The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 233, titled:
Significations of the Twelve Houses – Part 2: Houses 7-12
With Chris Brennan and guests Kelly Surtees and Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on December 5, 2019
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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 Andrea Johnson
Transcription released December 5, 2021
Copyright © 2021 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to be doing part two of our series on the significations of the 12 houses, and we’re going to talk about the meaning of houses 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 in this episode. So joining me today is Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees, hey, guys…
KELLY SURTEES: Hey.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, hey.
CB: …joining me once again in the studio. So part one on the houses we recorded yesterday, and we’re going to release that in November; then this is part two, the follow-up that we’re releasing sometime in December. And we spent a lot of time going through conceptual stuff related to the underlying premise of how the significations come about in the houses, and then we did a long, very painstaking run through the first 6 houses.
Today, since we don’t have to go through as much conceptual stuff, I think we’ll spend obviously less time talking about that and more time just talking about what houses 7 through 12 mean. So are there any preliminary things that we should get out of the way or talk about before we jump into it?
AC: I think we did that last time.
KS: I think we can probably just go.
CB: Okay.
KS: The 7th house. Everybody wants to know about the 7th house.
AC: Well, okay, one thing that I think we’ll end up doing anyway is that now that we’ve done the first 6, as we do the second set, the clear relationship of every house to its opposite house will be glaringly obvious to the point that it would be strange if we didn’t talk about it. So that’ll be I think part of our structure this time.
CB: Yeah, there’s more of a personal sense when you’re talking about houses 1 through 6. And then suddenly, you get to house 7 and you’re more clearly and consistently talking about ‘the other ‘ in some ways.
KS: Yeah, or even the ‘out in the world’ kind of sphere.
CB: Sure.
KS: There is a difference in orientation, if you like.
CB: Like the public sphere.
KS: Yeah, there’s something about the ‘out there’ nature–more public, more seen, perhaps.
AC: Yeah, and the relationship between the houses.
KS: Yes, and I think that is really critical. It adds to it.
AC: Yeah. Just as with the signs, part of the way you get to know the houses is by knowing what they relate to.
KS: Yes, what they’re connected to and then the way in which they’re different from that.
AC: Yeah. And so, I think that’s most obvious with our first house of the day, which is the 7th, which is other people that are important in your life, as opposed to the 1st house, which is you. So we have the ‘you’ and the ‘other’.
KS: Yes.
CB: Yes. So let me throw up a chart that has a diagram with all 12 houses and their significations. And I meant to mention this. We’re actually putting this on a poster this year for the poster package where we include the transits for the year in both a circular chart, as well as a secondary one that shows all the sign ingresses throughout the course of the year.
And this is the third bonus poster we’re using, and that’s part of the reason why I wanted to do this, this year, so people can have this on their wall as a reference, as they’re trying to memorize the significations of the houses. So these are all the significations. And then to zoom in, let’s see, we did houses 1 through 6 yesterday. There’s the significations of those. And here are the houses in the second-half of the wheel that we’re going to be going through today, starting with house 7.
So the 7th house in ancient astrology, the original name for this was ‘the setting place’, since that is of course where the Sun sets each day in the evening once it hits the degree of the Descendant. But also, planets through their diurnal rotation, they also set each day on the western horizon, which is associated with the 7th house.
The 7th is an angular house, and the primary significations that I have on our chart here associated with it are ‘relationships’, ‘partnership’, ‘marriage’, and the concept of ‘the other’ as contrasted with the 1st house signification, which is ‘the self’. So 1st house is self and 7th house is other. So back to what you were saying, Austin. Your entry point into this was you were saying that this is primarily the house of ‘the other’.
AC: Mm-hmm. This is the most social house of the zodiac we’ve talked about. Not the zodiac, of the chart. We’ve talked about how planets in a given chart are not always primarily going to show up as ‘you’. The unit of the chart is the ‘life’ not the ‘self’. The self is a subpart of the life; the part you identify with. And in the 7th, which opposes the 1st, we see planets showing up as people you encounter and have significant relationships with.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And one of my keywords for the 7th is ‘significant relationship’, and that certainly includes the romantic and marriage partnership types, but you’ll also see people that you have very close friendships or even close business partnerships with. So we talked about the 3rd as a ‘social’ place, but the 7th is much more social. It is the angular house that has strong social significations, and so you see a level of intimacy and entanglement in the 7th that you don’t see in the 3rd.
KS: Yeah, the intimacy factor. Because I say the same thing that the 7th house can describe a very close friendship, and of course, the business partnerships as well. But what defines a close friendship from no close friendship or from a close business partnership is that level of intimate exchange. Not referring necessarily to any physical intimacy, but it’s more that emotional, sort of ‘knowingness’ that the other person has around who you are, what you’re about, and what you’re dealing with.
CB: One of the things that’s funny about that is sometimes there’s a natural tension with the 7th house. Because if you’re looking at it and contrasting it with the rising sign, the 7th house represents often many opposing qualities that you don’t have in the rising sign, especially in terms of the elemental polarity. For example, if you have, hypothetically, Aquarius rising, then Leo…
KS: Just hypothetically?
CB: Just turning out examples, hypothetical. And so, if you had Aquarius rising, then Aquarius is a masculine air sign that is also a fixed sign, but then on the Descendant, what you find is the opposite; elementally, you find a fire sign. You find Leo, a fire sign, which at least in the Stoic qualities, fire signs tend to be hot and air signs tend to be cold or cooling. There’s some debate about that in the tradition in terms of hot versus cold and which signs are which. But let’s just say for the sake of argument at least that Aquarius is very different than Leo.
KS: Totally.
CB: There’s something about the 7th house when you’re looking at it from that perspective that is automatically presenting a contrasting quality that’s sort of absent in some ways or not present. While there’s similarities, both of them being fixed signs, or both of them being let’s say masculine signs, if you use that language, the elemental difference is introducing something new and something contrasting enough to be sometimes uncomfortable, but other times productive and useful.
AC: Yeah, so I would agree with that, and I would say it’s even easier to make that point with planetary rulers.
CB: Right.
KS: Yes.
AC: Aquarius is ruled by Saturn and Leo’s ruled by the Sun.
CB: Yeah.
KS: Massive polarity.
AC: Fit in grandma on one side…
CB: I don’t know if that was the term.
AC: That’s what I said.
KS: We’re going to stick with that.
AC: And then you have sunny…
KS: Warm and sunny on the other side.
AC: …yeah, on the other. Mars- and Venus-ruled signs oppose and Mercury- and Jupiter-ruled signs oppose, and then Sun-Saturn and Moon-Saturn, so we always have strong polarity.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Right, so that idea of polarity. And sometimes that can be difficult, or it can indicate tensions. So it can indicate that which feels uncomfortable to the native in some sense because it’s an opposite or antithetical quality from what they personally exude in some ways themselves in terms of what’s coming from their 1st house and their body and their mind.
But other times it can also be a component that you’re sort of missing and can attract to yourself in a way that complements or completes and adds something that’s actually useful or beneficial that you might not have had otherwise.
AC: Yeah, it’s almost astrology’s way of saying that you’re bound to encounter what you refuse to identify with, or that which you simply don’t identify with.
KS: Or that which you reject.
AC: The opposite’s just going to find you.
KS: Yeah, it is.
