary down there for sure. And the 4th house itself can carry so much power. I mean, being the end of the matter, right? Being the end of life and also even just the association with real estate is, you know? In this world, it’s associated with private property. And when we’re in a homelessness crisis, right, and housing crisis and scarcity, it’s the 4th house becomes a really loaded place in many, many people’s charts. And the IC takes on quite a bit of that.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. All right, are there any other 4th house things that we should summarize as just really important meanings that you got to or focused on, especially in the book, before we jump into the chart examples and start going through the houses?
PKA: I think that covers most of it, especially when we start getting into the examples and we start seeing how these things play out through people’s lives.
CB: Okay. Excellent. All right, so how we gonna do this – we’re gonna go through – you wanna go through the smaller houses first, or do you wanna go through the – that’s the route?
PKA: Yeah. So I think maybe a little bit of like, astronomical context might be helpful. So there are – it is possible for the IC to be – it’s most often in the 3rd, 4th, or 5th house. And sometimes it’s in the 2nd or the 6th, although those are very – those only happen at extreme latitudes, and they’re quite rare. So I just have a couple examples from each of those from the people who wrote in. And I think they can kind of go together as being these sort of extreme outliers that we can see, and we can kind of see that a little bit in their stories. And then we can move on to sort of a more robust discussion of the much more common 3rd house and 5th house.
CB: Okay. So I like that idea of showing astronomically. Let me show a chart really quickly for like —
PKA: Yeah.
CB: — the moment to demonstrate that. So here is the chart; I’ll back it up for now here in Denver for when we started with late – we started with late Sagittarius rising. This is our election today. And so let’s say this chart, for example – Sagittarius is rising. Like, late Sagittarius is rising, which means Sagittarius is the first whole sign house. Capricorn therefore, because it’s the second sign, is the 2nd whole sign house. Aquarius is the 3rd house and Pisces is the 4th whole sign house. So most of our 4th house significations are showing up there in Pisces in the entirety of that sign from zero to 30 degrees. But one of the unique things about whole sign houses is we find the degree of the IC in this instance over at 21 degrees of Aries, so it’s in the 5th whole sign house, and therefore according to the theory of the technique, we would see an importing of let’s say 4th house significations into the 5th whole sign house where there’s a doubling up. And one of the things that’s interesting and unique about the whole sign perspective is it doesn’t just start at the IC even though the IC is gonna definitely be the most sensitive point where there would be a culmination of 4th house significations. But really, the 4th house significations that are being imported from the IC start at the beginning of the sign and last until the end of the sign. So that’s really important conceptual thing we need to convey that in this approach, the IC acts as a sensitive point in the same way that the Lot of Fortune or the Ascendant act as sensitive points, which is to say that they are sensitive points that mark or designate the entirety of the sign that they fall in with their significations. So that’s how, for example, the Lot of Fortune was used in ancient astrology where whatever sign it falls in, that entire sign gets marked with Lot of Fortune significations. Or the degree of the Ascendant because it falls in 28 degrees of Sagittarius in this chart, it marks the entirety of Sagittarius with first house significations, all the way from zero degrees of Sagittarius to the last degree. So that’s an important part of the conceptual model that is good to convey at this stage.
PKA: Yeah, absolutely. And thinking about the way transits work to it as well – like, thinking about the IC as this culmination point, right? And so when we’re working at it with transits, it’s like, the whole sign of approach activates the IC in a way and then of course fades out as it moves through the rest of the sign. But that’s a really – thinking about them as these sensitive points. Because it is kind of a node, right? Like, it is a place where the ecliptic and the meridian contact each other. Of course, the Midheaven is the one we can see, and in this chart, it’s in the 11th house. And so with Venus right there, so sweet – I love these charts.
CB: Yeah. This is our election today.
PKA: Yeah! And so of course there’s a lot of ways that people kind of shorthand define the Midheaven and IC, right? And they’re not necessarily the most astronomically accurate, but as like, the Midheaven being say, the highest point in the sky. Like, that’s kind of true, but depending on what time of day you’re looking at, it’s not necessarily the highest the Midheaven is gonna get in that day because it’s the way – it’s like, the ecliptic moves – well, we move, of course, but the ecliptic looks like it moves from east to west as the Sun moves around. And then the meridian is what is just our north-south line. So here for me, it’s like, this is south. And so we have this north-south line. And wherever they meet, and of course this changes unless we’re on the equator, this changes connected to what season of the year we’re in. And so the Midheaven rises and lowers in itself and moves through the sky. And so you can see it’s always that southern point, but with the ecliptic moving, we see when we move the chart forward, the Midheaven also moves through the zodiac.
CB: Right. And that’s a really important point – I’ll animate it in just a second – but that this is where the crux of the issue, and this is the issue that has to be resolved, that we’ve been working on over the past 20 years and have been taking steps to articulate better. But the issue as you just pointed out is that the meridian, which is what we call let’s say the degree of the MC, which is the floating point that we’ll be talking about, is the north-south line basically. Like, the meridian points to where north is basically. And the planets reach their highest elevation at the degree of the MC. So there’s some sense of reaching the highest point of something with the degree of the MC, and also some notion of it being associated with north and the north-south axis. However, the 90 degree point – once you find the degree of the Ascendant, which is the eastern horizon, the point that’s exactly 90 degrees from that, which in this chart since 28 degrees of Sagittarius is rising, that means 28 degrees of Virgo would be the 90 degree point. That’s actually the 90 degree point if you’re like, standing on the earth and you look directly overhead – that’s actually what you would find. And the fixed stars, for example, around that point are what you would see if you looked directly upwards. And the ancient Mesopotamian astrologers would use those 90 degree point stars in order to tell time at night. So there’s this secondary similar overlap of meaning of like, you know, the stars that are at the top of the sky or the part of the sky that is directly above your head. And that’s the fundamental symbolic and conceptual – you could either frame it as a conflict here where we have two separate points that are representing similar overlapping significations of like, 10th house, Midheaven significations, or you could say if it’s not a conflict you could say that there’s two points in the sky fundamentally that have similar and complementary and overlapping meanings, and therefore it’s not just one thing or the other, which is the trap that astrologers wanna fall into. And it’s why some of the house division debates get so intense, because each astrologer that just adopts one approach – like, if you’re just adopting the quadrant house systems, the Midheaven very obviously symbolically and in chart work does represent 10th house things. And that is an experience that is very obvious and strongly felt, because astronomically and symbolically it does have some of those notions of culmination and highest elevation of planets and things like that. But then people that work with whole sign also see that the 10th whole sign house, the zodiacal sign that was culminating at the moment of birth, also shares and carries these 10th house highest point most public and visible point significations as well. And so part of the goal here in what you and I are doing today is we’re showing one of the best ways that we found to reconcile that, which is taking into account both and recognizing it’s not an either/or situation, but in fact both are true at the same time. And what’s – sorry, one last thing before – that approach is not something we’re just inventing, but this approach is actually something Vettius Valens talked about in the 2nd century —
PKA: Yes.
CB: — and outlined. And that’s why for 20 years now, I’ve been using this approach in the first place, because when I read the full anthology back in 2005, Valens has this chapter in like, book five of the anthology where he starts talking about exactly this approach and outlining this notion of the degree of the MC importing 10th house significations and doubling up into whatever whole sign house it falls. So already in Valens, he’s reconciling these two different frameworks and he’s showing you the path forward to using both by recognizing that they both share similar significations and can be used together rather than something that’s in competition. And there’s something really beautiful and elegant about that.
PKA: Totally. Yeah. I’m very much a secret third thing coded person in basically every aspect of my life! Including —
CB: Right.
PKA: — my astrological techniques. And actually, my natal chart – which we’re not gonna share today, but it is this problem. Because my Sun is actually square my Ascendant-Descendant, but my actual Midheaven is in the far other side of the sign. So in quadrant house systems, I’m firmly a 9th house Sun, but anyone who knows me – like, there’s 10th house-y qualities to my Virgo Sun. Like, absolutely. And that square to the Ascendant-Descendant is this exactly. There’s so much going on with it. And I think squares to the angles, squares to the Midheaven-IC, of course, are that same thing if we take it from the north-south axis. And of course, for anyone who wants to understand more of the astronomy, I highly recommend going on YouTube and looking up astronomy lectures on the celestial sphere, and that will explain this meridian, the celestial equator stuff, all this stuff. And of course, this changes whether you’re in the northern and southern hemisphere as well. But the Midheaven-IC is always that northern-southern thing, whether you’re in the northern or southern hemisphere; it just changes what it looks like. And I think there’s something really potent about being able to understand squares to the angles as just as active points as the angles themselves. And of course, this is square to the Midheaven-IC is the vertex/anti-vertex, which I don’t work a lot in that frame in my practice. But squares to the Midheaven-IC are a very classically slept on function, I think, when people are looking at their transits. And their profections and any other timing technique that activates the zodiac, basically. So I think that doing what we’re doing here, yeah, it really brings out how those techniques really do function. Like, it’s almost always the secret third thing when you’re actually talking to people and working with people’s lives, and I really value that.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And that takes some – there’s a learning curve to get used to that and getting used to being comfortable working with that sort of ambiguity sometimes. But once you do, and once you truly unlock it, it just allows for all of this complexity and this nuance to come out, and you start seeing the shades of gray and the in-betweens and things like that, and it just creates such a richer backdrop for doing chart delineations. So one last thing —
PKA: Yeah.
CB: — I’ll mention. Oh, go ahead.
PKA: Oh, I was just gonna say, for people who aren’t more familiar with my work, I sort of have this simultaneous education in traditional Hellenistic revival as well as more psychological and archetypal lineages as well. And so even though when you’re talking to me, I basically base all my delineations on whole sign houses, I’m usually actually looking at a Placidus chart when I’m looking at a chart in a consultation session because I love seeing the angles as they are because I understand it to be like, representative of the actual sky and the horizon, right? But I’m working, I’m blending these understandings of the whole sign houses of the squares to the angles of understanding the Midheaven and IC as these floating, important points. And I think that there’s, I don’t know, there’s just a very generative way to think about that. It’s very, you know, mercurial Jupiterian, which I definitely am. But it’s delicious, honestly, when it comes to astrology.
CB: Yeah. I actually think that’s one of the reasons that it’s harder to study the history of whole sign houses and when whole sign houses fell out of usage, because I think a lot of the astrologers from the medieval and Renaissance periods were like you in that they would cast a quadrant chart to have the quadrant house positions, but they would just obviously implicitly be able to understand what the whole sign positions were at the same time, because you just count the signs. And so sometimes when you go back and look and people are like, well, we don’t see a whole sign chart in such-and-such author, it’s because it’s such a simple and basic concept. But like you, sometimes it makes more sense to cast a quadrant chart and then just to infer the secondary positions on top of that.
PKA: Yeah. I think counting signs from the Ascendant is also a skill that especially beginners astrologers should definitely get in the habit of, because once you do that, you can do derivative houses, you can do Fortune houses like, very easily, just all in your head. And that’s one of the sort of pet beginner techniques that I think – and basically when you do that, you’re using whole sign houses no matter what kind of chart you’re looking at. And yeah, I think that’s totally accurate in terms of this used to just be normal.
CB: Yeah. Well, and there’s like, one chart example where like, Morinus does that and he talks about it and gives you a peek that sometimes that approach persisted much longer into the tradition that’s in like, the 17th century than you might expect.
So there was one last point to make about that I wanted to state was I think part of what we’re talking about here I always come back to and have been developing over the past 10 years is what I call the mercurial nature of astrology, which is that astrology was always traditionally represented by Mercury, and part of that is that astrologers are acting as interpreters and translators of the language of the stars and the sky. But also there’s a very practical reason for that that I see come up over and over again in astrology, which is that we often run into these dilemmas in astrology that seem like dilemmas where we have two different majorly seemingly competing ways of doing some specific technical thing where it seems like an either/or situation, and astrologers sometimes come down really hard in picking one approach or the other. But so oftentimes I think the answer to this is just going back to realizing that astrology is a mercurial or Mercury-based thing, and with Mercury, whenever you have those things, it’s always – it’s not necessarily either/or, but it’s both. And so we see that sometimes with like, you know, tropical versus sidereal or whole sign versus quadrant houses, or there can be like, major aspects versus minor aspects or what have you. It just comes up over and over again, these seemingly contrasting things where it’s like, how can two things be true at once, and so people aren’t used to thinking like that because it’s not everyone’s normal way of thinking. But it’s something I think that’s really valuable and important for astrologers to get used to thinking, because it is inherent to the very nature of astrology.
PKA: Absolutely. Yeah. I’m definitely in the “astrology as divination” school, and being an astrologer as being a diviner. And it’s more than translation. Like, yes, it is translation, but it’s more than translation. And that so often every translator knows that there’s a million ways to translate something, right? And it depends on, of course, the context and when we’re working with clients it depends on their lived experience and what they’re working with. And this is music to my ears for sure.
CB: Yeah. For sure. All right. Let’s jump into it. Let’s get into this —
PKA: Yeah!
CB: We’re gonna start. You wanna start with the 2nd house, right?
PKA: Mm-hmm!
CB: Oh yeah, did I mention… I’ll get to that later. But let’s start with the 2nd house. And so 2nd house significations for me are things like money, possessions, material things associated with the person’s life like wealth and other things like that. Are there any other 2nd house significations you usually throw in?
PKA: Yeah. I think I take a pretty expansive idea of resources, which of course is material wealth and income kind of, and there’s being in the 2nd house, that below-the-horizon, next to the first, there is this idea of agency when it comes to those things versus the 8th, which is so similar but that’s like, other people’s agency when it comes to material wealth and things. So I do see things about the body and land coming up in 2nd house too, even though those might be things we give to the first or the 4th. Those can come up. And I think especially in the culture we’re living in where that tends to be so optimized and so productivity oriented, the idea of material wealth and income is often tied into one’s body and one’s health, and so those things can come up when we’re talking to people as well when it comes to 2nd house topics.
CB: Got it. All right. So let’s share our first chart example, which is by a listener or somebody that filled out the form named Johanna right?
PKA: Yeah. Johanna lives in Helsinki, Finland, so Johanna’s the person who actually alerted me to the fact that it’s actually quite common up there, right, in these extreme latitudes for people to have their IC in the first house as well. So we ended up adding that as an option. We didn’t get any examples, but she showed me a couple that she just knows on her own. And Johanna’s chart is – I love it. It was my “if you put this date and time into Stellarium software to see the actual sky, you can see how the Sun and Uranus are in relationship to each other at the sort of like, highest point in the sky if anyone wants to be a real nerd and go all the way for it. So I’m actually just gonna read what Johanna wrote, because I think it’s so indicative. I guess we could go through what we’re looking at here as well, right? So we have this —
CB: Yeah.