CB: And that might be there astronomically in the sense that the Ascendant, that which was rising, emerging, and coming into visibility the moment of your birth, whereas the setting is something that’s moving underneath the horizon and is being concealed and submerged in some sense. So it’s not always fully conscious in the individual, especially early on in their life, but it’s something that may come into their life or be added to it at some point.
AC: Yeah. And so, the horizonal dynamics are really important here just as they are in the 1st. Because the 1st and the 7th are the only two houses that in a whole sign system are partially above the horizon and partially below.
CB: Right.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And in the 1st, we dealt with that as that union of the ‘ghostly and the fleshy’. And what is another union of the ‘ghostly and the fleshy’? That’s who we’re relating to.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And none of the other houses have that astronomical characteristic.
CB: Yeah. And it’s important that the Ascendant or the rising sign, the astronomical motion is one of emergence. That’s where the Sun emerges from underneath the horizon, or where the planets rise up and emerge over the horizon.
But at the Descendant, we have the opposite motion astronomically where the Sun is setting and submerging and moving into the Earth, or the other planets are setting and moving into and being submerged with it, but also, uniting with the Earth in some way where the sky and the Earth come together. And I think it’s that notion of ‘coming together in union’ that ends up becoming one of the primary symbolic motifs of the 7th house and most of the significations that come out of the 7th house.
AC: Yeah. And to further riff on that, a planet that is rising in the east is separating from…
KS: Yeah, that’s what I was just going to say.
AC: …and it is individually visible as separate from the Earth, whereas a planet that is setting is coming back to that unification. If we think about the Sun rising everyday, the Sun is separate from the Earth as its own thing, and then it’s coming back together with the Earth, just like you were saying so you have that union.
Just to use the Sun as a model here, if we’re talking about the individuating of consciousness or the understanding of self as separate than other, then we have in the 7th, “Oh, other people exist,” that coming back to union and compromise and that, “Oh, I’m not alone.”
KS: How do I interact with another? If I’m not alone, I can’t just do everything I want, when I want.
AC: Right.
CB: Yeah. And what were you saying, Kelly?
KS: Yeah, just riffing on that idea that you guys were talking about, the visual I got when you were talking about the Sun setting is it becomes less clear where the distinctions of separation are. If you’re outside two hours before sunset, you can very clearly see the horizon line, but the longer you stay out there and the more the Sun sets, the more it’s like, “Is that the horizon?” because it gets darker. So there is that sense of we have less separation here, and so, therefore, there is that idea just exactly what you were saying.
AC: Yeah, there’s a visual blurring.
KS: There’s a visual component, the blurring. It’s not clear where the lines are. Partnership is about clarifying where the lines are, that perhaps you’re both on one side of, but then there are lines between you. Do we want lines? Do we not want lines? Where do we want to put our lines?
AC: As it’s a negotiation, it’s inherently dynamic.
KS: It’s an evolving thing.
AC: Just like at sunset, right?
KS: Yeah, they’re here now and then they’re over there.
AC: Yeah.
KS: There’s a lot of symbolism in that idea of the union here, I think.
AC: That’s a really good point, Chris.
CB: Yeah. And that actually comes back to the issue that we mentioned earlier about there still being an issue of traditionally there’s three different houses at different points that have been associated with sex. But in the 2nd century, Valens and I think some of the early Hellenistic astrologers had a tendency to sometimes put it in the 7th house because of that notion of union, of coming together symbolically.
AC: If we’re saying sex acts require two or more people, I mean, there’s certainly some that can be done solitary.
KS: That do not, yeah.
AC: But if we’re using two-plus as our definition for a meaningful subcategory of sex acts, then…
KS: Austin does like to be specific.
CB: Right.
KS: We all noticed that in the first part.
AC: Then you do need something going on…
KS: You need your partner.
AC: …with the 7th house to get somebody else there.
CB: Sure.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And we can differentiate that between sexual pleasure, right? Because a person can pleasure themselves without needing anybody else.
KS: Yes, but if we’re talking about the context of physical intimacy with another person…
AC: Then you need somebody else or something else.
CB: So this opens up the broader category of the main one that we find in the 7th house, which is just ‘relationships’. And this is where astrologers look to in the chart for the topic of relationships, both in terms of what is the sign that is on the cusp of the 7th house, what is the quality of that sign, what planets are in the 7th house, and what are the qualities those planets are importing into the 7th house in terms of what that means for the types of relationships the person might have. And then, also, looking at the ruler of the 7th house for additional information about relationships in the life of the native in general.
KS: Hugely important.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: So ‘romantic relationships’ are often the primary ones that we’re talking about there.
KS: Yes. And that is the primary piece, I think.
CB: And that’s usually long-ish term relationships. While marriage–we’ll get to that point–is certainly one of the primary relationships if a person does get married at some point, the marriage partner, you’ll find in the 7th house.
KS: Yeah.
CB: This can also mean a ‘steady relationship’ would fall under the category of the 7th house.
KS: Yeah, I think if there is some sort of known commitment, it doesn’t have to be a marriage ceremony, per se. But it’s that idea of we are together, or we have defined this relationship; it could be exclusive, non-exclusive, but whatever agreement you make. But I think there is a longevity component and probably something in how bound together are our lives in terms of are we living together, are we working together, do we have children together. Some of those components would sort of clue you in to the substantive nature of the relationship which would make it a 7th house.
CB: You said ‘intertwining’? What was the keyword you just used? Was that ‘intertwining’?
KS: Yeah, your lives are kind of bound together in some way.
CB: That made me think of the keyword that Valens uses, which is evidently a euphemism for sex, but he say ‘intertwining’ in Greek. The closest English equivalent is ‘intercourse’, which literally means the same thing; it means an intertwining.
KS: Yeah.
CB: But I like you using that keyword because that’s one of the important things that happens in a long-term relationship is it becomes an intertwining of your lives on so many different levels. And that’s one of the things that characterizes a relationship or a long-term relationship versus a friendship or something is that sort of intertwining and that merging of your lives.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: More? No? Okay.
AC: There’s a lot to say. So planets that are placed in the 7th will, it’s interesting because they do, I would say, triple-duty. Because again, we’re here at an angular house.
KS: Yes, so the global impact.
AC: Yeah, it’s just going to do a lot of things. One is that it’s going to characterize a person’s subjective taste for other people and relationships. And they may or may not be conscious of what they’re attracted to, but it’s there. On an external level, you’re going to tend to be drawn into connection with people represented by planets in the 7th and ruling the 7th.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And then, three planets in or ruling the 7th also have a lot to say about timing in a person’s romantic life. So for example, you have Saturn in the 7th especially, but also, ruling it. Then, you know what? We can say probably 80% of the time if there’s a strong Saturn in the 7th that person is going to couple off later than a person who has Venus in the 7th. And so, the planets comment on at least those three things.
KS: Yeah.
CB: So a Saturn in the 7th, one of the classical delineations is delays in relationships.
AC: Mm-hmm. And for people out there who are, I don’t know, 25 and looking woefully at their 7th, if you’ve got Saturn there it doesn’t mean that you don’t get what you want; it does mean that you get it later.
KS: Yeah.
AC: What Saturn takes all day to cook is often quite good.
KS: Is usually worth waiting for.
AC: Yeah. And so, I have Saturn ruling my 7th. Kelly, you have Saturn in the 7th.
KS: Yes.
AC: We both met our marriage partners during our Saturn returns.
KS: I thought that’s what you were going to say actually is that you could look to the Saturn cycle–whether it was the Saturn return or some other type of Saturn trigger–to activate that given its connection to the 7th.
AC: Yeah, and then I got married on the waxing square of Saturn to Saturn, which is also the maturity of Saturn in the Vedic system, but it was all Saturn timed.
KS: All Saturn, yeah.
CB: That’s probably a good principle in general for all the houses, that wherever Saturn is located in the chart can sometimes indicate difficulties earlier in life, or things that might be a little bit more difficult for the person in that area of life, but eventually get better with age.
KS: Mm-hmm.
AC: Yeah.
KS: Absolutely. Like a fine wine, you don’t want to drink that too soon.
AC: There are special circumstances that can interfere with Saturn fructifying later, but the baseline is that it’s way better in your 40s than it is in your 20s.
KS: Yep, and better again I think in your 50s or your 60s, just progressively it improves. So that’s Saturn in the 7th, but obviously any planet there or ruling the 7th and the qualities of that planet will come in.
AC: A simple way to do it is this person’s got Mercury in the 7th, they’re going to want somebody they can talk to. That’s going to be really important.
KS: It’s so simple. An air sign ruling the 7th or Mercury in the 7th, you might say your love language is communication.
CB: Sure.
AC: So I have Capricorn in the 7th. So my love language is ‘responsibility’?
KS: Responsibility, hard work. Restraint, maybe.
CB: Restraints.
AC: Not inaccurate.
KS: What it would indicate is you respect or perhaps are potentially drawn to a partner–the theory would say–who is responsible; somebody who’s got their shit together for instance. Capricorn, 7th house would struggle with a partner who was a little more flaky or a little bit more creative or a little bit more disorganized; whereas other placements, like a Venus 7th house connection would be really into the creative partner or the artistic partner.
AC: Yeah. So the planet ruling or in the 7th will also describe ‘relationship styles’.
KS: Style, totally.
AC: So for me, with Saturn ruling the 7th, I was only ever interested in are we in a relationship or not.
KS: How do we define this, yeah.
AC: My few attempts at dating were more less-defined structures. It was really uncomfortable for me. I didn’t get it.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And so, I was very like, “Doing this or not doing this?”
KS: So it was a very clear distinction.
AC: Right. Whereas if somebody has Mercury in the 7th, it’s going to be much more mobile.
KS: Sort of ambiguity.
AC: That’s a person who can probably date much more effectively than me.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Sure. One I’ve seen in a lot of the modern texts–I still agree with this; it’s a pretty good delineation–is the Sun in the 7th or people with heavy 7th house emphasis need a relationship or a partnership, and sometimes they find themselves through other people; or their sense of self-identity sometimes does become more well-defined. Initially, that doesn’t go well at all because they’ll sometimes at the beginning of a relationship tend to completely subsume their own identity to the partner.
KS: Yeah.
CB: But then eventually, in the long term, sometimes if it works out well that comes around and eventually they find themselves again. And there’s a give-and-take or a back-and-forth that happens with that.
AC: Yeah. And that’s I would say at least as true, if not more so, if you have the ruler of the 1st in 7th.
CB: Yeah, definitely.
KS: Yes, that’s the other piece. And that’s an accurate statement to make that a person might really define themselves through their partnership. And I’ve said to clients who have lord one in the 7th or strong solar indications around the 7th it’s really important for you to focus on quality control where your partner and your relationship is concerned because you’re going to take a lot of your sense of self or self-worth from that part of your chart. And therefore, you really don’t want a dud.
CB: Sometimes that can work out well if it’s a good relationship, but if it’s not a good relationship…
KS: That’s where it becomes much more problematic.
CB: Yeah.
KS: That’s a great topic.
CB: That’s a big topic.
KS: Yeah, it’s a huge topic. And it’s one that clients and students always want to know about.
CB: Right. And this was the episode I did last month, I guess, with Jessica Lanyadoo partially about relationships; although this is a subset of that, that’s a whole other thing.
KS: Yeah. I mean, we could do a whole three-hour episode just on the 7th house. So I guess we’re like how much more should we say?
CB: What were you about to say, Austin?
AC: I was going to go further down that particular rabbit hole, but I don’t think that’s useful. So let’s talk about just the non-romantic parts of the 7th.
CB: Yeah, definitely
KS: Yeah, that’s a good idea.
AC: The 7th is the biggest ‘people’ gateway in the chart. For example, if you have strong Jupiter there, you’re probably going to meet teachers for whatever you want to learn very easily because they’re just Jupiter people rolling through your 7th consistently.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And so, the social significations of the 7th are focused to a laser point in significant partnership, but you also just meet a lot of people like that.
CB: Yeah, benefits from other people, Jupiter in the 7th, let’s say.
AC: Yeah, yeah.
KS: One of the other topics that I often am talking about with regards to the 7th house is the idea of someone who works in a practitioner/client-style environment; so that ‘one-on-one’-type relationship. So when we sit down with a client, we’re engaging in a 7th house-style relationship with that client. So some of the other significations is if lord of the 7th is in the 10th, or lord of the 10th or lord of the Midheaven is in the 7th, that can indicate that a component of your work is in this 7th house-type setting.
AC: Yeah, it’s going to be one-on-one.
KS: One-on-one. So whether you are a massage therapist, a naturopath, or an astrologer, it would all fulfill the one-on-one category.
AC: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Yeah. Or sometimes your marriage partner or long-term partner is somehow tied in with your career or your work.
KS: That can also be when there’s 7/10 crossover.
AC: Yeah, or you meet the partner at work.
CB: Right.
KS: Yeah. And that’s where people are like, “What kind of setting would I go to try to potentially meet a romantic partner?” See what house lord of the 7th is in and that can be a help. But yeah, the one-on-one. So there is a bit of a work component that can come up.
AC: Yeah, when the 10th is involved.
KS: When the 10th is involved, yeah.
AC: That principle goes for the rest of the houses.
KS: Totally, totally.
AC: So if you have the lord of the 7th in the 9th, then you are much more likely to meet people that you’re interested in when you’re at church or on vacation.
KS: Yes
CB: Yeah, like a religious partner or a partner from a foreign country, or a partner that you met in a foreign country is a typical delineation of 7th house/9th house connections.
KS: Totally. Or they can be in your country, but they’re from another country.
CB: Right.
KS: Or any other country.
CB: All right, one of the things that comes up with the 7th house that might bear mentioning here is the 7th house is one of those houses that has an aspect with the 1st house. But because it’s in opposition, and planets in the 7th house are automatically opposing the Ascendant and other 1st house planets, it can sometimes create some tension there, especially if it’s difficult planets. It creates some tension with whatever your 1st house placements are, which can be your body or your mind.
And typically, in the Hellenistic tradition, they tended to put enemies in the 6th house or the 12th house. But there was a bit of drift in the Medieval tradition where they started putting ‘enemies’ or ideas of ‘combatants’ or ‘open enemies’ in the 7th house because of that opposition and that tension with the 1st house.
AC: I would say that, one, I would agree with basically enemies for 6/12. A malefic in the 7th is an enemy.
CB: Yeah, it can be.