PKA: — Cancer IC.
CB: So yeah, just for the audio listeners. So Gemini rising, Cancer IC.
PKA: Yeah, and Johanna has a Moon in Sag right below the Descendant, and then separating from a square from Saturn in Pisces in the 10th, which also feels kind of relevant. The Ascendant ruler for her Gemini Ascendant is a stationary Mercury in Aquarius conjunct Mars in the 9th, which also feels relevant to her story.
So Johanna shares, “I was born in 1994 into a family in the midst of a major recession in Finland which was caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union and earlier financial market liberalization and foreign currency loans. A large number of Finns became heavily over-indebted and lost all their assets. My family was one of them, as my grandparents were merchants and my aunt’s husband was an entrepreneur. My relatives lost practically all their property during the recession, and some of them are still repaying debts well into the 2020s.”
So of course, with the IC in the 2nd house, this puts the Midheaven in the 8th house. So this would be a generational signature that people with this Uranus-Neptune in Capricorn of her generation living in Finland at this time would be living with.
“From a young age, I had a feeling that I could be the one to get an education, become wealthy, and pay off my family’s debts, even though as a child I didn’t understand any of it. I’ve never received any money from my parents, but I’ve always been generous and tried to help my over-indebted relatives throughout my life. I started doing occasional jobs at the age of 13 to build up my own assets, and later I went on to study economics to better understand the causes of the 1990s recession and the mistakes made in handling it. Of course, I also thought that if I became an economist, I could get a well-paying job. I’ve always been interested in Finnish history, especially my family’s history. Because we had no property, we also had no history. Our family’s farms, houses, and cottages had been repossessed.”
And so here I think we can see another piece around that looking at the 4th house as distinct from the 2nd here. So the 4th house is Virgo, and so sharing her Ascendant ruler is also that Mercury with Mars in the 9th in Aquarius.
CB: Right.
PKA: “As a child —”
CB: And she —
PKA: Yeah.
CB: — is motivated by her family’s situation to like, go to school and study economics, which is like, a 9th house thing.
PKA: Yeah. And then also seeing that being that 8th house Midheaven being ruled by that Saturn in Pisces in the 10th and being in that square to that Moon, which is her IC ruler.
CB: Right. Yeah, that makes sense that that focal point is just with the IC —
PKA: Yeah.
CB: — which is importing home and family significations into the 2nd whole sign house of money and finances, that was a major foundational thing early in her life was the unstable family financial situation.
PKA: And this thing that completely – it wasn’t just family financial struggles, right? It completely uprooted not only her national identity, which is also something that we often associate with the 4th, so bringing that into that 2nd house and really just entangling them completely together so that it impacted her entire life. She also shares a cute note here too speaking through her Moon. So her spouse’s Sun and Mercury is in Cancer exactly on her IC.
CB: Nice!
PKA: Which is so cute! And there’s one piece I want to pull out from her story as well. And one thing that’s funny – part of the reason she submitted is because, of course, my name Pallas – there’s a national park wildlife reserve in Lapland in Finland called Pallas-Tunturi, which is an essential part of her story and is part of why she’s an example here, because it’s just so beautiful. So when we’re thinking about the IC as a sensitive point, I feel like this is maybe the only example we have here of a transit or a lunation – eclipses especially, but lunations as well – activating the point of the IC and making really wild things happen. So she writes,
“In 2023, the New Moon in Cancer aligned exactly with my IC. At the time, I was living with my partner -” of course, this Moon ruler of the IC in the 7th – “in a rented apartment in Helsinki on the verge of burnout because I couldn’t finish my university thesis after transitioning into fulltime work.” More 2nd house stuff. “Due to the war in Ukraine, interest rates rose significantly in Finland, and many private real estate investors were forced to sell their investment properties. That happened to us at the end of 2022, and shortly after the New Moon in August 2023…” Oh yeah, the New Moon in August ‘22. “Our landlord” – right, more 8th house stuff – “informed us that we had to move out because he was selling the apartment. We decided to move to Lapland and work remotely from there for a year. I wanted to reconnect with my roots as my grandparents were originally from Lapland, and the Moon happened right around the Full Moon in Cancer before Christmas. In Lapland, I found my extended family with whom contact had been lost, and discovered that my grandfather’s childhood home from 1909 was still standing. This is extremely rare, as Nazi Germany burned down almost all buildings in Finnish Lapland during World War Two, making the house a valuable part of our cultural heritage. Living in the middle of the Pallas-Tunturi Fells for a year helped me recover from burnout, and I found a sense of home. Located about 250 kilometers north of the arctic circle, Pallas-Tunturi offered a truly wonderful experience. Surrounded by the serene silence of arctic nature, the untouched wilderness, northern lights, and crisp mountain air, I felt deeply connected to something timeless and healing. It was in that vast quiet landscape that I rediscovered both my roots and myself.”
CB: Wow.
PKA: Yeah.
CB: Beautiful.
PKA: Yeah. Thinking about that Saturn ruling the Midheaven, 8th house, squaring the Moon as the Moon as IC ruler in the 7th – like, moving with your partner because you get evicted and finding yourself in the like, arctic mountains.
CB: Yeah. So there was definitely with the lunations that were happening on the IC in the 2nd house, there were financial things that were happening at that time in terms of needing to work full-time in order to make money and pay bills. And then having weird things start happening with the home and living situation due to the landlords at the time, and having this push for a move and a relocation with the partner that leads to a reconnecting with one’s roots and one’s familial tradition in some ways.
PKA: Such a beautiful example.
CB: Yeah.
PKA: Such a like, yeah. I mean, I haven’t seen that many 2nd house IC examples, even in my client work when I was doing my research. So being able to see these and everyone who submitted those was really special.
CB: Yeah. And it’s important, because sometimes it’s through the timing things like she was sharing that you really see it come out at the same time, because you start seeing overlapping in this instance 2nd house and 4th house significations becoming prominent in the life in the same way, in a way that’s overlapping and reinforcing each other. So I did mean to say that even though in this instance, for example, while there’s the entire sign is marked with IC and 4th house significations in Cancer as well as 2nd house significations, the IC is a sensitive point, there is almost like, a graph that you could draw where there’s an intensity that kind of like, peaks at the degree of the IC and then declines afterwards. But —
PKA: Absolutely.
CB: So it marks the entire sign with IC significations, whatever sign it’s importing those 4th house significations into, but the actual degree and the degrees surrounding it are often experienced, especially in transits, as a period of heightened intensity with respect to the IC significations.
PKA: Absolutely. A hundred percent.
CB: Yeah. So we’ll see that come up more. Okay, awesome. Well, thanks to Johanna for submitting that. That was a great example.
PKA: Next we have this is our second and last 2nd house example. It’s Amber. And she’s in – or was born in – Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1991. Should we be reading the birth information out for the audio listeners?
CB: No.
PKA: No? Okay.
CB: That’s okay. Let’s just skip it. We’ll just – especially because we wanna get through, if we wanna get through our 20 examples, let’s just keep it concise to —
PKA: Yeah.
CB: — especially the IC placement.
PKA: Yeah. Agreed. Okay, so this is another Gemini rising, Cancer IC example. We have Moon in Capricorn, of course, in the 8th with the Midheaven. And Amber shares,
“Material wealth and income for me is like trying to collect water with a sieve. No matter how easily it flows, it always slips away. I’ve always had a steady job, yet any kind of material abundance remains elusive, diluted by a tide of hobbies, distractions, and quiet timidity that keeps me from expanding my horizons in the tangible world.” So 2nd house ruled by the Moon in detriment, “The maternal element looms large. My relationship with my mother was tense growing up. I often felt like a fish out of water, never quite the daughter she wanted, though I can’t fault her for her financial generosity in times of need.” So we see this Moon – IC ruler Moon – in the 8th with the North Node, right, offering generosity but not necessarily the kind that Amber felt she needed, which is not an uncommon thing. And that South Node on the IC in the 2nd house itself being this sieve that she talks about where her own ability to make money feels – she says, “These issues have always felt amplified, even against what could otherwise be seen as a very fortunate life.”
CB: Okay. So yeah, there’s some financial things as well as a little bit of like, self-worth type things that are tied up with the IC being in the 2nd house.
PKA: Yeah. And one other thing she shares – “Often in unexpected ways,” she does end up being “frequently gifted or inherited things.” So for example, “during one failed attempt to move abroad, a stranger gave me 50 dollars when I had nothing left, enabling me to get to my sister’s house. Or when my partner and I moved into an unfurnished flat after a no-fault eviction” – right, more eviction things – “his mother gifted us an entire living room set up. And on a more permanent note, my parents have put their house in my name so I will inherit it – probably my only tangible asset, which is ironic given my lifelong desire to get away.
CB: Wow. Okay.
PKA: Yeah.
CB: Nice. Absolutely.
PKA: Feels so spot on.
CB: That’s good. And something we should mention, I forgot to mention, that for the structure of the actual survey itself that we asked people two primary questions basically, or there were three fields. And the first field was like, the first field said what – if any – ways if you IC falls outside of the 4th whole sign house, how do IC significations overlap with the significations of the house that it falls in in any notable ways? And that’s like, the first paragraph or reading. And then the second question we asked was what house is the ruler of your IC placed in, and do you see any overlaps or connections between the IC house and the whole sign house that it’s in and the house that the ruler is in? And this is where some of the additional delineations are coming from.
PKA: Yeah.
CB: Cool.
PKA: Really – people did so well; I was so impressed with everyone. So we’ll go into 6th house ICs, because these are the other examples of ones that are very not common, and you have to be – like, the upper latitudes in the northern hemisphere up in Scandinavia are quite populated, right? And quite a few English speakers and I guess people who are into astrology, which is cool. So we did get a number of 2nd house and 6th house examples from that. So our next example’s Jo. This is the one —
CB: So real quick —
PKA: Sorry. Yeah?
CB: 6th house significations real quick —
PKA: Yes!
CB: — for me are things like work, health, illness, and sometimes subordinates or people that work for you can come up in the 6th house.
PKA: Yeah. Servitude for sure I think is one that comes up, and that can be something when we’re dealing with the IC, stuff more often I’ve seen like, IC rulers in the 6th, there can be inherited experiences of that, and the way that the trauma of servitude and of course in some examples like, literal slavery, which is a 6th house association traditionally, how that can be passed through the trauma of that through family lines is something that can come up in 6th house examples.
CB: Okay.
PKA: Yeah. So this is the one that we don’t want to share the place.
CB: The place. Okay. So let me just get rid of the data altogether then, and I will just share the chart itself.
PKA: Great.
CB: Which is a chart with Sagittarius rising and the IC is in Taurus in the 6th whole sign house.
PKA: Yes. So this is a quick one, but I wanted to share this one because this was not the only Sag Ascendant, Taurus 6th house IC that we received that had an association with a family farm. And one of the other ones was literally a family diary farm, so when we’re thinking about Taurus, that is very, very, very spot on, and the 6th house as well.
CB: Right.
PKA: 6th house also being domestic animals, too.
CB: That’s what I was just thinking. It was also —
PKA: Yeah.
CB: — yeah, we often find animals and like, pets in the 6th house.
PKA: And 12th house too, of course, with like, larger animals as well being – I think cows you’re probably sort of one and the other. They belong in both houses in different times. But so Amber, just real quick, shares,
“My generation is the 10th on the same family, very very far north. A very practical family with seasonal routines. Maybe not emotionally present, but practical and reliable, always helping each other.” And with the ruler of Taurus is Venus, of course, and Jo’s Venus is at one degree Virgo right, you know, near the top of the chart even though it’s quite far from the 12th house Midheaven. And she shares, “Venus is in my 10th, and I work with remediation of soil, removing hidden pollution, cleaning, tidying, generational pollution projects from the subsurface of the soil.”
CB: Wow.
PKA: Just so good!
CB: Incredible.
PKA: I love that. Yeah.
CB: I like also the simplicity of the initial delineation of just like, the IC importing family significations into the 6th house and —
PKA: Yes.
CB: — the family has run a farm for 10 generations. So it’s like, literally the family and animals are the two primary archetypes coming together there in this instance.
PKA: Yeah. And I mean, we can also see some actual 4th house whole sign significations too being like, say, the real estate aspect of it, right? Because it’s Pisces in her chart, and Jupiter is dignified in Sagittarius in her first house as well, which is just like, that is a fortunate familial connection in terms of… So this one, some of the other examples as well, we can see this is a quite positive, albeit maybe not emotionally present, but there is a way that seeing the condition and placement and angularity of the IC sign rulers will often show not just the circumstances, but then how people feel toward the circumstances, right? Which we’ve seen that in a couple of these examples so far where it’s like, it might be quite fortunate circumstances, but how it actually lands is not so appreciated depending on other factors.
CB: Yeah. Sometimes intermediate astrology students struggle with that sometimes where they’ll have a placement in a certain part of their chart that’s supposed to mean something, but there’ll be like, a maltreatment or there’ll be something tricky about it and it will actually be indicating a negation of those topics rather than an affirmation of those. So saying no to it rather than saying yes. And people will sometimes struggle with that, because they assume the placement is always supposed to be an affirmative. But sometimes what’s being indicated in your chart is like, a negation or that you won’t do that thing or that you won’t feel good about that thing or that there’s a problem there in some way.
PKA: Hundred percent. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we have one more 6th house example, and that’s the Cap rising one.
CB: Okay.
PKA: And this is an example from Norway.
CB: And this is okay to share the data?
PKA: Yes. Yeah. And so this is Capricorn rising, with a Gemini 6th house IC.
CB: Okay.
PKA: So she shares, “What I inherited and struggle with the most is the servitude work ethic of both my parents. I’ve always sacrificed my physical needs to serve others. My father worked as a carpenter but got partly disabled due to injuries from the work wearing him out. He was not good at taking care of himself, eating or rest-wise. My mother had to change jobs to a consultant desk job from being a nurse, which is also taking a toll on her and she always works overtime.” So there is a Venus on the IC is here, but it’s still in the 6th house, right? And so those difficulties of that servitude and then of course of illness being another 6th house one that we didn’t mention being – well, maybe we did – but being very, very prominent often. And so IC in the 6th being parents that overwork themselves to the point of illness feels very, very spot on.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah. That’s very literal and makes a lot of sense.
PKA: So the ruler of the IC here bringing in a little bit of the 5th house example, because the ruler of that IC is Mercury in Taurus, which is very close to the Sun, combust, in the 5th house. And so Cap rising studied art in 20s, and drawing and art in general has always dealt with the themes such as daily routines, daily life, and work. “I find the most inspiration at my work and have made several drawing portraits of my colleagues and my working space. Work was also very fun for me; I really love to work. But I have a hard time finding jobs that are compatible with my own health.”