AC: I don’t think that the 7th can host enemies, but you have to have specific conditions. Whereas the 6th and 12th will always tell you about that which opposes you.
CB: Yeah. Also, sometimes, things that are making hard aspects with the Ascendant can indicate things that are causing health problems for you, or bodily problems for you to whatever extent the Ascendant or 1st house planets indicate your body and physical vitality.
KS: Yeah.
CB: And sometimes the other facet of this is looking at transits and transits through the 7th house. So those can often be important periods of timing for relationships, either for the starting or ending of relationships. Or if you’re in a long-term partnership, then it can be an important turning point or a pivotal time for relationships in some way.
KS: Absolutely.
AC: I would say that that’s especially true during the formation stages of a partnership, let’s say, first five years or whatever. When you’ve been together for, I don’t know, one Venus, so eight years, a lot of times what I’ve seen is that the transits to the 7th just tell you about what’s going on with that person’s partner. And they may or may not have any impact on relational dynamics other than, “Oh, yeah, my sweetie’s having a really rough time,” or “My partner just won the lottery.” That impacts things.
KS: That’s actually really true that the 7th house transits can describe experiences or circumstances more directly affecting the partner. So Saturn there can be like, “My partner’s having a rough time at work,” for instance, and Jupiter there is like, “My partner’s got the raise (or won the lotto).”
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And what’s funny about that sometimes is I’ve seen people get disappointed because they’ll have a very positive transit going through their 7th house. It’s hitting a natal planet and they’re excited about that, but then nothing positive happens in there, but their partner gets a raise or something like that.
KS: To our point which we’ve been sort of reiterating throughout episode one and a little bit today is that the chart represents your life as a whole, and the 7th house is going to describe the significant people in it. And so, triggers to the 7th are like triggers for them, not necessarily for you personally.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And it’s like sometimes that can have a ricochet effect on your life, but it doesn’t always necessarily have to, sometimes it can just be in their life. Although certainly sometimes with a super heavy, difficult transit and the death of a partner, obviously that’s affecting the partner the most in that their life came to an end at that point.
KS: That’s a big thing.
CB: Obviously, that also affects you in terms of your experience of going through that, of losing a partner. And just that duality sometimes of when you start getting into these houses that deal with other people in your life describing sometimes an event in their life, but also sometimes it can affect or does affect you.
KS: Absolutely.
AC: Yeah, I mean, if you’re at the point where you’re actually sharing a life with someone, and you have plans together, then anything that’s significant that happens to them does affect your plans. It affects the person you’re hanging out with everyday if you live together.
KS: Absolutely. And that’s where it’s a very subtle distinction to be like, well, this happens to your partner. So the technical beginning point is that your partner experiences x, y, or z, but it will absolutely affect your time with them. I mean, if your partner gets really busy at work, your relationship is going to be different for that time or going forward as a result of that.
AC: Yeah. And so, from a technical perspective, if the rulers of the 1st and 7th are in strong aspect to each other, then you’re more affected by your partner and your partner is more affected by you. If they’re off doing separate things, then that’s going to be less, right? And that’ll be reflected in life.
KS: In life in general, yeah.
CB: Sure. So to take that back out of the relationship realm…
KS: I know. We keep ending up back there, sorry.
CB: Yeah, it’s so easy. It’s fine.
KS: So easy to do, isn’t it?
CB: It’s really the primary area that’s relevant, but there are areas like, for example, ‘contractual relationships’ or ‘contractual agreements’. Especially in electional astrology, if you’re trying to elect a chart for signing an agreement with another party, then usually you’re the 1st house, the person signing it, and then you have the other party which is assigned to the 7th house typically.
KS: The person that you’re trying to do the deal with.
CB: Yeah, so it comes up very frequently in electional astrology in buying and selling relationships.
AC: Yeah, the elections and horaries for any contest between two parties, it’s 1/7.
KS: Yes. When you’re doing sports-type things, like who’s going to win.
AC: Especially boxing where there are two people.
KS: Two people, yes, that’s true.
AC: Unless it’s champ versus contender, which is 4/10. But if they’re on relatively even footing, it’s always 1/7.
CB: Sure. Yeah, so all sorts of partnerships and things like that. If you ‘start a business with somebody’, where it’s you and a partner starting a business, sometimes that can show up in the 7th house. I mean, obviously, if it’s a close friend, sometimes that gets murky in terms of you might see 11th house activations or other things like that.
KS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah, I’m trying to think of any other 7th house things we need to touch on.
AC: Well, there’s ‘death’.
CB: Sure. So we start getting into the realm of death in this angular triad especially. So we’ve got illness with the 6th and then the 7th is the setting place. And in the original set of significations for the houses death was assigned to the 7th.
KS: I’m sure that’s where Maternus had it.
AC: In Vedic, that’s standard.
CB: They still assign it to the 7th?
KS: Yeah.
CB: But they also assign it to the 8th, don’t they?
AC: Yes. So the very basic protocol is determining which planet has the greatest killing power, the maraka. And so, either you look at the rulers of the 7th and 2nd and see who’s more malefic and stronger, and then that’ll be the planet that you’re most concerned about when you’re doing death timing, but the 7th is the primary one there.
CB: Okay.
AC: Actually because it’s twelfth from the 8th.
KS: Oh, yeah, yeah.
AC: The 8th is death, but also, longevity, and that which destroys your longevity. But anyway, the 7th is used as an indicator for death.
KS: Yes.
CB: Sure.
KS: But the symbolism of the setting Sun was considered to be the death of–whether it was the Sun or another planet–or it dying.
CB: Like in Egyptian cosmology.
KS: Yes, the Egyptian idea.
AC: The euphemism for death is going into the western lands.
CB: Okay.
KS: Which is where the Sun goes when it does at night.
CB: And in the early Hellenistic tradition, there was tension for the first thousand years because the first text on the houses put death in the 7th, and that was the Hermes text. And I talked about this in the previous episode on the house division issue and the debate about the origins of house divisions.
So the Hermes text was probably the first text on the houses and it put death in the 7th. But then there was a second text that was written later that revised some of the significations and it moved death firmly to the 8th house. In the later traditions, in authors like Antiochus, Thrasyllus, and Vettius Valens, they have a tension between which to assign it to.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Because astrologers, even if they’re capable sometimes of assigning topics to multiple houses, there’s always this tendency to want to try to find one primary house to put it in. And most of the later tradition ended up siding with the 8th house; at least in the Western tradition, putting death in 8th for the most part.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: So we’ll get into that topic more in the very next house. But it’s important sometimes to realize that some of these houses have a connection with each other through the connection of the angular triad and it being a process that’s taking place in terms of those three houses. So this one is the angular triad around the Descendant where we find illness in the 6th, we find the setting place in the 7th, and then we find in most of the other traditions death and inheritance and other things connected with death in the 8th.
KS: Yeah. And I mean, you can see with the 7th, I can understand there’s a sort of ‘stuck-ness’. The 7th sees the 1st, but it stands in opposition to it. So you could see with the 1st being ‘life’, what is in opposition to life.
CB: Right.
KS: But then of course, the 8th doesn’t aspect the Ascendant.
CB: Yeah, and the issue of that which does not aspect the Ascendant being antithetical to life versus whether the opposition itself from that sign is antithetical.
KS: Yeah, yeah.
CB: All right, anything else we need to touch on in the 7th before we move forward to the next house?
AC: I think that’s a nice transition to 8th.
CB: Yeah, it sounds like we’re already jumping…
KS: Apparently, we are ready to go.
CB: Yeah. All right, let’s do it then. Let’s throw up the chart. So here’s our diagram again for the 8th house. So the 8th house traditionally in ancient Hellenistic astrology was called ‘the inactive place’ or ‘the idle place’. It is said to signify ‘death’, ‘inheritance’, and ‘the assets of others’, or ‘money or financial matters involving others’.
It is a succedent house. It’s the succedent house that follows after the 7th house or the angular house. So planets in the 8th are sort of rising up to and come into angularity after those in the 7th house. So those are our basic, basic significations and meanings. And the 8th house is one of those tricky houses because it’s gone through a lot of transformations in modern times; ‘transformation’ is the keyword for that house.
But the 8th house is one of those houses that’s tough because when you go back and read a lot of the ancient Hellenistic texts, they don’t have a ton to say about it, aside from ‘death’, ‘inheritance’. Valens does mention ‘the partner’s money’ at one point as a derivative house signification, but they don’t go into it a lot outside of that. But in modern times, the 8th house has become in some astrological schools a major, major focus partially due to the modern assignment/equivocation of signs with the houses and then modern planets with the houses.
KS: Mm-hmm.
AC: Yep, Pluto rules the 8th house, right, Chris?
KS: That’s in your book, isn’t it?
CB: Yeah, the Hellenistic astrology book.
AC: That’s Antiochus, right?
CB: Right. Yeah, it’s like if you don’t have that, if you’re not assigning Scorpio to the 8th house or Pluto to the 8th house, then all you have to work with is some of what we’ve mentioned here, which is that it’s a house that does not aspect the Ascendant; so therefore, it’s thought to be not supportive of life and that it’s a succedent house that follows after the 7th house where the planets set.
And that seems to be why it starts to get these ideas of that which comes after life, or that which comes after death, or death itself. It’s coming after and has a sense of finality in completing the angular triad around the Descendant.
KS: There are other things that we could throw into the 8th house.
CB: Okay, let’s throw some positive things into the 8th house.
AC: Well, how about ‘debt’?
KS: Yeah, I mean, ‘debt’.
AC: One of the most practical or one of the more practical sets of significations with the 8th is ‘borrowing money’ or ‘having money borrowed from you’. And we see this very strongly within the 2nd/8th axis. The 2nd is your stuff, the substance of the native. The 8th is sort of mine, yours, ours.
So for a lot of people who deal with huge amounts of money, you’ll often have big 2nd/8th action because in order to do big business, you have to borrow money to do this. Everything is funded by loans and there’s a repayment schedule, etc., etc.
CB: Let’s explain why that is conceptually and introduce a new concept that we haven’t introduced yet, which is once you get to the 8th house, you start getting into the concept of derived or derivative houses, or ‘turning the wheel’. If the 1st house is ‘you’, and the 2nd house indicates ‘your money’ or ‘your finances’, and the 7th house is ‘the other’ or is ‘your marriage partner’, then by extension the 8th house is the second house relative to the 7th house.
AC: ‘Other’s money’.
KS: ‘Other people’s money’.
CB: Yeah, so literally ‘other’s money’ or ‘the assets of others’. And when you introduce that concept of ‘other people’s money’ or ‘that which belongs to others’ that broadens it and creates a much broader category of things that you could start putting there.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And it’s not only seventh from the 2nd, it’s second from the 7th, so you’re getting that same thing on both sides. And so, ‘inheritance’ is one of the oldest set of significations there; and that’s not your money until it’s your money, right?
KS: Yes, until somebody dies.
AC: Right. You also see–I’m not sure if it shows up at first in the Arabic phase or if we can find some late Hellenistic stuff, but it’s been used for well over a thousand years for ‘judging dowry’; judging how many goats will my partner bring to the marriage.
KS: To the marriage.
CB: That’s very, very relevant these days.
AC: No, but it is. People bring assets, people bring baggage of gold, silver, and gross donkeys.
KS: It is actually relevant. Not a dowry per se, but are you more inclined to marry someone who is more well-off than you or less well-off than you; there is a way of assessing. I’ve done this with some clients, the 2nd house versus the 8th house, do you have more money than your partner, does your partner have more than you.
CB: Sure.
AC: And it works very consistently.
KS: And it’s quite a spectacularly simple but quite impressive thing to be able to do with a chart.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Because there can be financial inequalities in relationships.
KS: Hugely.
CB: This is where you can start to see that in a chart.
KS: Yes.
AC: So the dowry is a thing we mostly don’t do anymore; we don’t do it in America at least. It’s in effect in other parts of the world.
KS: Yeah.
AC: But even if you’re like, “We’re two broke kids and we’re getting married,” 20 years down the line, one person may have ended up bringing a lot more substance financially to the marriage. Also, people inherit, unless your parents have absolutely nothing, which happens, but a lot of people have parents that have something. Again, it might not show up when you’re two broke kids, but in 30 years, one person inherits a million dollars, and one person inherits a set of stamps.
KS: Right.
CB: Yeah. I actually know somebody who was in a long-term marriage for actually his entire, for 40 or 50 years, and he had Jupiter in Pisces in the 8th house. And his wife at one point, her mother died, and they inherited a million-dollar mansion from her mother, which is just this like a sudden financial windfall; and it showed up in his chart through his 8th house, which was indicating the sudden rise coming from his partner’s finances.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah.
KS: Yeah, and I’ve had the opposite with a client with something very difficult. I can’t remember the specifics but Saturn was transiting a difficult planet in the 8th perhaps, and the partner was going through an incredibly stressful time with his business, with his business partner.
CB: Right.
KS: And that was causing huge financial stress on her, but it was that idea that it was her partner’s difficult situation. But I think all the money things in the 8th house, like ‘taxes’, how you’re handling your tax debt, any kind of ‘loans’, inheritances–I have this experience personally–they’re not always the financial inheritance that you think about.
AC: Oh, no. There’s all the rest of the things that we inherit.
KS: Yeah. And the experience I had was Jupiter was transiting my 8th, and my original astrology teacher became sick with cancer and did pass away in that time, which was very devastating for me on a personal level. Professionally, she was looking to hand over different elements of her practice to someone and ended up referring all of these clients to me quite early in my practice. So I sort of ‘inherited’ not her entire business, but enough of kind of a leg-up, if you like. So just to say, yeah, inheritance, I mean, it can be stamps as well.
AC: Yeah, it can be a genetic disorder.
KS: That’s true. We need to talk about that.
AC: If you have the ruler of the 6th in the 8th, a good chance that your health problems are exactly one of your parents’ health problems. Yeah, you can inherit talents. You can inherit psychological complexes. You can inherit stamp collections.
KS: Stamp collections.
AC: Donkeys.
KS: I will definitely inherit a stamp collection because my Dad loves to collect stamps.
CB: I’m trying to think of other things that I’ve seen show up with the 8th house.
AC: I would just say back to just money, the 8th house is ‘going into debt’ if you’ve got the ruler of the 8th in a really good position. For example, the ruler of the 8th in the 2nd, by going into debt, you’ll probably make money.
KS: Yeah.