CB: Brilliant.
PKA: Also just inherited illness in relationship to family is like, such a potent piece of this part, too.
CB: Yeah. There’s such a – because there’s a mutual reception here where Gemini is the 6th whole sign house and also contains the IC and it’s ruled by Mercury, which is in Taurus in the 5th whole sign house, and then the ruler of the 5th house is Venus which is placed in the 6th whole sign house conjunct the degree of the IC. Whenever there’s an exchange of signs between the house rulers, we’ve seen this over and over again in the houses series, that it creates a strong connection between those two areas of the life. And this is a really good vivid example of that.
PKA: And of course, her own work being fun as well, because we have the other benefic is Jupiter in Scorpio in her 11th house ruling the 12th house Midheaven, which is also where her Moon is. And that feels like that brings in some of that joy to her work as well, even if it’s probably – and she didn’t share, but – it’s even probably in 12th house topics or it will be eventually.
CB: Okay. Yeah. All right. So that’s the 6th house, yeah?
PKA: That’s it for 2nd and 6th.
CB: Okay. So those are the two – in terms of the majority of the charts that we collected in terms of where the majority of our audience is, I think those are the outlier houses that we wanted to start with first. But the majority of examples that we have, and the majority of people have, the IC either in the 4th whole sign house or in the 3rd whole sign house or in the 5th whole sign house. So that is what we’re gonna talk about next, and why don’t we – shall we start with the 3rd house?
PKA: Oh yeah. 3rd house is so rich. I feel like it’s one of the houses that people often have some trouble with because it seems like the significations don’t really connect, but when you get to that root of like, the joy of the Moon, I feel like it really connects so much of the 3rd house.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So when we did the 3rd house series, it was like, communication was a core one, but also siblings, relatives, neighbors, the city that you live in and the surrounding neighborhood. Sometimes friends came up with the 3rd house, especially local friends or friends that you grew up with in your neighborhood as a result of proximity. And finally short-distance travel and traveling around your city and your local environment and things like that were all very prominent themes.
PKA: Yeah, and bringing in that neighborhood vibe too with like, the idea of a temple or your neighborhood gathering place, which is like, sometimes a mall, you know? But oftentimes, especially historically, it was a church or a mosque or a temple, and that being quite a prominent 3rd house association too often.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah. For sure. All right, so who’s our first 3rd house —
PKA: So —
CB: Actually, let me give a couple of mine just to reiterate.
PKA: Yeah, oh yeah, sure.
CB: Because that sets up an interesting context. One of my favorite ones from the 5th house one that I just did that I happened to find in that context was the birth chart of Serena Williams. And this is – I found this really brilliant, because Serena Williams has Taurus rising, and the IC is in Cancer in the 3rd whole sign house. And the ruler of the IC in the 3rd whole sign house is the Moon, which is placed in the 5th house. So the way that this manifested in a very specific and literal way in her life is her parents, which is the IC, raised her and her sister – Venus Williams – to be chess [tennis] champions. And especially her father developed this like, strategy or this plan in order to make them like, the biggest chess [tennis] champions in the world, which was successful and they eventually actually became. And Serena is the younger of the two sisters – this is in tennis – and Serena, because she was the younger sibling, her older sister, Venus, is the one that started competing first, and so Venus sort of opened the path and then Serena followed afterwards. But then eventually when they became older, because they were the two at the top of the field, they ended up competing with each other. And Serena, I think, often is sometimes interpreted as having come out on top or having won in that battle when it comes down to certain things. But I just thought it was brilliant that in this instance, it’s like, the IC – which is the parents – teaching her and her sister tennis together, which is the 3rd house – siblings – and then the focus is on sports, which fundamentally is normally like, fun and games. It’s something people do for leisurely activities, which is the 5th house – the ruler of it being in the 5th house. But in this instance, because it’s like, the Moon is the sect light because this is a night chart, and this became part of her life’s work was becoming the biggest tennis champion in the world. But it was very much tied up with her parents and especially her sibling.
PKA: Yeah. Wow. Yeah, the 5th house – well, we’ll get into that in the 5th house example. But definitely games and gambling comes up in the 5th for sure. I love that like, Venus in Scorpio being ruled by but then also like, just separating from the Mars in the 4th too and just like, how that 4th house business can – you know, it’s got this Virgo Moon, but there is this probably kind of itchy quality and the competition aspect of it as well —
CB: Yeah —
PKA: — being down there.
CB: — I mean, with the Mars in the 4th whole sign house, there’s like, things involving her father and the role he played in pushing them and sometimes being somewhat overbearing. And you know, that was the movie that came out a few years ago that Will Smith played her father and they called it King Richard, which really speaks to that Mars in Leo in the 4th house placement and the role he played in the family and then also just interestingly in terms of that was like, the Oscar that Will Smith won and then he went up and like, slapped Chris Rock and the controversy that broke out surrounding that and just like, yeah. There was like, some Mars stuff there as well. But you get both.
PKA: Yeah, 9th house South Node with the Midheaven too with the North Node with the IC and just like, the way that the nodes are so wobbly and kind of chaotic and really draw focus. So that 3rd house sibling dynamic getting so much popular attention as well —
CB: For sure.
PKA: — feels like part of that.
CB: So that was one, and then to contrast with that, I just found a new one last month where I was just like, flipping through channels on Netflix after recording a long episode and taking it easy one day. And there was this new Netflix documentary that had just come out on Charlie Sheen, and I used him like, a long time ago as a chart example of Saturn in the 10th house in a night chart, because he was like, the highest paid actor in Hollywood and then he went on this crazy drug bender or something like that, and he just like, threw it all away and walked away from it all in this fiery almost like, downfall at the time. But he’s since cleaned up and gone into recovery, and they released a Netflix documentary about him that coincided with the release of a book in September when the eclipse happened in Pisces. And it’s partially him also I think trying to clean up his image or control the narrative a little bit about his story. But those issues aside, and there were many problematic issues in terms of him, so I’m certainly not endorsing any of that, but he has Gemini rising and the IC is in Leo in the 3rd whole sign house. And Mercury, the ruler of the Gemini Ascendant, is there in Leo with that overlapping IC and 3rd house placement. And what was very fascinating about the documentary is that it focused a lot on the important role that his brother and his father played in his life, and his brother especially Charlie grew up shooting home movies with him because the father himself was the famous actor Martin Sheen, who was in like, famous movies like Apocalypse Now, so his father was an actor and that inspired Charlie and his brother to also start acting and shooting movies early on as they were growing up together on a home camcorder. And his brother was – or is – Emilio Estevez, who became a famous actor as well a little bit before Charlie in the 1980s going into the 1990s. And then that was part of – him and Charlie got a lot of experience shooting home movies together, and they were often imitating what their father did, which their father was sometimes in like, violent movies where he was getting killed. And so they would sometimes like, recreate these violent movies in their home movies where they’re getting killed in different ways. And then his older brother getting into acting first impressed a sense of competition in the sense of like, Charlie wanted that. He could see the access and the things his brother was getting access to, and so he partially followed in his steps into acting to achieve the same things. So there was just a lot of like, 3rd and 4th house significations that were very intense and very overlapping with this ruler of the Ascendant being in the 3rd whole sign house of siblings, but also copresent with the IC of parents and family at the same time.
PKA: And seeing the opposition between that Sun ruling the IC and Saturn ruling the Midheaven and just like, often, you know, the back and forth of a downfall and a comeback and giving up on things. It’s like, that very classic push-and-pull with Pluto down there too.
CB: Right. For sure. Yeah.
PKA: And that being wrapped up in the story, yeah.
CB: Yeah. There was a quote at one point I wrote down that made me think of that Sun-Saturn opposition or the Sun conjunct Uranus and Pluto in the 4th whole sign house where he said,
“We watched Dad die a lot.” And he was talking about like, movies; they were like, growing up and like, his father would die in these movies. And so, you know, that left a little impression of some sort. And I just thought that was such an interesting quote with that Sun-Uranus-Pluto conjunction in the 4th whole sign house opposing the Saturn. And that’s one of the tricky things is you have to – when you’re doing this – is reconcile that those 4th whole sign house placements are gonna mean something, and they’re gonna contribute something to the person’s life, but then those IC significations are gonna contribute something as well. Because the other part throughout the documentary is that his father was like, constantly going to bat for him and constantly trying to help him through his drug addiction and trying to sometimes even when Charlie didn’t want it, his father was trying to do what was best by doing a press conference one time after he overdosed to say, “My son overdosed,” and to like, air his private dirty laundry in order to try to force him to get help. But yeah, sometimes that’s both good things and tricky things.
PKA: Yeah. And when you see something like this where the IC house that’s other than the 4th and the 4th house are wrapped up, like, there’s often these conversations happening between the planets, right? Between the house rulerships. The IC can often signal what ends up being most important when you’re talking to a client – what ends up being most kind of affectively or somatically important to them. Because when we understand the angles to be the thing that is relevant and hyperlocalized to exactly where on earth we were born at that time, versus the other motions of the planets as being sort of how the angles frame that, right, there’s a way that the angles themselves – and of course this makes sense with the Ascendant being us, being the body, being that moment, but it happens with the angles as well. So it’s like, even though there is this heavy 4th house emphasis and it does rule the IC, that IC and that sibling relationship does have this not just psychological but formative importance when it comes to someone’s relational field and how they simply experience the whole world and tend to think of themselves as well, but also other people, and really wherever the IC is. And we saw that in the 6th and 2nd house examples, right? It tends to kind of structure the whole world around someone.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and that’s what important here is like, if you just looked at this in a quadrant framework, you would get the 4th house emphasis with the ruler of the Ascendant after the IC in the 4th quadrant house. But you would miss the 3rd house component, the major role that his famous brother Emilio Estevez, who is like, the same time Charlie was a leading actor in Hollywood, you have this other guy who was his brother that’s also, you know, very prominent and playing in, you know, Mighty Ducks was a pretty big movie. I don’t know if you’re the same age timeframe as I am, but —
PKA: It’s huge!
CB: So yeah. And there’s other stuff there. I am trying to and I would like to develop more of a conceptual distinction between what the whole sign house placements indicate versus what the quadrant or IC placement indicate. But currently, I just see a similarity and an overlapping of significations rather than something that I can firmly say, “This thing is doing this, and this thing is doing this.” And I’m still open to somebody like, presenting that or still developing this as I go further into the houses series about creating a firmer distinction if there is one. But I’m also open to that there may not be one, just because of dealing with two different frames of reference that have similar meanings of certain sectors that we’re looking at.
PKA: Yeah, the IC is canonically – I mean, once you get to the Midheaven, I feel like that might end up making this more clear, because when you see the Midheaven floating around in the different signs up top and you actually can trace those to people’s like, more conscious and more obvious contributions, I think that’s probably going to be more clear than the IC because the IC, as we talked about, by its nature, there’s secrets down there. Like, when I sit with people in sessions and we’re focusing on the IC, so often they have no idea when they walk into it. Right? When they walk in to talk to me, and then we end up talking about all these other things, and then eventually we kind of like, spiral around into exactly, and they’re like, “Oh, that’s my IC!” Right? But it takes a lot of looking around, right? Wandering around in the dark, bumping into things in order to be able to tell where you are when you’re trying to look at the IC.
CB: Right. Yeah. For sure. I guess I just like, for myself, for example, I have my Aquarius rising and I have my 10th whole sign house as Scorpio, and when I have transits – like, I just had Mars go through my 10th whole sign house and like, within 24 hours of Mars going into the 10th whole sign house, my website was crashed catastrophically and was hacked. And I dealt with that over the course of the past month, month and a half, as Mars was going through my 10th whole sign house. But then because my Midheaven is early in Sagittarius in my 11th whole sign house, I know that there’s gonna be a continuation of 10th house themes as Mars goes in there, and it will add an additional element which is also like, 11th house themes when Mars goes in there. But I don’t see experientially in terms of transits a major distinction; instead, I just see a continuation of similar themes between those two so that I’m not – well, I haven’t fully set down my final word on this. I’m not committed to that there definitely is a like, conceptual distinction between let’s say the whole sign versus the quadrant house placements. Sometimes people try to say like, maybe the quadrant house placements are more psychological and the whole sign placements are more literal. But the problem with that, I think, is that may just be a byproduct of people associating quadrant houses with modern astrology and like, whole sign with more predictive ancient, Hellenistic or traditional astrology. So that may just be a temporary byproduct of where we find ourselves at this place in time rather than something that’s true when you get down to it with charts.
PKA: Yeah, I think that’s not the case. I definitely – I resist, even though I have that psychological, modern astrology training, I definitely understand the subjective and objective experiences, right, to be a lot less different than people actually think and to be a byproduct of American cultural narcissism mostly, right? And basically a lot of my work serves as a kind of antidote or repair to all the damage that has done throughout people’s families, and I think accepting that the chart is both the whole world and that our experience of the world is representative in some way that is valid and sort of repairing that disconnection. And so toward a distinction between the quadrant and the whole sign, I’m of the mercurial mind. Right? I think that we can see everything in both, likely, and there’s ways that understanding the whole sign house approach when we’re thinking about the angles especially and we’re thinking about the Midheaven-IC especially, I do think it kind of reroutes us. Like, not just in the lineage of astrology, right, of hundreds and thousands and millenia of understanding the way that the earth and sky are so connected within these very elegant schemas. There’s something so rich in that. But it’s also a way that it allows quadrant house cusps to be a tool in the toolkit that is grounded in these ways that allows us, I think, more complexity and more nuance in part because of the seeming simplicity of it.
CB: Right.
PKA: Which doesn’t answer your question, but!
CB: Okay! Well, maybe by the end of this – okay, you have until the end of this episode to —
PKA: Okay!
CB: — answer definitively one of the greatest questions of modern contemporary astrology. So let me give just one more example, and then we’ll get into the —
PKA: Yeah.