AC: If you have the ruler of the 8th conjunct Saturn in the 12th, don’t go into debt, you’ll probably just end up paying interest on it. It’s a general guide to, we could say, luck and how things will tend to turn out for going into debt. Some people make a lot of money by going into debt; some people just get deeper into debt by going into debt.
KS: Yes. You want to assess whether debt is something for you to dance with or not.
AC: And that comes up a lot more often than death. Death is absolutely something that we see through there. It’s just that we generally will use a credit card more often than people die.
KS: Correct.
CB: Yeah. I mean, the financial aspect of the 8th house is definitely the most non-negative one that you can talk about…
AC: Oh, it can be negative.
CB: …with relative consistency.
AC: Drowning in debt will be seen through 8th stuff.
KS: Hugely negative.
CB: No, I’m just saying in terms of death, it’s hard sometimes to frame that in a positive way, but financial matters are definitely a major 8th house topic that’s not necessarily always negative.
AC: Yeah, you can strategize around that.
KS: You can. It’s more productive. On the death topic, there are other associations. You will see sometimes if you have lord 8 in the 10th, or lord 10 in the 8th, people work in the hospice industry or respite care and things like that.
CB: Right. I had a funeral person that was like a mortician.
KS: A mortician, yeah, yeah. So the connections with death are not always explicitly you dying or you dealing with the death of a loved one, but it can be being involved in the death or the grieving process in some capacity.
CB: That was a really funny consultation because I felt like I was going out there. I was like, “I don’t know how this is relevant, but you have the ruler of the 8th in the 10th, and a really literal delineation is maybe somehow your work involves issues surrounding mortality.” And they just smiled really bigly, and they were like, “I’m a mortician.”
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah.
CB: That was real funny.
KS: Because there are morticians in the world and we have to be able to see that in the chart.
CB: Yeah, every possible, not just vocation, but permutation of different people’s lives and they’re configured, there’s so many of them; but they all are in the chart, but you can see it in the chart in different ways. And training yourself as an astrologer, what combination would result in this career, or this focus in life or what have you. One of the major challenges you have to do as an astrologer is to train yourself as to just what is possible.
KS: Totally. Were you going to say something, Austin?
AC: No.
KS: Okay. The one other piece that I want to throw in for the 8th house, I don’t want us to get stuck here, but I do see this as relevant is the connection to ‘disturbed psychology’; and what I mean by that is whether it’s some fears or some paranoias. I know in the modern, they say ‘psyche’ and ‘psychology’, but I do see a little of people who are either suffering from some types of mental health stuff, and/or people who work in that field with strong 8th house significations.
CB: Okay.
KS: Yeah, I don’t know if you guys see that at all.
AC: I think it can contribute. I strongly prefer the 12th for most of those.
KS: I do too, actually. But I think the 8th is a secondary something on those topics.
AC: Well, two things. One, if you have malefics in the 8th, then you’re naturally in a position to deal with other people’s malefic situations or feelings.
KS: Yes.
AC: I see that a lot in therapists. And then, two, within a natal chart, if you have, let’s say, a life-giving planet–ruler of the 1st as an example, or the Sun–in the 8th, then it is not configured by classical aspect to the 1st; you can’t see it from the rising. And so, people who have Sun in the 8th have a hard time being seen, which is a psychological challenge.
KS: Yes.
AC: It’s hard to get the light to the surface, so that other people can reflect it.
KS: Hidden.
AC: And so, one thing you’ll see is that people generally don’t identify with planets in the 8th because there’s no configuration between the 1st and the 8th. And that’s especially glaring when it’s the Sun or the Moon.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And the experience of that can be like being overlooked or not seen for what you’re doing.
KS: A hundred-percent.
AC: One thing I’ve encountered a lot is people with a lot of 8th house stuff where they’re contributing a lot to somebody else’s well-being, or they’re contributing to a group project, but then they don’t get credit for that. And again, we’re back to debt, credit, etc., etc., and that has a lot to do with not being seen; and also, because it’s not just them.
With the 8th, there’s almost always other people involved. Like the 7th, it’s a very ‘othery’ place.
KS: Yes.
CB: Right.
KS: It’s very much ‘othery’.
AC: And I would say it’s the invisible ‘othery’ place. Like debts, if you ever loaned money or borrowed money from a friend, you kind of don’t want to talk about that and not look at it.
KS: It’s awkward.
AC: They’ll pay me back when they can. We want to preserve the dynamic. A big thing that happens with any long-term relationship or friendship is people start thinking about what they’ve done for the other person versus what the other person has done for them, and that’s always below the threshold of one 1/7 relation.
KS: Like the underneath.
CB: Right. ‘Taxes’ is another one.
AC: Yeah, which debt to the government.
CB: Yeah.
KS: I mean, these are all forms of shared or other people’s money, basically. When we pay our taxes, I’m putting my money with your money and we’re going to do something like get the garbage picked up once a week or whatever we’re contributing to.
AC: I like to think of death in terms of the borrowing. Like we have ‘borrowed’ a body, we’ve got to give it all back.
KS: Oh, that’s a good point.
AC: It’s going to come due.
KS: Yeah, we’ve got to pay this loan at some point.
AC: Yeah, like this is a rental.
KS: That’s brilliant.
CB: And we had mentioned this earlier at one point, maybe in the 2nd house, but accountants sometimes come up under the 8th house because you’re working with other people’s money.
KS: Absolutely. Stockbrokers.
CB: Bankers.
KS: Bankers, investment bankers, which is all the leveraging.
CB: So to bring it around with some of the modern significations, I was curious how you guys feel about this. Death, we’re talking about it very literally here. But in what instances can the 8th be more like metaphorical death? Which then leads closer to the modern interpretation of the 8th, which they try to take it more in the direction of ‘transformation’. And while some of that comes from the attempt to equate the 8th house with Scorpio, and with Pluto especially, is ‘transformation’ a relevant 8th house signification.
AC: Well, I would say that if you are carrying debt that is a situation in need of transformation. And that is true on a financial level, in order to achieve financial health, you need to get on a payment schedule. If that is occurring in the context, emotionally, of a relationship, where let’s say you feel like the other person has been giving half of what you have, or vice versa, that is a dynamic that’s in need of transformation if you’re going to obtain relational health, and I think we can extend that principle. 8th house situations often need change in order to be sustainable or healthy.
KS: Yeah, so there’s a level of things maybe not being sustainable or functional potentially in their current state.
AC: Yeah, I mean, to a certain degree by the very definition of ‘debt’, whether you’ve loaned the money or borrowed it, you’re in an unequal situation.
KS: Absolutely. The power dynamic that’s created there.
AC: Yeah, that’s a great power dynamic. The United States has used debt very effectively to control a variety of countries.
KS: Yeah.
AC: “Yeah, we’re going to give you a development loan.”
KS: Yeah, but there’s almost a very pedantic difference I think you guys are talking about because Chris, I think you were saying is the 8th house just a place of transformation.
CB: Is it a place where other metaphorical deaths can take place?
AC: Yeah, what I was just trying to say is that all of these situations are actually in dire need of transformation.
KS: Of transformation, yeah.
AC: And the problem with transformation is that it’s a huge word because that can mean anything.
KS: Yeah.
AC: If I grew a pair of devil horns, that would be a transformation, right? It’s too big a word. But the situation needs to change to be brought to a sustainable, healthy, equitable very often in the 8th. Those situations show up a lot of the time in the 8th.