CB: — user-submitted ones. This was a really good one that we found during the 3rd house series that my friend Nick Dagan Best had originally pointed out to me. But this is the birth chart of Jack Nicholson, and he was born with Leo rising, and the degree of the IC is in Libra in the 3rd whole sign house, the place of siblings. And the ruler of this is a retrograde Venus which is in Aries on the degree of the Midheaven in the 9th whole sign house. So what was important about this example is that Jack Nicholson grew up believing that the person who was his biological mother was actually his sister, because she had him when she was younger out of wedlock, and it was in like, the 1930s so it was more of a social or societal issue at the time where there would have been a stigma. So instead, his grandmother raised him, and he always grew up believing that his grandmother was his mother, which is also a 3rd house signification. We’re getting like, grandparents here in the 3rd house and we’re also getting siblings and we’re also getting parents. And it’s funny, because it’s ruled by this retrograde Venus in Aries, and it’s like, a weird situation with his mother and his grandmother. And the further bizarre part is he didn’t learn about this until after both of them had already passed away and a news reporter like, found out and approached him about it while he was promoting a movie. And he actually had to ask his older – I believe it was his sister about this, and she knew, and she had to ‘fess up at that point and tell him that that was true. And it was like, this huge moment for him that changed everything he knew about his origins and his early life and the person he thought was his mother versus his sister and everything else. So I thought this was one of the most brilliant examples of having the IC, the place of parents, in the 3rd whole sign house, which is the place of siblings as well as other extended relatives, that I’ve ever seen.
PKA: Yeah. And having that Mars in Sag with the North Node in that trine and ruling, right, the Venus Midheaven too and the fact that like, it did come out eventually feels very prominent and tender as well, rather than it just staying a secret forever.
CB: Right. Or I mean, the other part is like, Pluto’s at 26 degrees of Cancer, and it’s squaring the —
PKA: Yeah.
CB: — IC at 22 Libra, and it’s also squaring that Venus, the ruler of the IC, at 24 degrees of Aries. So there’s this Pluto element to things in the 12th house and some of the secrecy and other types of significations that come up with the 12th.
PKA: Yeah, and within a minute, that opposition with Jupiter ruling the Saturn 8th, too, which of course is opposite the Moon in the 12th – the other place that secrets like that are kept.
CB: Yeah. All right, so those are the last of my examples that I found while I’ve been doing this research over the past year. Tell me about some of the submissions that came in from —
PKA: Yeah!
CB: — listeners that have the IC in the 3rd.
PKA: Okay, so I think we won’t pull up charts for all of these because some of them are pretty quick.
CB: Okay.
PKA: But we will pull up a chart for our first one, who is Gia. So that’s the first 3rd house IC.
CB: So this is Gia’s chart who has Taurus rising, the IC in Cancer in the 3rd whole sign house?
PKA: Yeah. So this is one of our youngest examples. I tried to allow for some representative spread sampling, but we were also looking for a certain amount of representation in terms of chart ruler signs and things like that, and then also the actual experiences. So I didn’t necessarily choose like, the absolute astrologer best examples or the most intense ones or things like that, but ones that gave a sort of nice overview of examples of what kinds of charts you might see. So of course, this is the IC ruler with the IC, with a Moon in the 3rd house. And then we would expect the siblings to show up especially in this one, and this is interesting and just like, a content warning that I do mention stillbirth in this although it’s not graphic or anything like that. So Gia shares,
“I do not have any siblings, although I am a rainbow baby. The stillbirth of my sister profoundly affected my family and resulted in my mother’s mental decline and her passing. My immediate family is just my dad and me. We both have the Moon in Cancer, Sun in Pisces and Mercury in Aries,” so there’s a direct father connection as well. “I have been blessed with friends who consider me to be siblings. They have offered me food, shelter, and companionship; I have spent holidays with their families and siblings. I also have a close relationship with my dad’s brother,” so this is an uncle; this is more of that 3rd house extended family, extended relatives. “For someone with no living siblings, I’m very blessed with a multiple of sibling-like relationships.” And also shares that basically everything in their chart ends back to that Mars in Scorpio on the Descendant, but except for the Moon. And so they take the Moon very – like, feels a lot of responsibility with the Moon. Protecting home and the expansion of that to the earth as home, as well as loved ones, is something that Gia writes and speaks about often. And so there’s communication themes there too in being a writer.
CB: Nice.
PKA: Yeah.
CB: Nice. I like that. This is a good example of what we were talking about earlier. It’s a mixed example, but where there can sometimes be a negation of things. Because it’s like, we have Saturn in Aries in the 12th house, and it’s sort of overcoming through a superior square the Moon in Cancer and the IC in the 3rd, and there’s like, this negation of the topic of siblings that happens. Was it an older sibling or a younger sibling? Did they specify?
PKA: Would be older, because if they’re considered a rainbow baby, that means that their parents had tried to have a child before and couldn’t, and then they got their rainbow baby who is the baby who comes often after a miscarriage or stillbirth or just fertility struggles generally.
CB: Got it. Okay, yeah. I was one of those as well. Sometimes one of the things that Rhetorius talks about in the 6th century is how the 12th house was the sign that was rising prior to birth, and so sometimes it indicates that which happens prior to when you were born. And I think that’s part of what’s going on here as well in terms of the Saturn in the 12th and that overcoming square with the Cancer planets. But then it’s like, you also have the two benefics are also in Aries overcoming that, sending in other testimony, more positive testimony to that 3rd house which is helping to affirm the Moon being in its own sign. So it’s like you’re getting a mixed case of negation from Saturn and then affirmation from Venus and Jupiter.
PKA: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Yeah. Okay, great.
PKA: Beautiful.
CB: Good example. So what’s the next one?
PKA: Yeah, I think this is our one Scorpio IC ruler example, so why don’t you pull up the chart. So this is Meg, 3rd house; it should be the next one.
CB: Here is the chart. So we’re looking at Gemini rising with the IC in Leo chart?
PKA: Yes. Gemini rising, IC in Leo, Sun in Scorpio with a whole stellium of Saturn, Sun, Moon, South Node, Pluto, and Venus.
CB: Nice.
PKA: So this is an example of IC ruler in the 6th, and then also with the Midheaven ruler copresent with the IC ruler as well, which often shows up in whole intensity of emphasis in whatever house it’s in, and so even in a cadent house such as this one.
So Meg shares that she has always been the black sheep of the family, despite being the oldest of four girls. So her siblings have a very significant impact of her life. Her sisters live “conventional” lives, stayed within a certain radius of where they grew up, all got married to men, have children, versus Meg is single, childfree, and moved to another state. She has typical sibling relationships with them; sometimes they fight like crazy, sometimes they’re besties. But she feels a weird pressure to try and live up to their standards even though “as the oldest I was supposed to pave the way.” And she does reference the Sun-Saturn conjunction as being part of this kind of, which I suppose is almost an inferiority complex. She also shares that the nine degree Leo, which is her IC, is also a family lineage. That was her mom’s Moon to the degree and grandmother’s Midheaven was also nine degrees Leo. And so there’s a bit of breaking away from this. I think the copresence with the Moon in Scorpio and the Venus in Scorpio let alone with the South Node and Saturn in a night chart and Pluto too, it feels quite black sheep with all of that being ruled by a 5th house Mars in Libra even.
CB: Right. Yeah. Just a night chart Saturn, and you have the most positive and challenging planet in Scorpio on either side of that Sun as the ruler of the 3rd house and the IC, and just you get a lot of those heaviness of those feelings of responsibility due to the Sun-Saturn conjunction ruling that, as she said.
PKA: Hundred percent. The 6th house comes in, and she shares she has always had an almost obsessive desire to control her siblings’ health from the standpoint of worrying about their safety and wanting them to be healthy and well. “I cannot stand about them being sick or hurt; I am the person who always sends my family articles about the latest diseases that has popped up, reminding them to get their vaccinations, panicking about covid, et cetera.” But she also shares that this has caused friction in the family to the point that she put her foot down last year and didn’t end up going home for Christmas for the first time ever because of some of these health concerns and the divisiveness and friction that she experienced in doing that even though it was the right thing to do. So that’s also very, very 6th, very separation from family even when the family is that… Oh, well, I guess also there’s the 4th house being ruled by Virgo as well as the Ascendant in Gemini, right, being in the 7th with the Descendant in Sagittarius. And so that’s also a planet in detriment having a lot of say over the situation.
CB: Sure. Having the ruler of the 3rd house and the 4th house in the 6th house of illness and health and conjunct Saturn in a night chart and just like you said a feeling of distance or even alienation in that instance as a result of the focus on health issues related to the family and the siblings.
PKA: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
PKA: That’s a really strong 3rd house Leo example.
CB: Definitely.
PKA: In kindness to Meg, and of course everyone else sharing these very vulnerable, often painful things that we do often find at the IC.
CB: Definitely. All right, let’s move on.
PKA: Let’s see, who do we want to do next? The next one I think is actually more of a Midheaven example, so maybe you’ll want this when you get around to doing that.
CB: Yeah.
PKA: We’ll go to Victoria, who is a 3rd house Libra IC. And I love this example so much; this was one of my favorites.
CB: Okay, so we got Leo rising; we got the IC in late Libra in the 3rd whole sign house along with the Sun, Mars, and Mercury in a night chart.
PKA: Ruled by Venus in Sag in the 5th. And so when we’re thinking about these house topics, we can see how the 3rd, 4th, and 5th get kind of pulled together in this example just so clearly. So Victoria shares, “I am an only child but have kept the same group of friends since middle school who feel like sisters to me. In terms of neighbors, I’ve always made friends with and maintained friendships with my neighbors, even after I move. I also like to make friends with the people working at stores I frequent.” This is so 3rd house. Having like, a neighborhood errand route is, as a 3rd house person myself, an extremely important aspect of 3rd house life. And so Venus in Sag ruling the 5th – or in the 5th, rather – and she used to coordinate weddings and do floral design. Worked at a law firm for a few years after she became a mom, but now she’s a stay-at-home mom. She spends most of her time doing 3rd house things now and driving around, running errands, chatting with friends on the phone, shopping. And always have some home decor project going on. So this is so IC. “Really lucky at thrifting and finding cool stuff on the side of the road, which is technically my old neighbor’s stuff.” I feel like that’s such a cute example. And this is one of my favorite parts, and this is very dignified Saturn opposite exalted Jupiter, too, I feel like in the 6th and 12th, though we’re not talking about that, but it feels relevant —
CB: Right.
PKA: — because it’s square all that stuff in the IC. So when she was doing floral design, she shares, “I had a nonprofit that collected past sale by date flowers from local grocers and the arrangements from events I coordinated to give to hospice and long-term care facilities. I wasn’t aware of the astrology at the time, but in retrospect it tied in the 3rd – driving around to pick up stuff from venues and markets – the 5th – creating floral designs – and 12th where I have Jupiter in Cancer – emotionally caring for people in institutions.”
CB: Wow. Nice.
PKA: Spot on, right? And —
CB: Yeah, that’s pretty good.
PKA: — she wasn’t sure if we were gonna follow up or not, so she shared, “If y’all do this thing on Saturday and want to chat, would you please be so kind as to give me a head’s up? I’ll be at my neighbor’s annual cowboy cookout party!”
CB: Nice!
PKA: This feels so like, Venus in Sag 5th house ruling a Libra IC.
CB: Yeah, the role of parties in association with the 5th house was something that was – I didn’t not recognize, but it became much more prominent when we did the 5th house series and I remember now there was one of the examples I forgot to include here was there was a listener who had the IC in the 5th whole sign house, and they said when they grew up their family was constantly hosting parties, and that that was like, a major part of their life, and that the idea of hosting parties at home continued on into adulthood in a major way.
PKA: Yes. Hundred percent. Yeah, we’ll see some of that in a couple of the 5th house examples if we get to those ones.
CB: This example —
PKA: Yeah.
CB: — also brought up the topic of early childhood education, like kindergarten through high school basically, or anything below college and how that really does – even though that’s more of a modern thing – like, we really did see that come up very prominently in charts very frequently in the 3rd house.
PKA: Yeah. Well, when you think that like, even before such structured collective public schooling – like, public schooling’s fairly new, right, in the history of humanity. And the idea that like, it was your neighbors. Like, you had kids, it was the families, it was like, your neighbor’s families were constantly taking in the kids. There is an early childhood component to the 3rd house, and also like, churches and temples and these places were places – I mean, they still are to a certain extent, but in a more limited space – but they’re places of childcare. And that feels like one of the connections to the 3rd house for sure.
CB: Totally. That makes so much sense. And also the idea that we even still have today sometimes of the image of like, your entire schooling is like, in your neighborhood or pretty local to you for your entire life until you hit that point when you’re around like, 18 and then you go away to college and it’s the first time for many people that you’re like, moving out of your home or the image you see of parents helping their kid to move to college across to a different state or something like that.
PKA: Yeah. Hundred percent 3rd house things. I love that.
CB: Totally. All right, cool.
PKA: Let’s pull up Amelia.
CB: Okay. There we go.
PKA: This is a 3rd house Virgo IC, and this Cancer rising Virgo 3rd house is one of the most common 3rd houses I see coming from where my clients are mostly, which is North America and Europe. So this is one that there was quite a few examples of real spot on things. And so —
CB: This is Cancer rising, IC in late Virgo conjunct Saturn, and Jupiter is also in the 3rd whole sign house in Virgo with those two placements in a day chart.
PKA: Yeah. And this one is – so there’s quite a lot going on in this one, but the thing I wanna pull out the most is that this person – so she shares, “In my early school age years,” which we were just talking about, “I was boarded or privately fostered out to families” so she could go to a better school while her mother worked in the city because the commute was too long daily.
CB: Wow.
PKA: And the father left or abandoned their family when she was only six months old, which is I feel like there’s that Saturn on the IC hangs very heavy. 3rd house piece of this, and then we’re looking at the Virgo IC with Mercury in Pisces with the Midheaven in the 9th. And so this boarding situation morphed into more long-term situations when her mother left for up to three months out of the year to do solitary Buddhist retreats. And so then she – yeah! So then she was boarded out to families in that Buddhist community, and then eventually moved abroad. Her mother eventually moved abroad to be closer to her guru. So she shares she was colloquially called a dharma brat, so she was born and raised as a white Westerner into a Tibetan Buddhist religion, and her whole childhood and all the experiences from early education to traveling abroad to being boarded out with other families were dictated around the culture of this religious institution and mother’s spiritual pursuits for better or worse. And so we see this, yeah, Midheaven ruler —
CB: How literal!
PKA: Right? Midheaven ruler too – Jupiter being in Virgo with Saturn with the IC, and that being like, the mother’s spiritual pursuits creating displacement of her own from her family. And then her moving abroad as well.
CB: Incredible. That’s just absolutely incredible. And it’s like, how do you… I’m trying… Like, how do you get that without looking at it from this perspective and like, seeing…
PKA: Yeah.
CB: Because that’s such a unique and complex delineation, but we can kind of see it perfectly here with that, you know, Saturn on the IC in the 3rd whole sign house ruled by Mercury in the 9th by – I guess it’s by sign and by quadrant. Yeah, that’s just brilliant, though.
PKA: Yeah.
CB: Cool. Okay. And then not to get – I know there’s additional things that are being contributed by —
PKA: Yes.
CB: — Venus ruling the 4th whole sign house and being placed in the 12th, but yeah, that’s pretty good.
PKA: Yeah.
CB: All right.
PKA: I love that. Okay, so we’ll do one more 3rd house. Wait, is that right? Yeah, one more 3rd house. So this is S. So this is another Virgo example, so this will give us some ability to sort of see how different Mercuries function.
CB: Okay. So we got —
PKA: And then the —
CB: — Cancer rising.
PKA: Cancer rising.
CB: IC in Virgo in the 3rd with Jupiter and the ruler this time is Mercury in Aries in the 10th whole sign house.
PKA: So, “My IC is in the 3rd whole sign house,” but also another one without actual siblings. Only child. Childhood was notably very isolating and lonely. “My parents were refugees, so this involved a lot of administrative work on my part as a child as I could read and write English better than them even from an early age. Unfortunately, these responsibilities have carried on into my adult life. I also have Jupiter stationing direct in my 3rd house, so I think it’s an important house for me.” And then the ruler being Mercury in Aries in the 10th, “Dad started a business when I was a teenager, and my mom and I started working for him. I’ve now been running that business as they are no longer able to because of their age and bad health. I have to do this for a couple more years, as it supports them financially until they reach retirement age.” So that 10th house ruler being such a like, visible part of their life and being such an important large part of their life, but at the same time being in the 10th versus their actual Midheaven’s in the 9th. Right? And so it’s not necessarily what they want to be doing or what they would feel compelled to do, but is a major part of their story. And the translation immigration paperwork piece of things is that Jupiter in Virgo with the IC in the 3rd is really spot on.
CB: Yeah. That’s really interesting, just the travel component of the 3rd house is really important here. And obviously they have 9th house stuff going on with the Moon and Mars there in a day chart. But the IC in the 3rd house and just how all of the declining houses, the 3rd, 6th, 9th, and 12th can bring in travel significations and that element of the parents being refugees. And then because they could read and write English better than their parents how they would have ended up helping them to communicate basically, which is the 3rd house component, but it’s being brought into play for the parents which is the IC.
PKA: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Also shared, “We moved a lot when I was a child, maybe 20 times. This was common whilst we were waiting for permanent residency. Sometimes this made it so I had to travel to school for two hours each way. Other times, I was just a 10-minute walk from school.” So that’s so Virgo IC 3rd house, yeah, with the Jupiter in Virgo down there too.
CB: Absolutely, yeah. So moving around – IC – constantly was causing issues with early childhood schooling and a feeling of like, unsettledness there.
PKA: Yeah.
CB: Nice.
PKA: Yeah.
CB: All right.
PKA: 5th house!
CB: Okay, so that’s it for the 3rd house. Okay! So —
PKA: Yeah, I think so.
CB: — that was good. So that was really good. I think we saw a lot of good elements and we brought in almost all of the significations that we mentioned at the beginning and also remembered some new ones during the course of that. So that is the IC in the 3rd whole sign house. So now we’re gonna skip the IC in the 4th whole sign house and we’re gonna jump into our other big section, and I think it’s actually our last section, with the degree of the IC in the 5th whole sign house.
PKA: Yeah.
CB: What are our – so our 5th house significations – I just did a whole episode on this – are things like primarily children; the 5th house indicates the topic of children. But the 5th house also indicates traditionally the place of pleasures and fun and enjoyment. It can indicate games and leisurely activities. It can also relate heavily to the topic of sex and sexuality comes up as very prominent with the 5th house. Is there any other major things I forgot to mention?
PKA: Those are most of them, for sure. Yeah. Like, art being a big one – art and children. Literal babies.
CB: Yeah, creativity. The idea or the concept of creation or that which you create, as well as that which you contribute and through your contribution or creation of that, that which may survive you or become part of your legacy in some sense.
PKA: Yeah, hundred percent.
CB: Maybe I should give really quickly some —
PKA: Oh yeah.
CB: — of my ones that we’ve already given in the other series. Some of my celebrity ones. So one of those was Francis Ford Coppola, who’s a famous movie director who directed The Godfather and Apocalypse Now and a bunch of other things like that. He was born with Capricorn rising and the IC is in Taurus in the 5th whole sign house. And one of the things that he would do that was really important to him is that he would bring his family wherever he was shooting a movie, even if that was like, in a different country. He would like, uproot the entire family and take them all over there. So famously when he shot Apocalypse Now in I think it was like, the Phillipines or somewhere, he took his entire family over there for months even though it ended up being a famously long and troubled and sort of like, disastrous production, which I think his wife even shot a documentary about it at one point that was released later and became very famous. But that was – shooting movies and stuff, it was a family affair. And then of course, through that, one of the things he did very early on is he started collaborating on films with his daughter, Sofia Coppola, and then he taught her and she learned a lot about filmmaking through the process of growing up with a famous director dad and then ended up acting in one of his films, The Godfather III, which didn’t go super well. But then later on, she became a famous director in her own right at this point and established herself. So this important 4th house family component with the IC and 5th house creativity component.
PKA: Oh yeah, that’s spot on. I love that Venus-Jupiter in Pisces.
CB: So get this. Sofia Coppola was born with Aquarius rising, and the IC is in Gemini in the 5th whole sign house. So it’s like, then you think about that from her perspective, and she grows up with a famous creative father who works together with her and helps to support and like, encourage her own creative impulses and endeavors and things like that. And that was actually a common theme that I found in the 5th house series when the IC was there or when the ruler of the 4th was in the 5th was like, having a scenario where imagine if your family is like, supportive of your creative endeavors in some sense, especially if it’s well-placed, as opposed to sometimes the opposite if let’s say your family is not supportive of your creative endeavors.
PKA: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, with the Mercury there too in the sign trine with the Jupiter ruling and right on the Midheaven.
CB: Yeah. So one of the themes that did come up sometimes, though, with the IC in the 5th house is some of the contemporary discussions about like, nepotism when one is getting roles or something let’s say in acting or in other fields partially as a result of their family connections, let’s say. So for example, Sofia Coppola was cast, I think, as like, a teenager in The Godfather III, and then a lot of critics panned her performance or said it wasn’t very good and sort of criticized her acting and it was kind of actually a very tough experience for her. But then in the future, she ended up going more into directing rather than acting and became a successful and famous director in her own right eventually and established herself. But sometimes that topic can come into play in contemporary discussions, or that’s one area where we can see where some of those contemporary discussions can come from.
PKA: Yeah. And even with her Sun-Saturn too, like, in the actual 4th, right? And the expectations that can come with – the expectations that then lead to sort of public vulnerability feels wrapped up in that signature as well.
CB: Yeah. Well, and that’s the thing about both of them is even though I’m focusing on the IC here, the really interesting thing about both of their charts is that both of them – she has Aquarius rising with the ruler of the Ascendant, Saturn, in the 4th house of home and parents. And like, she has this really famous father, and her family is really important to her although, like I just said, she had that really difficult time as a teenager where her father cast her in this huge movie, the third moving in the Godfather series after the follow-up of the first two movies that were widely hailed as two of the most important or most successful movies of the 20th century. And then she plays a prominent role in that, but then just gets panned by critics, and I’m sure that was a really difficult experience. And interestingly, like, he has Capricorn rising, but then he also has Saturn in —
PKA: Oh yeah!
CB: — Aries in the 4th whole sign house. And the part about that for him that was interesting as well is like, he was selected as the director of the Godfather movie, and he did it and part of the reason it worked out was because of his family background because he had Italian heritage as an Italian-American and coming from an Italian-American family. And he incorporated that into directing the movie, and that’s part of what made the movie more authentic in terms of The Godfather as a representation of the Italian-American experience.
So there’s a lot of things that are very important about the 4th whole sign house placement here; it’s not all just about the IC. But you can see how both of those sort of work in tandem.
PKA: Yeah, absolutely. Especially that like, the 5th house ruler in the 3rd and that being like, a generational signature feels very potent in this example.
CB: Yeah, that’s a great point, because it’s like, that Venus rules the IC in the 5th house of creativity as well as the 10th whole sign house of career, and it’s exalted in the 3rd whole sign house, which is especially like, communication and things like that. One of the funny things about that is his father, he had his father was a musician, and he had his father score I think one or two of the Godfather movies, and his father won like, an Academy Award for it, I think. So that’s pretty cool.
PKA: Yeah, film sets are so 3rd house in so many ways, too! There just —
CB: Yeah.
PKA: — can be so chaotic, and there’s so much going on.
CB: So two other examples – one of them, this is Tori Spelling’s chart with Aquarius rising and Saturn is in the 5th whole sign house in Gemini along with Venus and the IC in a night chart. So you have the most positive planet and the most challenging planet there in the 5th house of creativity with the IC of like, parents. And her father was a famous television producer, Aaron Spelling, in like, the 1960s and ‘70s and ‘80s. And in the 1990s, he created a new television series called 90210 that was about like, teenagers, but he cast his teenage daughter who was Tori Spelling in one of the lead roles. And in the ‘90s, like going way back over 30 years ago, this was one of the earliest discussions I remember hearing about like, ideas of nepotism and having a famous parent who’s like, casting their child in a role and whether the child is up for it acting-wise or if there’s a disparity between them and the other actors and things like that. And we don’t have to get into like, the pros and cons of whether that was true or different things like that, but just the fact that there were discussions like that taking place surrounding her father putting her in a role like this is interesting as a parallel with like, Sofia Coppola, for example.
PKA: And Venus right on the IC there. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And in mutual reception —
PKA: And Saturn with those – yeah.
CB: — with Mercury.
PKA: With those gifts, and then also yeah, becoming a superstar of her own accord after that —
CB: Totally.
PKA: — despite that, yeah.
CB: Absolutely. And then finally, I believe the last example I was gonna share here that we had found was just this is the birth chart of Billie Jean King who was a tennis champion. And she was born with Capricorn rising and the IC is in Taurus in the 5th whole sign house, the place of games and sports. And the ruler of the 5th house is Venus in the 10th whole sign house of career, dignified and very well-placed in its domicile in its own sign of Libra. And Billie Jean King grew up in a very athletic family where both her father and her mother were athletic, and they were very, very supportive of athletics and eventually of Billie Jean King herself getting into sports. But it was in a very supportive like, loving context where when she would come home from playing a game, they wouldn’t ask her, “Did you win?” They would ask her instead, “Did you have fun? Did you have a good time?” And so in this instance, the positive indications were like, having a supporting parental situation – IC – within the context of her playing sports and games, which is the 5th house. And then that ultimately leading eventually to her having major career success, which is Venus in the 10th house of career in its own domicile and becoming like, a leading tennis player in the world at some point in the future as an adult.
PKA: Yeah, that’s a really impressive one.
CB: Yeah. So it’s just a good idea of how sometimes the IC can tell you, you know, what is the support system like in terms of your parents or your early home situation, and how does that contribute sometimes to the other topics of the house that it falls in.
PKA: Yeah, absolutely. And you see that so starkly in the 5th house ICs for the people who are artists or are creators of some kind, because the presence or absence of support, right? And I feel like this is that negation that you’re speaking of, too, is because there can be an emphasis there when really what we’re seeing is an absence of support for their art careers, et cetera. Yeah.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah. You’ve gotta be open to the inversion of that, or the negation of that not just the affirmation. Like, hers is a great chart because it’s like, the ruler especially is super well-placed, so there’s a positive affirmation of that, but in the other instances, you could have let’s say whatever the most challenging scenario is that we could possibly imagine connected with the IC in the 5th house and let’s say the parents were the opposite – that they were not supportive or they didn’t believe in that that person could do that as a career, and therefore they told them to get a real job and like, that they didn’t follow their creative dreams in the end as a result of an unsupportive parent let’s say. Or one of the things we commonly see with the 5th house and the IC there, especially in contemporary times, could be if there’s issues with sexual orientation and let’s say the native is gay but that their parents are not supportive of that, for example, so that there’s a tension there between parents and the 5th house of sexual orientation can sometimes come up as a topic or theme.
PKA: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is where it really serves us, especially as consulting astrologers, but also just people who care about astrology in expanding our ideas of what the IC can offer too. Because so much – I mean, I’m a practitioner in training in Dr. Daniel Foor’s ancestral medicine program as well, and so I think a lot about the ancestors in tandem with the IC work. And understanding that, especially queer people have so many ancestors of queerness and ancestors of culture and ancestors of art with which to relate actively with and in this supportive way, even if the bio family is estranged or downright harmful, it can be especially for folks who have that IC in the 5th and who are artists, this can just be such a powerful realization to be like, “Oh, yeah, I actually am part of so many lineages. They just aren’t 4th house-y kind of stuff.” Right? Like, “they are in the way that they are this grounding, but they’re not necessarily my family of origin. Like, I’m not limited to that.” And I feel like we see a lot of that in – I especially I work with a lot of queer clients, and I see a lot of that in my practice as well.
CB: Absolutely. That’s a great point; I’m glad you said that.
PKA: Yeah. I think we wanna pull up Caro’s chart —
CB: Okay.
PKA: — which is a 5th house Aries example. This relates to the performing piece and the childhood performance piece, and she wrote really eloquently about it. So we’re seeing a Sag rising chart with an Aries IC, and this is another example of the ruler of the IC being on the IC. I feel like these ones are really instructive from like, a teaching perspective because they’re just such distillations. And okay, so Caro shares,
“I have my IC in Aries in my 5th house with my natal ruler, Mars. I grew up with parents that would have explosive fights, verbal, sometimes turning physical, and then the next day both parents seemingly moving on as if nothing happened. They eventually divorced, and both moved on, remarried very quickly. My mom has been remarried several times now. My stepdad who she divorced is an Aries Sun and an army veteran, and was in my life since I was a little girl,” so that’s also – especially with Mars-y ICs, we see presence of military often. “I got along with him great, and he was actually a calming presence,” but the mom who we’re looking at – this Venus in Libra and the Midheaven in part for that, and then we’re also thinking about the 10th house ruler, Sun in Scorpio, which I feel like we can see both of these on and off. The mom is often instigating the arguments. And oh, one aside here because she mentions a Disney World connection – there were so many Disney World and Disneyland connections in the 5th house IC examples! Which just feels like, very spot on for 5th house. And then this was the part where we get into real 5th house stuff. So “dance and performing played a big part of my childhood, and as a form of escapism from the turbulence in my home. For example, I would often be at a dance studio for hours taking classes, and I was part of a dance company competition team. It felt like a home away from home. I not only felt more seen and recognized by others when I was performing, but often received much joy and fulfillment from this. One year, I received a award for best performer of the dance company. When my parents divorced and I had to move and leave my dance studio of many years, it was a deeply painful time in my life.” And then also —
CB: Wow.