KS: More consistently.
AC: And then metaphorical death.
KS: Yeah.
CB: I mean, what do you think, Kelly? Because you were bringing in another signification that’s more modern when you were talking about what again?
KS: Yeah, like the psychology thing. And I know it’s very easy to be like this is a modern take for the 8th, but I think there are some older allusions to this.
CB: Yeah, doesn’t ‘the occult’ or ‘something that’s hidden’ get thrown in the 8th occasionally? Is that part of where you’re going?
KS: Well, yeah, but it wasn’t so much that. It’s along the 12th house, mental health, spiritual, bad fortune, sorry, bad spirit piece. There’s a version of that that seems to sit in the 8th house as well. And I wonder if it’s because it’s about things that are blind to the 1st.
CB: Right, because the 8th house can’t see the 1st house, or the 1st house can’t see the 8th house.
KS: Can’t see the 8th house. So it’s like there can be things that you’re not aware of that can be causing you unease inside the psyche or the mind, if you like.
CB: Right.
KS: I feel like we’re going to probably end up fact-checking this.
AC: So while you’re doing that I’ll speak to ‘the occult’.
KS: Yes.
AC: So again, too big a word because there’s a lot of different things practiced by, I don’t know, a hundred different cultures, etc., etc. If you’re looking at highly ritualized, a lot of times you look at the 9th.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Because I’ve read for a lot of practitioners with a lot of different styles, with the 8th I see a lot of people who are doing more ‘mediumistic’ stuff. Whenever I’ve read for people who are either professionally or part-time they’re just really interested in mediumship–which primarily but not exclusively concerns the dead–it’s always big 8th house stuff.
KS: Yeah, that makes sense.
AC: It’s 8th. A lot of times, it’ll be ruler of the 8th in the 7th, or there will be multiple indicators like three planets in the 8th with Pluto on the Descendant. But I don’t see, just to take for example, astrological magic where you have to be able to calculate the chart and construct the ceremony and do all that; that shows up in the 9th, that type of occultism, whereas, more ‘mediumistic’ stuff, spirit interaction shows up very strongly in the 8th.
KS: Yeah.
CB: What is that category that a lot of people are talking about lately of dealing with your ancestors or ancestral work?
AC: Yeah, ancestral work.
CB: That’s relevant there. Or is that more of a 4th house thing?
AC: I would say 4th/8th.
CB: Okay.
AC: Like I said during the last episode, the 4th is like what’s there ancestrally, the 8th is what concerns you about that. And so, if those two houses are really tied together, then that’s really important. But in most cultures, historically, you honored your ancestors regardless of whether you were being haunted or not, which would be a way of activating the 4th and your roots. But if you’ve got specific stuff going on that shows up in the 8th, then that’s going to be crucially important.
CB: Yeah. So I just pulled out my book, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, available in fine bookstores everywhere, and Vettius Valens in the 2nd century says: “The eighth house signifies death, benefits from death; it’s the idle place; punishment, and weaknesses.”
AC: Oh, we should talk about ‘the idle place’. Because one of the things we’ve been doing with the houses is, okay, just generally speaking, how much juice does a planet in that house have, right?
KS: Yes.
AC: And so, the 8th is unanimously the worst of the succedent houses.
CB: Yeah, compared to 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 11th.
KS: And 11th.
AC: And so, planets in the 8th, if they have a big job like ruling the 1st or ruling the 10th or whatever, a lot of times there’s a lack of energy. If you think about the time of day when the Sun is in the 8th house, it’s not quite sunset, but it’s like the two hours leading up to sunset. And there’s generally like, “I’m kind of tired of doing all this.” There’s an energy lull during that part of that day.
KS: That’s true actually.
AC: It’s like, “Uh, I get off in an hour.”
KS: Yeah, it’s like the last hour of the workday kind of thing.
AC: Yeah, it’s the least productive hour of the workday. And so, there’s like an energetic [makes sound] that’s often present.
KS: Dropping down, yeah.
CB: Right. What were you going to say, Kelly?
KS: I’m just looking up here the idea of the fear and anxiety that goes with the loss, the decay, and the death with 8th house, and that’s where you can get some of these psychological components.
AC: I would say fear of loss and grief.
CB: Fear of loss, fear of grief, yeah, all of those components kind of go into the 8th, which I think is where we get some of that…
AC: Yeah, I would agree.
KS: …psychological territory.
AC: Yeah, I would say 12th is stuff that’s kind of just you. The 8th is those things which are relational.
KS: Yeah.
CB: I wanted to say one of the things I just realized that you almost went into, Austin, was the 8th, traditionally, they tended to treat it as the third worst of the ‘bad’ houses. Usually it’s the 12th is the worst because it both doesn’t aspect the Ascendant; and it’s a cadent house and it only has a weak inferior sextile with the 10th or the Midheaven.
KS: Yeah.
CB: The 6th is the next worst after that because it’s also cadent. It doesn’t aspect the Ascendant, but it is configured by a superior trine to the Midheaven, so it’s a little bit better than the 12th. And then we have the 8th as the next one in terms of the ‘bad’ houses after that because it doesn’t aspect the Ascendant. It does have a superior sextile to the Midheaven, and it’s also a succedent place.
So that’s sort of the breakdown also in terms of places. And when we say ‘good’ and ‘bad’, what we mean is those that are subjectively more positive or negative for the native and in terms of that which can help them directly, or that which is helpful or supportive to them directly versus that which is not.
There is a way though that 8th house placements can be more helpful or the more constructive side of the 8th house can come out, and I see that when planets in the 8th are configured especially by a close sextile within 3° to the degree of the Midheaven, or to planets that are in the 10th whole sign house. The planets in the 8th house can tend to work a little bit more productively in those instances than they might otherwise.
KS: Absolutely. And here’s an example for you of that: Maya Angelou’s chart, who has a Taurus Midheaven, with Venus conjunct Mercury in Pisces in the 8th house, and by degree, sextile to the MC. So someone who is known for her writing, her evocative work, her poetry, but her first autobiography is called I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
And we’ve got the Venus-Mercury as almost like the ‘bird’ or the ‘singing’, but the ‘caging’ component is the 8th house, if you like. And so, she’s sort of speaking to the caged feeling that women of her color and her generation had experienced, if you like; but we see that coming out in terms of professional success because of the link to the MC.
CB: Right.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: Definitely. All right, so other things I wanted to mention before we wrap up the 8th house, I knew somebody that had a really well-placed 8th house with Jupiter and the Lot of Fortune there in Pisces, although it was in a night chart. But he just had a way of manifesting money from other people in this really bizarre manner.
KS: Jupiter in the 8th, you said?
CB: Yeah.
AC: So that also rules the 11th, which is going to pull that in, which is very helpful.
CB: 5th.
AC: Sorry, 5th. Broad square.
CB: Yeah, I mean, you are right. And I think there’s also a sextile with Venus that was supportive and it wasn’t afflicted by Saturn. So especially through donations, people would just donate money to this guy very regularly and very frequently for many, many years, and he got by doing that; so it’s something you can sometimes see with people that have favorable 8th house placements.
Another thing is you guys mentioned at one point that idea of ‘what is your love language’ and you talked about Mercury and words if they have Mercury in the 7th.