PKA: — she mentions being active at summer camp and that being one of her favorite times of year. So add summer camp to 5th house significations as well.
CB: I love that; that’s great. Yeah, that’s a really good example of… You know, it’s a day chart, so Mars is the more challenging planet. It is dignified in its own sign, which helps a bit, and then it also has a nice sextile with Jupiter in early Gemini, which is also offsetting and affirming things a bit. But that a lot of the early experience of that was in the conflict between the parents, which is Mars conjunct the IC, and their separation, which is Mars. But then how their outlet and one of the ways of getting away from that was challenging that into the creative impulse, which is also very strong, which is the 5th house.
PKA: Yeah, and seeing the really strong expression of the Mars opposite Venus with the IC and Midheaven really like, doubling down on all those significations and with the Moon wrapped up in there with trine and sextile in her first feels like it really brings all that forward. And she’s obviously very articulate about this experience and very aware of it, and it’s like a very felt experience for her. And I think oftentimes that’s kind of how we get to see these IC stories is when they do just come to awareness and we’re able to articulate them, and even that process itself can be, yeah, really healing and attentive to a lot of the childhood wounds that we do tend to hold at our IC.
CB: Definitely. Yeah. That was a cool keyword though, that the home away from home IC was at the dance company studio basically, the place of creativity, the place of the creative outlet. So that’s a good one I’m gonna put in my memory banks for the future as an archetypal outcome of that placement.
PKA: Yeah. I think even just like, IC not in the 4th “home away from home” feels like it covers a lot of the bases of that. We’ll pull up Ellie; this one’s really quick, but I want us to see it in comparison to this one in part.
So this is another —
CB: Okay.
PKA: — Sag rising, Aries IC. But rather than Mars on the IC in Aries, we have Mars with the Midheaven in Libra with also Venus in Libra up there. And so this is Ellie, and she shares that “my father was a theatre impresario in London’s West End, and in his younger years was a musician in the London Symphony Orchestra. My mother was a ballerina for the Royal Ballet.” So we have Venus and Mars in Libra and the Midheaven quite far away from the IC, and from her Moon, which is also in the IC, and in a very tight opposition to that Mars. And so she says that she doesn’t quite see the direct connection, but she did choose to do the polar opposite to her parents for a career and that her parents were disappointed. So instead of going into the arts, she went into economics. And also —
CB: Nice.
PKA: — that she devoted her life to her daughter, who has represented her career for the last decade or so.
CB: So okay, so the initial part of the delineation makes sense, both of the parents were creatives with the IC in the 5th whole sign house. But then she chose not to follow in the parents’ creative direction, which is like, the ruler of the 5th and the IC being Mars in the sign of its antithesis or exile, which is in Libra in the 11th whole sign house with the Midheaven. And then what’s the bit about the —
PKA: And then so her daughter has represented her career for the last decade or so, and then she also chose economics rather than going into the arts. So having that – and I wonder if we could see, yeah, so having just the… Choosing to do the direct opposite of what your parents do I feel like is a very Moon-IC opposite the rulers, opposite your Midheaven experience, and then also this is where that very direct delineation of IC in the 5th where – and this came up in numerous examples – of people saying like, “I didn’t really have that much connection to my family until I had children, and then my children became my family.” And that seems to be a very common 5th house experience.
CB: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Okay, and decided to study economics. The ruler of the 8th is in the 5th, which could be part of the tension there in terms of the parents and the focus on financial matters causing a tension. The ruler of the 2nd is Saturn in the 9th, and studying financial matters. There’s interesting just like, additional pieces I might connect in, or at least when I hear certain keywords I look at certain houses and look at what the ruler is doing.
PKA: Yeah. If I was to follow up with this person, I would probably ask about their spouse. So consider what this Jupiter in Gemini is contributing, especially to that Mercury, to the Libra by trine to see how that sort of sweetened and probably also complicated, because I would consider that to probably be part of this departure from her family because it’s almost a separate signature. And then also to – I would be so curious to know if Ellie’s kid likes art. That would be one of my other questions.
CB: Yeah, having the ruler of the Ascendant in the 7th whole sign house is definitely directing the life or showing a major focus on relationships. And then the other sort of gravity where a lot of the gravity of the chart’s being focused on is also towards the 11th house here with that stellium in the 11th whole sign house. But you know, that’s the opposite end that, you know, maybe we’ll have to do a follow-up episode on someday is just the fact that all those planets are also copresent with the MC. So we’ve got that Libra stellium is in the 11th house and getting 11th house friends, groups, alliances signification, but also with the MC there it’s getting career significations at the same time.
PKA: Yeah. I feel like professional artists are such a specific element of the population, and that if you grew up with multiple, you know, let alone in I feel like the UK where it’s probably – I mean, class is involved often as well. And I feel like if you choose to divert from that, there’s a lot going into that decision, and I feel like a lot of that comes probably from that 11th house stellium.
CB: Okay. Yeah, for sure. All right.
PKA: Yeah, we do have a IC ruler in the 7th that sort of piggybacks on this, but it’s a different sign. So we have Ebru, which is an Aquarius IC.
CB: There we go. So this is a Libra rising chart with the IC in Aquarius.
PKA: Yeah, and then we have Saturn in Aries in the 7th copresent with Venus too. And with the Sun, so this is another one where we have the IC ruler and the Midheaven ruler together, which is often part of a conversation. But yeah, that and the Ascendant ruler as well being Venus, of course. And so okay. So Ebru shares, “Love is a very important concept in my family. My mother and father were very much in love when my mother got pregnant and they had to get married. They separated although very much in love and got married again when I was seven. Separated again three years later. My grandmother was very much in love with a married man, and they had an on-and-off relationship for 40 years. My grandmother, my mother, and me, we all had off-marriage pregnancies at a very early age. Also creativity is an important part of my home. I grew up in a home with lots of literature and poem-reading. I never had children; my partner is now a sculptor and I paint at home too, so we have many artworks at home.” I feel like that really wraps up the 7th house-5th house significations quite astutely.
CB: Yeah, that’s incredible. I love that they brought up the concept of love, just because that was a major one that came out during the course of the 5th house series. And we actually I think culminated some of our – maybe it was our ruler of the Ascendant episode talking about bell hooks’ books where in like, the later – there were different eras in bell hooks’ career, but it seemed like in the later phases of bell hooks’ career, she really was focused on the concept of love as this transformative element that had to be reconceptualized, but once it was reconceptualized, it could be a positive counteracting influence for communities and for the world in a very significant way. And there was a whole 5th house stellium or 5th house emphasis that was driving a lot of that is what we saw.
PKA: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, All About Love. Yeah, I mean, the 5th house as the joy of Venus is very, very loud in a lot of these IC examples. So it’s funny when you’re working with 3rd house ICs, working with that joy of the Moon idea, and then with 5th house ICs working with that joy of Venus. It really brings out some really stunning things that you might not necessarily notice otherwise until you’re talking with someone and asking these questions, and this is often what comes out. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. But it’s interesting how in both instances it was like, the theme or the topic of love was a major factor in terms of the parents and bringing them together at different points and then also with the grandparents in this instance as well.
PKA: Yeah. And then, of course, because the 7th house planets – so this IC ruler, Midheaven ruler, Ascendant ruler are all ruled by that Mars in the 3rd as well. And so we see a little bit of that coming in too in terms of these generational patterns of grandparents and extended family and those being presences in the 5th house stories.
CB: Right. And also —
PKA: And so potent.
CB: It’s like, this is – so the IC is in Aquarius in the 5th whole sign, so it’s ruled by Saturn in the 7th, but it’s also Saturn in a night chart. So it’s a more challenging placement and so sometimes there were, you know, the parents – there were challenges with the marriage and they moved away from it at different points. But then also it’s conjunct Venus in a night chart, which is the most positive planet, so you’re getting extremes of some of the greatest challenges and then some of the most positive things. And the parents early in the life, part of the experience of that was the parents playing out that dynamic of this dynamic of attraction and being brought together by love, and then being pushed apart as well at different points with Saturn.
PKA: And this brings in a little bit of that Moon, too, but she also shares that “since I changed homes so many times,” so we see that in the 4th house-5th house piece of it, IC, “divorced, two marriages, I fell in love so many times.” I feel like that such a 7th house stellium ruling the IC just being so foundational to one’s life. “I bought my house with so many challenges and then had a legal battle with my 2nd husband about the house.” So here we’re seeing I think the Saturn in fall, too, aspect of it on top of the night chart-ness of it, and the 8th house as well. But all ruling that IC and just able to articulate it and being so prominent to her identity and life.
CB: Yeah. That’s really good; the ruler of the 4th and the ruler of the IC in the 7th. Saturn in a night chart and having a separation, a divorce from a partner where there’s a dispute over the home basically and the living situation.
PKA: Oh, and I just saw she’s also born on Venus day and hour too.
CB: Nice.
PKA: That’s really sweet.
CB: All right.
PKA: Okay, so the other Aquarius example that we have is A.N., and this one’s really quick but I think we should look at it because it’s so astrologer good.
CB: There we go.
PKA: So this is A.N., also an Aquarius IC with Libra rising. And this is Saturn in Cancer in the 10th house versus of course the Midheaven has Mars in Leo on it in the 11th. So and they share, “My father is an accomplished obstetrician who delivered thousands of babies. Many of the babies were of famous lineage, like babies of famous people or sports heroes, et cetera.” It’s like, you see the 10th house angularity I feel like come on so strongly as the ruler of the IC. But then she also shares, but that her immediate family was broken apart by a romantic affair, and it’s been very hard at times also.
CB: Right. Yeah, that was a major theme that came up with the 5th house is not just babies, but also sometimes – and not just love, but also romantic affairs and that other side of the 5th house which is on the one hand, like, physical passion, and that as a driving factor as well as sometimes the overlapping things of people falling in love with different people and that creating ambiguity and sometimes pulling them in different directions.
PKA: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the 5th house – I mean, in this sort of negation or absence, the 5th house contains a lot of difficult experiences too, right? Like, fertility challenges, which we don’t have any examples with that, but were in a few of the examples of course. And we already heard with like, miscarriage and stillbirth being – that was the 3rd house example, but we can still we see so much of that when we talk about 5th house stories, especially when they’re difficult. Yeah. And —
CB: Absolutely.
PKA: — also connections between that sort of pleasure, joy, partying lifestyle which can spiral into addiction, and when we’re dealing with the IC especially if it’s with hard planets or ruled by planets in difficult positions as well, that stuff gets inherited and people carry lineages and trauma around that even if they weren’t necessarily impacted directly. It can impact people for generations and generations. And I think when you have a 5th house IC, that is something that can come up for sure.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah. I love the core of this example, though – the father helped to deliver babies with the IC, the father, in the 5th house of children. And then they were often like, famous babies or coming from famous families with the ruler of the 5th house and IC in the 10th whole sign house of career and the public —
PKA: Yeah.
CB: — and reputation.
PKA: Yeah. And with the Moon-Jupiter in the 6th, which I’m sure has many expressions for this person. But as one of them being in charge of that Saturn, you know, having a little bit of the bonifying support of it so that it’s not just – you can see that Saturn in Cancer and why it’s got more juice than you might think otherwise.
CB: Yeah. All right.
PKA: I love that.
CB: Definitely.
PKA: I think we should pull up Coryna, who’s our Gemini IC example.
CB: Here we go.
PKA: This is just a very sweet, beautiful one that pulls on the children association.
CB: So this is Aquarius rising with the IC in Gemini in the 5th whole sign house?
PKA: And so Coryn’s IC ruler is Mercury in Aquarius right with the Ascendant. It’s retrograde, but it feels very potent to me. So Coryna shares, “I grew up as a multi-racial Yoruban Nigerian in diaspora. Both my sister and me have the IC in the 5th whole sign house and we have both relied heavily on artistic practices to connect with our Nigerian heritage. She is a visual artist and graphic novelist, and I’m a writer. Since I was a teenager, I’ve used fiction and poetry writing as an opportunity to imagine the familial ancestry and stories that I am disconnected from and to feel a sense of connection with my roots.” So here we have the writer-artist aspect of a 5th house IC literally using writing to connect with roots and with the ruler being Mercury on the Ascendant. And they also share, “I am also one of those people who has been dreaming of names for my future children since I was a child myself, so by now I have dozens of baby names compiled to draw upon when I do have a kid. Not only is this a super Yoruba thing [it’s common for people to have eight to 10 given names in our culture], imagining my future children has always been grounding for me. The IC in the 5th feels like being grounded in imaginaries of the future.”
CB: I love that; that’s beautiful.
PKA: So gorgeous.
CB: Yeah. This makes a lot of sense. This connected with one example I didn’t bring over into this because I had already used it twice in the 4th and 5th house episodes, I think. But there was a listener and patron named Olabimpe who had the IC in the 5th house I believe, and also there were things about her father and her family lineage and place of origin that she was incorporating into her creative output, and that was like, a really important thing in her life. So I love this example, because this sort of complements that one as well and it reminds me of it.
PKA: I love that. Yeah. It’s so spot on.
CB: Yeah.
PKA: I think —
CB: So the family and family roots and origins sometimes inspiring one’s creative output, or provides a nice archetypal parallel with the Billie Jean example where it was like, a supportive athletic family that was supporting the native’s pursuit of sports in a joyful and positive way. And even though those are completely different in terms of the focus of sports versus art, you can see we’re starting to get to understand the code underlying that placement a little bit and how there can be an archetypal similarity there.
PKA: Yeah. Super spot on. I love thinking about the 4th house South Node too and – I mean, and the Venus with Jupiter with the Midheaven, right? And so it’s like, even this absence and this disconnection that they feel related to 4th house topics ends up fueling the art and the writing that they do. And it contributes to their own sense of identity, and that feels like a way that IC in the 5th can also describe like, a dislocation from 4th house topics in a more expected, kind of conventional way.
CB: Yeah. All right.
PKA: Love that.
CB: So —
PKA: Yeah.
CB: What else do we got?
PKA: Yeah, so we have another one that speaks to the 5th house home bringing in like, the 4th house topics into the 5th house. So we’ll pull up Elodie, who is our Pisces IC example here.
CB: I had an issue finding the location for this chart —
PKA: Oh, yes.
CB: — so we might have to describe it because —
PKA: Okay, I’ll just describe it.
CB: — Solar Fire is not doing me any favors.
PKA: Yeah.
CB: Although I could just animate it —
PKA: It’s —
CB: And —
PKA: Sure.
CB: — like, roughly recreate the chart even if I don’t have it exactly right.
PKA: Yeah, Quebec place names as a Canadian myself I’ve had to wrangle with Quebec place names often in my practice.
CB: Okay, so shout out to Elodie – apology to Elodie. I know Elodie’s an astrologer, and yeah, so this is not gonna be exact but it’s a Scorpio rising chart with the IC in Pisces in the 5th whole sign house.
PKA: And this is Jupiter in Virgo example too with Jupiter with the Midheaven in the 11th as well. And so Elodie shares, “I have a Pisces IC in the 5th house, and I grew up in a house filled with music. My dad as a musician and a luthier.” And I had to look that up, actually, but it’s someone who restrings and actually crafts musical instruments. “He is also a Pisces Sun, Venus, Mercury,” so we have the father association with the IC. “Both my grandparents on my maternal side have strong Pisces signatures. My mom is a midwife, and I grew up very closely with the world of pregnancy and babies. My mom delivered my three younger brothers at home.” That is such —
CB: Wow.
PKA: — a spot on. I saw some, there are some other examples with people growing up with daycares with 5th house IC. And Elodie also shares, “I was brought up Baha’i, which has a lot to do with the universality of mankind and the acceptance of all religion’s basis for peace in the world,” which is so ruler of the IC in Pisces and the 5th in the 11th with the Midheaven. “I always made a lot of art at home growing up, and my first job was being a singer and songwriter. I lived near the ocean growing up next to the Saint Lawrence River, if you know you know.” I do know; it’s basically living beside the ocean. The Saint Lawrence River’s huge. “Even though I moved a lot and ended up living on the island of Newfoundland for the past 20 years surrounded by water. Very Piscean reality living here in the fog.” I think this is such a beautiful like, Pisces IC kind of Jupiter in the 11th going and exploring and then kind of coming home to your sort of the primordial soup of where your IC is I feel like happens to a lot of people. And so this Pisces IC being born next to the river and then leaving it and then coming back to the ocean feels really, really spot on too.
CB: Nice. I like that.
PKA: She shares, “I’ve always felt that my Pisces IC is who I am deep inside. I usually look at the IC to gauge where people’s roots are planted, and mine are planted in the elusive spiritual waters of Pisces.”
CB: Beautiful. I love that.
PKA: Yeah. This is just gorgeous. I feel like also this is an interesting thing about how, you know, earlier in life she was an artist – like, a singer-songwriter – and I mean, I still think of Elodie as an artist. But that sort of distinct phases of life, and I mean there’s all kinds of ways – like, triplicity ways, et cetera – to look at this. But I think there’s – with 5th house ICs, depending on what’s happening with the Midheaven and the Midheaven rulers, people don’t always bring those formative artistic experiences with them into their adult life, right? And sometimes it’s really important when people are working with their IC and just working with their chart in order to recover some of that. And sometimes it just stays back there, you know? It just stays. But like, recognizing the foundations and like, how important those 3rd house, those 5th house experiences were and still are to like, foundation and grounding is really a beautiful thing that looking at the IC can give to people, even if those topics aren’t as relevant in their adult lives.
CB: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And you mentioned basically the 11th house component with the ruler of the 5th/IC in the 11th house, and Elodie talking about growing up in the Baha’i faith and emphasizing that it was a big community of people that came together to pray and celebrate. And so there was this major community element to things.
PKA: Yeah. And I mean, I don’t know a lot about the Baha’i faith, but I know enough to know it’s quite a global phenomenon, right, and that it really not only in the way that it – what phrase did Elodie use? One planet, one people, right? Which is so 11th house in terms of that, yeah, just considering humanity and the kind of ideology that underpins that, which does feel quite Virgoan and very, very Jupiterian.
CB: Right. Definitely. Brilliant. All right, that was a great example. Shout out to Elodie for submitting that.
PKA: Yeah. So because you shared a Taurus example, I think I’m only gonna share one of the Taurus examples, and this will be our last one.
CB: Actually, one last thing.
PKA: Yeah, sure.
CB: One thing that Elodie’s chart reminded me of of just a thing that was mentioned in passing was how she mentioned parent having placements in early Pisces, right? So that’s a really important element here, and I did a short video about that a month or two ago because that’s another element that we literally can’t see from just the birth chart itself, and yet it plays a crucial role in sometimes determining how one chart that has like, let’s say the IC in the 5th house, let’s say it’s almost the exact same placement – like, the same degrees – you’ll have one person that was born in a hospital on that day born into a family where they have their mother has a Venus-Jupiter conjunction on the degree of the IC in the 5th whole sign house, and then you’ll have another person born that has the same degree of the IC in the 5th whole sign house but their mother has like, let’s say, like, a Mars-Saturn-Pluto conjunction or something on the degree of the IC in the 5th whole sign house. And therefore from our limited vantage point, unfortunately, as astrologers, if we just look at the birth chart, we can only see – we see a similarity on the surface level there between those two placements of the potentiality of pointing us in IC/5th direction of that being important area of the life. But the person’s experience may be wildly different based on the synastry they have with their parents’ birth chart I guess is what I’m trying to say.
PKA: Absolutely. Hundred percent. Yeah. And I think we’ll mention this briefly at the end, but my upcoming talk at UAC is actually called “The IC in Relationship,” and it’s about more than just that kind of familial relationship, but we will be in part looking at that because it does – it’s our environment, right? And of course it’s not just our familial environment; it’s also the land where we grew up, it’s everything environmental that contributes to that IC. But when it comes to the number of connections you can trace through – and even just whether or not the IC sign shows up in a family like it often does as being quite important. But then sometimes it doesn’t, right? And the IC is actually this strange kind of oddball zodiacally in an intermediate family unit. And that says something as well. That says part of the story about how this person might feel displaced from their immediate family and how that contributes to their ideas of basically everything, but you know, especially themself and what’s possible when it comes to that kind of connection definitely.
CB: Right. Yeah, that’s a really good point. And it also brings in an element of, while we talked earlier about how the placement in the natal chart could be receiving affirming aspects from the benefics or negating aspects from the malefics that are saying yes or no to those topics, the synastry will functionally do the same thing where if you have, you know, positive synastry from a parent or a family member that’s supporting that placement, it may affirm it in a good way. But if there’s challenging things, it could be negating it. And our challenge as astrologers, unfortunately, is our viewpoint sometimes is limited in terms of not being able to take into account all charts at all times and everything else, so but it’s an important element when researching this topic that can be like, an X factor that can send a wild card that is sometimes hard to account for. But sometimes when you’re living it, like, if you are, for example, Elodie in that case, like, she knows what parent has stuff in early Pisces and how that’s contributing to things. But as a consulting astrologer, sometimes it’s a little tricky.
PKA: Yeah. Absolutely. Yes. Love the question asking. I say in the book, actually, I say like, the IC is a place of questions, because you basically have to ask questions in order to be able to tell what’s going on there. I think so many of the survey responses and I think it’s partially a testament to – I mean, not only the work my audience has done in working with the IC and putting their self-delineations together, but also what you’ve been doing on the podcast in terms of also showing this more nuanced method of delineating it and delineating the houses. And I think, yeah, there’s the examples just really speak to the whole breadth of human experience while also displaying the method and the technique just so starkly and so beautifully. Yeah, I’m really happy to have had the opportunity to do that survey.
CB: Yeah, this has been amazing. This is amazing. And I’ll be looking forward to your lecture at the United Astrology Conference next year on this, so that’ll be great – great topic.
PKA: Oh —
CB: Do we have any more —
PKA: I have one last example, yeah. So this is a Taurus example. And it’s another 5th house. And this one is one that really blends things, but I think speaks and sums up really nicely what we’ve been talking about in terms of negation and experiences of that and departure from things that we’ve inherited as well. So this is —
CB: So which one is this?
PKA: This is Miri. Sorry, yeah.
CB: Okay, got it. Cap rising and Taurus IC. Got it.
PKA: Yeah, that’s perfect. Okay.
CB: Here we go.
PKA: So Miri shares – I’m just gonna read Miri’s because it’s very well-written. “My IC is in the 5th house of Taurus ruled by exalted Venus in Pisces in the 3rd. Firstly, I come from a lineage of artists and musicians. My family members are collage artists, painters, watercolorists, and sculptors, many of whom also sing and play the guitar, lute, bass, piano, drums, and so on. Our ancestors used to work in the Royal London Orchestra. I spent my whole childhood painting and drawing or helping my mother teaching her art classes. Secondly, many of them earn their money by working with children as art teachers. Thirdly, our family home is filled with artworks and located in the beautiful English countryside next to a nature reserve. My family carry out their own preservation of local animal and plant species on our land, which includes gardens, meadows filled with all kinds of wildflowers, fruit trees, bushes, and vegetable patches. You will find all kinds of endangered birds taking sanctuary there, so the house is surrounded by birdsong. You will also see deer, pheasants, bees, and foxes. A lot of my family’s artwork is inspired by the surrounding nature and animals.”
CB: Beautiful.
PKA: Yeah. So that Taurus IC ruled by that exalted Venus in the 3rd with the Sun and Saturn.
CB: Yeah, which is – and Venus is like, closely sextiling the IC.
PKA: Yeah. And then with this Moon in Cap in the first feels relevant too. I really do look at the domicile ruler and the exaltation ruler of the IC whenever I look at a chart. And then you can look at all kinds of rulers of the IC, of course, but there really is – when there’s sort of sympathy in between them, they speak to different flavors of the experience of the IC in different ways. So she shares,
“The ruler of my IC is placed in the 3rd. All my immediate family are all art teachers involved in education. They spend a lot of time talking about the neighbors in the village.” I think gossip is an underrated 3rd house signification, even though it’s also 11th, but you know.
CB: Right.
PKA: When it’s local, it’s so 3rd house. “Furthermore, I lived with a lot of extended family and numerous siblings in the same house growing up, with my grandparents, uncles, and brother on my mom’s side and with my stepmother, stepsisters, and half-sisters on my dad’s side.” And then we also have languages in terms of an older 3rd cousin also lived with them who could speak fluent Chinese after marrying someone. And this was so inspiring to Miri as a child that she did a school trip to China and then ended up studying Chinese at university and moving to China.
CB: Wow. That’s brilliant.
PKA: Yeah. And then this is when it comes to – and so we have that 3rd house emphasis of the education, literally art teachers, right? 5th house – the art, and then the 3rd house – the teachers – and then we also, of course, opposite that is the Virgo, which is the 9th, which is what we might associate with teaching more generally. And then that having a connection with Mercury-Mars in the 2nd in Aquarius – that Mars in a tight square to the Midheaven-IC, which is part of what we talked about before. And so then the South Node on the IC as well. And so in the final part, she mentions, “My experience of the IC was not so great,” and this is despite it being seemingly idyllic, right? Presence with the South Node and opposition with Pluto and then this square to Mars, I think, is also very prominent. “The ruler of the IC is copresent with Saturn in a night chart, so there was a lot of struggles feeling very isolated in the rural home I grew up in away from society, and there was a dark and dirty side to the countryside life. Many of my extended relatives were abusive, causing significant trauma to me, and there was never escape from such a large family. These conditions are what partially pushed me to abandon the pursuit of art myself and move across to the other side of the world as an adult.”
CB: Okay. Yeah.
PKA: Right?
CB: Because I was wondering what the other side of the 3rd house was, because even though it’s the 5th and the IC is ruled by this exalted Venus in a night chart, which is the best planet in the chart, like, the 3rd house also has Saturn in a night chart which is the most challenging planet in the chart just based on sect. And I thought there might have been a bit of that with the implication of the gossiping component, but that’s where that comes out more.
PKA: Yeah. It’s really spot on to be able to have that, you know, what seems idyllic, right? What seems like kind of a perfect, pristine childhood and an exalted ruler of your IC is definitely going to offer some of that. But then to have it be a lot of like, other people’s experience, right, and to have it not be so much of your own experience, too. And I think that there’s the South Node with the IC and this Mars square and, you know, literally leaving that place and going and making her own way literally halfway across the world feels so – with Mercury who rules that 9th house, right – it just feels —
CB: Yeah.
PKA: — very potent.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s a comment I get constantly on YouTube, which is just like, well, what happens if the most positive planet based on sect and the most challenging planet based on sect are in the same house. And the answer is like, you get both. You get —
PKA: Yeah.
CB: — extremes of some of the best stuff and then extremes of some of the most challenging stuff in the same area or the same sector of the life.
PKA: Yeah. Absolutely. Always.
CB: Nice.
PKA: Yeah.
CB: Always! Yeah. That’s brilliant, though. That’s such a vivid example. Yeah, that’s a great one.
PKA: Yeah, I feel like it really sums up kind of a lot of what we’re talking about here in terms of being able to see the differentiations between the houses and where the IC lands, versus the houses where it’s associated with. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, definitely. Is that our last – we gonna end on a high note? Was there any final ones?
PKA: Ah, well! I mean, there is one that I pulled out that —
CB: I mean, I’m fine; I wasn’t saying we have to. I know… But I was gonna leave it up to you.
PKA: Well, I feel like someone finding their way toward astrology and making meaning of such an experience feels pretty potent. There is one other one that I was thinking of sharing, and when I was going through the signs, when I was going through the submissions, I was really looking for chart rulers – not that we were gonna include chart rulers in every one of the houses, but I like that as a sort of sample spread. And I had a hell of a time finding IC ruler in the 4th whole sign house for this. So I did find one, but as I mentioned before, it’s someone who doesn’t necessarily like, appreciate kind of what we’re doing. So I wonder if we wanna look at it, because I feel like it kind of opens up what we’re talking about in terms of negation. So this is LJ. So it’s another Taurus example, but it is the last one that I pulled out because I thought it would be an interesting way to end.
CB: Okay. So this is Capricorn rising with the IC in Taurus in the 5th whole sign house?
PKA: Yeah. So she doesn’t give us very much, so we don’t have a lot to work with. But I think we can maybe pull apart a bit around why it doesn’t track, you know, and maybe point to – so if some other people, even after all of this, are like, “I still don’t get it,” we might be able to point to some little pieces to pull out what might make it click.
So LJ shares – so okay, so LJ’s IC is in Taurus in the 5th house, the same as this last one we looked at. And their IC ruler is Venus in Aries in the 4th house. So this is a 4th house IC ruler. And so LJ shares,
“I find it a bit confusing, because when it comes to home, I don’t have children, so I don’t have those familial stories in my life. As much as I once wanted children, that ship has now sailed. I feel like how protective I am over my home and my roots feels more Aries than Taurus. I also didn’t have a particularly supportive family when it came to my art practice and pleasure certainly isn’t something that figures into my family life. So I suppose I don’t see how the IC relates to me. Venus would rule my 5th house, but she’s in my 4th house in Aries, though I’m incredibly lost as to how that’s related. Like I said above, I feel like my IC would make more sense in the 4th, and having it in the 5th just makes me wonder what the IC is even for.”
CB: Okay.
PKA: Which is like, okay, so what we did get from this is that LJ does have an art practice that her family was not supportive of. So that’s kind of the main thing that feels connective to me. So we do have this 4th house experience of immediate family, right, those kind of origin stories that are present. Potentially the father, the Mars is down there with Venus, right? But then we have this 5th house IC. And then one thing that I do like doing is when we’re thinking about an IC, if it does have an exaltation ruler, if the domicile ruler is in a situation like this where Venus is in aversion to the IC, and also in a tricky position despite being powerful in a night chart, we can – sometimes, if it does – look to the exaltation ruler, right? And so she does have this very waning Pisces Moon in the 3rd with Mercury. And so my question to LJ would be if we do – if the 4th house stuff is too hot and too spiky and not supportive to 5th house IC topics, right, it’s like, what about the 3rd house? What does it offer it? And what does thinking about the Taurus-ness of it, right, like, thinking with the zodiacal sign and the ecology and the mythology and everything we know about the signs. It’s like, how does that contribute? Because protective of home – there is definitely a Mars-y Aries way to go about doing that. But there is also a Taurean way, I think. And I’m curious if like, allowing what would arise by taking seriously Taurus as your IC, right, and allowing that to be separate from these harmful familial involvements, even though of course we see that with the IC ruler being in the 4th, there seems to me to be a conversation that can happen there that isn’t necessarily about those experiences, although it obviously has been formed by them. And I feel like that’s part of what I see in this chart in terms of what she shared.
CB: Okay. In the document, I think I’m missing one of the paragraphs; I don’t know if it accidentally got deleted. Is it just this paragraph, or were we missing one?
PKA: There.
CB: There it is.
PKA: I don’t know what happened. Yeah. So no children. So expanding this 5th house piece of it.
CB: Yeah. I mean, the thing for me is I just think it’s more of a classic instance of the negation, because it just has to do with —
PKA: Yeah.
CB: Like, I don’t use exaltation rulers, so I can’t speak to that. But I do think that that Saturn placement in a night chart, which is the more challenging planet in the chart as a result of it being a night chart, is opposing the IC and opposing the 5th house. And so what we’re getting is Saturn negating some of those 5th house and IC topics. And that’s why there may be less of a ability to relate to some of that stuff. For example, with the topic of children.
PKA: Yeah, and being the Ascendant ruler.
CB: Right. Yeah, exactly.
PKA: Yeah, and that being so much more present in her experience.
CB: Right. And then when it’s the Ascendant ruler, sometimes it’s like, that stuff is arising as a result of choice and personal volition. So it’s like, you know, potentially a choice not to have children on some level or that arising as a result of in some instances certain choices that the person makes.
PKA: Yeah, or having wanted to and then the life just like, not making space for it.
CB: Right. Exactly. Right, okay, because she says that that was something that she did want at one point in time but that ship has sailed. So I don’t know if that’s – it’s hard to infer things. I don’t know if that’s implying some wistfulness over that or what necessarily.
PKA: Yeah. I mean, that Mars is so powerful, too, right? And this is another thing is that when we’re thinking about this kind of lively – planets as people, you know, kind of and seeing how they actually show up in our day-to-day life and in our worlds. And it’s like, sometimes the planets are just much, much louder than other planets, right? And so the Venus of that experience and the Venus in Aries of that experience, even though she’s separating from Mars at the same time, the presence of that Mars in the 4th house would probably drown out whatever Venus is trying to sing.
CB: Yeah. And this really is – just going back to what we were talking about earlier, so this would have been good to pull out at that point because of the negation idea of that sometimes astrologers run into an issue of not understanding a placement when it’s like, not being able to relate to a placement. But it’s arising out of the negation. So it’s like, the two things we know about this person is that the topic of children was negated for some reason with Saturn opposing the 5th, and that the parents were not supportive of the creative pursuits with Saturn opposing the IC in the 5th. So the reason the native doesn’t resonate with it is because they’re expecting an affirmation of those things, but the chart aspects, at least, the only aspects to that IC – major aspects – were not ones that were lending as much support as they potentially could have.
Okay, interesting. So yeah —
PKA: Yeah, I think that tracks. I hope that’s clarifying for LJ.
CB: Yeah, because the other part of it is it’s not just setting up – because Rhetorius talks about this in the 2nd house of when a planet is like, aspecting through especially like, an opposition, and that one of the paradigms in Hellenistic astrology is that planets can aspect empty houses. You don’t have to have a planet in a house in order for a planet to aspect that house, partially because even if a house is empty, like it kind of is in this instance at least in terms of planets with Taurus in the 5th whole sign house with the IC, we do know that at different points in the life, planets will transit through Taurus. But then it’s like, what is the experience once planets – let’s say especially slow-moving ones or retrogrades – move into Taurus? Part of their experience is that they immediately activate that opposition with Saturn in Scorpio in a night chart. So for example, the Saturn opposition as a teenager would have been experienced as Saturn going through the 5th house and activating that natal Saturn placement, and it probably at that point as a teenager was experienced as the parents not being supportive of the native’s creative aspirations or pursuits.
PKA: Yeah, that totally makes sense.
CB: Yeah.
PKA: Yeah. Those oppositions are definitely real. And of course, like, the Midheaven is treated as powerful for many good reasons, right? This is a huge part of why the IC is also hard to talk about, and especially when we have planets with the Midheaven – whether they’re an angle-ruler or not, they tend to be a lot – like, they pull focus away from the IC. So this is a function of that negation, but then when you’re in a consultation with someone, and they want to relate with their IC, right, and they want to make sense of it in a kind of more life-giving way even when it’s in a hard situation like this, it often takes giving those planets with the Midheaven space and being able to be like, okay, here you are. This is what you’re saying; we hear you. How about we make some space in terms of tend to these roots even if they’re hard, even if it feels sort of impossible because of other things that are going on in the chart. And I think it is possible. But you know, the Midheaven is incredible as a point in the chart and as a point in people’s lives. And I really feel that mycelial understanding of the IC as part of what nourishes our Midheaven and nourishes those expressions, and you do see that when there’s planets with the Midheaven and the IC is in an otherwise empty house, for sure.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah. The final thing here is just is the implication that the native, they said the parents did not support my art practice. Is the implication then that the native still became an artist or did continue their art practice despite their family’s like, opposition to it?
PKA: So they don’t say here, but I would kind of think so, just looking at the chart. But it doesn’t say. And so I would be —
CB: Okay.
PKA: That would be one of my follow-up questions with this chart, for sure. Because especially with that 3rd house emphasis, too, like – I mean, there’s writerly-ness, you know what I mean? So I think that it would be very interesting to know if this person did continue to have an art practice in their own way despite that parents’ negation of it, for sure.
CB: Right. For sure. Yeah. And then that’s really what it would become, and then ruler of the 5th, Venus in the 4th, also ruling the 10th and yeah, just the potential that they did – although Venus is also opposing Pluto, so there you would get some of the tensions with the family potentially not supporting the art practice, but the native still gravitating towards artistic pursuits. So you end up with a very complex delineation there then that provides a nice counterpoint to some of our other delineations where the parents were supportive of the native’s creative pursuits of just like, asking a person like, “How would you describe a chart where a person didn’t receive support from their family for their creative pursuits but nonetheless continued to pursue that anyways,” let’s say.
PKA: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s —
CB: Cool.
PKA: — spot on.
CB: Yeah.
PKA: I guess that’s also not a high note! But the IC kind of isn’t like that often.
CB: Yeah, well, it’s a good – it does help to fill out the picture for us so that we’ve seen a full spectrum of lots of different experiences of the entire spectrum, and that’s really what’s important for us as astrologers. And it’s what I like when – that’s one of the reasons I do these long episodes with like, lots of chart examples, because I want to not just show one or two or three chart examples and go really deep into those and then call it a day. I want people to see the full spectrum. And I think this was really brilliant research, and I’m really glad that we did this, and I’m glad you put together that survey and then went through all of these to pick out some of the best ones, because yeah, I think we got a really good picture here even though it’s not like, complete. Obviously, there’s more that could be said. But this was amazing, and I really appreciate it. Especially everyone that sent in their examples and wrote out and shared these life stories and their chart. So thank you to everybody who sent this in, as well as to you for doing this research and everything. This was really good.
PKA: I’ve been the IC in the 3rd and the 5th has been a bit of a pet. I’ve made sure when we did the IC book and the case stories there that there was at least a few ICs in the 3rd as well as ICs in the 5th whole sign house, although it is majority IC in the 4th whole sign house. And I just – especially with the people who tend to be in my clients, I see a lot of people who do practice magic; they’re spiritually inclined, and there’s so much 3rd house stuff that goes into that. And then of course, being part of the queer community and the 5th house being such an important place in terms of those lineage ancestors that are outside of the bio family, and there’s stories that need to be told, right? And so I just, I really appreciate your willingness to collab on the survey with me, and of course to everyone who wrote in, because they’re just such, such beautiful stories.
CB: Yeah. Thank you. I’m so excited to have done this finally because it’s something I’ve meant to do for years, but I didn’t feel like it was time. And I was finally ready, and then I was actually thinking about reaching out to you for like, several days, and then you emailed me like, at the same time after I was on the verge of emailing you. So the synchronicity was perfect. And yeah, people should check out your book because you have a big, thick book on the IC and the meaning of the IC, and it’s a really brilliant book. There it is!
PKA: I was using it as my mouse pad.
CB: Okay, nice. Yeah, but people can learn more about this topic and go deeper if they want to with your book on the subject.
PKA: Yeah. It is a labor of love. I really think of the book as a community project being backed on Kickstarter and before that, it was supported through my Patreon. And you know, I started writing the book in 2018. So it’s been a long time coming, and so many people were involved. And I’m just, yeah, grateful it’s out there and grateful it exists as a resource for people, for this very important but often under-attended-to point, so grateful to you for tending to.
CB: Yeah, I’m so glad we got to do this and got to fill out this missing technical piece that’s always been so important to me in chart readings and that I developed and have followed over the past 20 years and have expressed the concept that I’ve always told people when I lecture on whole sign houses, even in a basic talk, that the IC imports 4th house significations into whatever whole sign house it falls. And I hope now it’s clear what that means tangibly and why it is that I say that.
PKA: Hundred percent. No, I think this will be a very – I’m very excited for this. Yeah, because we first talked about this a year ago, but then the book was sold out and we couldn’t do it. And now it’s available. But even I was going through my own grief processes for the last few months, which are IC-related in part, and so I had to wait in order to even like, follow back up with you about doing it. And so I love that the timing was full of synchronicity, because it is definitely a spirit-guided endeavor. And this just proves it yet again!
CB: Absolutely. Brilliant. All right. So you do consultations related to the IC and related to this material, and you have the book, which is available through your website and you also have those lectures coming up, right?
PKA: Yeah. I’m speaking at NORWAC and UAC this year, which will be – both of them will be so lovely. UAC will be – we first met at UAC 2018; I don’t know if you remember that. It was just in passing. I was thanking – you were with Leisa, and I was thanking Leisa, because my first astrology conference I ever went to was NORWAC in 2016. And it was through an AFAN scholarship, and so I was thanking Leisa for her work with AFAN. And yeah, UAC 2026 in Chicago, I’m giving a talk on – oh, it’s the “IC in Relationship” one. And I’m actually doing some consultations opening this month, which is November for anyone watching later, that are related to that topic. And so if anyone’s super interested in that aspect, they can get in on those. And then at NORWAC, I am giving two lectures – so one called “The Mage and the Sage” on Jupiter-Mercury and taking kind of an experiential storytelling approach to how those planets relate in a chart. So we’ll be looking at them using techniques and then kind of expanding it into what kind of stories they tell us. And then one on the IC, which will be more of a beginner/intermediate kind of cozy introduction to it, which will also be – it’ll be really sweet, yeah. Less technical than we did today, the one at NORWAC, but it’ll be a really lovely time. And of course, that’s virtual as well as in Seattle as well.
CB: Nice. I love that. What’s the URL again for both of your websites?
PKA: So my consultations you can find at NineOfWands.com, all spelled out. And that’s also – my Patreon gets early access, so if you’re on my Patreon, you will get the heads up – and my mailing list, as well, which you can find on my website. And then the book is in the shop at idolastellarum.com.
CB: Okay, and you don’t have the book on Amazon currently. People need to get it from your website?
PKA: Yeah. They order it directly from us – both print and ebook.
CB: Good. Okay, good. Just wanted to make sure that’s clear. And the last thing is like, 2018 keeps coming up, and I keep thinking every time you mention 2018 how Uranus first went into Taurus at that time. And in the forecast, I just talked about how Uranus was returning back to Taurus for the final time for one last final lesson or to bring full circle all of the lessons that first started back in 2018. So I think it’s brilliant that one, you started working on the IC work in 2018 and two, that we met in 2018 and now things are full circle and we’re doing a podcast on the IC at the end of that transit. I know we’re not going into your chart, but I don’t know if there’s any way that that relates, but I’m very curious how that might relate to your chart or your journey in general.
PKA: Well, the lead-up to me writing the book was actually Chiron —
CB: Okay.
PKA: — of all things. I had a – and Venus retrograde. I had a five pass Chiron transit to my IC —
CB: Oh.
PKA: — which resulted in a quite long period of homelessness and transience that both contributed to the writing of the IC and also interrupted it from time to time. And so that’s the move into Aries coincided with Uranus’s move into Taurus, and so it was like, Uranus moving out of my 5th was also Chiron moving into my 5th. And so there’s a piece there. But the IC, my IC is in Pisces, and the Kickstarter was funded with the IC conjunction – it was Venus and Jupiter in Pisces in that chart. And then the IC was finally released publicly when Jupiter was in Gemini. So it was a full – my IC ruler moving from going around.
CB: Okay.
PKA: Yeah.
CB: Well, I love – and then of course that was all activated last month, if your IC is in Pisces, just there was the Pisces eclipse that just happened in September and Saturn just returned back to Pisces for its final thing. And it’s gonna station there this month, because we’re also getting the last final full circle of the past three years since March 2023 that Saturn’s been going through Pisces. So that’s also really beautiful.
PKA: Yeah, and my IC is 3rd decan Pisces, so it is with Saturn. Yeah, it’s passed officially, but it’s, you know, definitely still copresent in this last pass of it.
CB: Nice. Cool. All right, well thanks for doing this. Congratulations —
PKA: Thank you!
CB: — on the book. Everybody should get the book and check out your websites. And yeah, thanks very much for collaborating with me on this today.
PKA: Oh, it was great. It was good to work with you. It was fun. Yeah. Thanks.
CB: Cool. All right, well, thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
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