KS: Yeah.
CB: But I see with 8th house people sometimes, especially with benefics there, is their love language can be giving gifts.
KS: Yes, that is one of the love languages.
CB: That is one of them?
KS: Yes.
CB: Okay.
KS: I think it’s just called ‘gifts’; there’s a special term. But yes, there is a gift component.
CB: Well, if that one exists as a category, then I definitely would put that somewhere in the vicinity of the 8th house, just in terms of giving things to other people almost as a sign of affection in some way.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, the 8th house shows up in relationships. It’s less important than the 7th, but I would never ignore planets in the 8th if I were focusing on relationship astrology for someone.
KS: Yeah, that’s a good point.
CB: Definitely. Did you think of any other miscellaneous 8th house significations that you wanted to throw in, Kelly?
KS: No, I feel like we’ve covered all the ones that I would normally use.
CB: Okay.
KS: I hope I’m not forgetting anything.
CB: Okay, shall we move on?
AC: Yeah.
KS: Yeah.
CB: All right, let’s do it. So here are the significations of the 9th house. Were we going to do this, or were we going to pause?
AC: After the 9th.
KS: After this, yeah.
CB: Okay, got it. All right, so here’s the diagram; it shows the 9th house and its significations. Traditionally, in ancient Hellenistic astrology, the name of the 9th house was ‘the place of god’, and that is opposite to the 3rd house, which is ‘the place of the goddess’. The Sun is said to have its ‘joy’ or to ‘rejoice’ in the 9th house. The 9th is a cadent house, but it’s configured to the rising sign through a superior trine. So despite being cadent, it’s still treated as one of the ‘good’ houses.
Traditionally and in general, I think a pretty stable set of significations for the 9th house is ‘travel’ (especially foreign or long distance travel), ‘foreign things’ (like foreign people or foreign places), ‘education’ (especially higher education), and also, ‘religion’ or pretty much all matters connected with religion.
KS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah, so those are the significations that I have on the poster for the 9th house. What do you guys think? Any core ones that I’m missing there? Because sometimes picking a single word is really hard.
KS: It’s very hard to do.
CB: Yeah.
KS: It’s very stressful.
CB: Especially when just one of those has a few different permutations that are all very important. Like I put ‘foreign things’, but usually you might put ‘foreigners’ or ‘foreign places’ there, or ‘foreign travel’.
KS: Yeah, I think the key with a diagram like that is that each word is like a drop-down box kind of thing. If you think, okay, God or religion, we go on each of those topics for a number of minutes just expanding.
AC: ‘Divination’ and ‘magic’.
CB: Yeah.
KS: ‘Divination’ and ‘magic’. And ‘astrology’, but that comes in under the ‘God/wisdom’ piece.
AC: Well, I think it’s worth stating explicitly. There are a lot of people who will talk about God for their entire life without ever mentioning astrology.
KS: That’s true.
AC: In Firmicus, it’s very clear. Planets in the 9th, it’s like, “Oh, you’re going to do this at the temple.”
KS: Yes.
AC: “Ah, you’re going to be a soothsayer.” “Ah, you’ll foretell things by the stars.” “Ah, you’d make a great exorcist.”
KS: Yes.
AC: It’s all temple jobs.
KS: So this is where you come to understand the Sun having its ‘joy’ in the 9th, and then knowing that there are ideas around the Sun being the source of wisdom or the source of divinity, the 9th house is like where that divine or revealed knowledge or wisdom kind of pours into your chart and your life. So the more you have going on around the 9th house, or the more significant planets in your chart that are connected to the 9th, the more temple-type work you’re going to do of some iteration or another.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: Sure.
KS: Yeah, and I think that’s a hugely important thing. It’s where ‘philosophy’ in the 9th comes from. It’s the idea of the love of knowledge and the love of ideas and things like that.
CB: Yeah. And let me read Valens’ significations, again, from the 2nd century, just because it’s illustrative because it’s so early. And while some of his significations are weird, or they’re ones that didn’t continue to be used in the tradition, there are some where seeing them go back that far, like almost 2,000 years now, is sometimes really helpful.
But he says: “Ninth house: friendship, travel, benefits from foreign things. It’s the place of God, king, sovereign; astrology, oracular decrees, the appearance of gods, divination; mystical or occult matters; fellowship.” And that’s the last signification, ‘fellowship’.
KS: Yeah.
CB: So it’s like some of those are a little odd from a more modern or a later traditional standpoint, but some of them seen there, like ‘travel’; Austin, you mentioned ‘divination’. It’s interesting that he puts ‘mystical or occult matters’ in the 9th.
AC: I would love to know what the pre-translated words are because ‘occult’ is an English term that is very tied into that stuff being illegal, and therefore, you can’t see it; like that’s a couple hundred years old.
KS: Yeah.
AC: I’d be curious what the…
KS: The actual original Greek. Was it Greek?
CB: Yeah, it’s from Greek. Actually I have a long footnote, an obnoxiously long footnote on it.
KS: Okay, Austin can read that in the break.
AC: Other languages tend to have better words than just, “Oh, it’s ‘occult’.”
KS: Yes.
CB: It looks like in the footnotes it says, mustikōn ē apokruphōn. So it means ‘hidden’.
AC: Okay.
CB: ‘That which is hidden’ or ‘that which is obscured’…
KS: Oh, so it is explicitly about obscured.
CB: …or ‘occult’. Because ‘occultation’ astronomically is like when something moves in front of another thing and obscures it or hides it. But that’s where we get the word ‘occult’ from because it’s those matters that are hidden or secret, but also become sort of private or part of the mystery traditions.
AC: Right. Well, okay, so that makes sense. Right, what goes on in ‘mystery school’, the first rule of what goes on in ‘mystery club’…
KS: Yeah.
CB: Although I do want to say that he also has some similar significations with the 4th house as one of the other ‘hidden’ places.
AC: It’s a different kind of obscuration.
CB: Yeah.
KS: The darkness piece.
CB: Actually let me give that really quickly because I should have just been doing it all along; it just would have taken a lot of time. But he says: “Fourth house: reputation, father, children, one’s own woman, an elder person’s action; one’s city, home, property, dwellings; the results of actions; changes of place; dangers, death, confinement, and secret matters.” So ‘secret matters’ is the one that I was thinking of that he throws in there.
KS: In the 4th.
CB: Yeah, it’s just a similar sort of variation and wording in the Greek.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Okay. So one thing I’d like to throw in for the 9th because I think it’s nice–because it ties in several of the key significations–is the idea of ‘the pilgrimage’.
KS: Oh, totally.
CB: Okay.
KS: A thousand-percent.
AC: A pilgrimage is usually done to a temple, which is a 9th house location, that is far away for religious or spiritual reasons.
KS: And it’s special. If you did it once a year that would be unusual.
AC: Yeah.
KS: It’s like a one-off, once-in-a-lifetime.
AC: Right. And we were talking about 3rd versus 9th, right?
KS: Yeah, the routine versus the special travel.
AC: If you do something every New Moon and Full Moon versus, okay, every five years, we do the pilgrimage.
KS: Yes, so I completely agree. And then a slightly maybe more modernized version of a direct pilgrimage is when people take these once-in-a-lifetime holidays. Whether you go to Machu Picchu and maybe you’re going for spiritual, but it might just be that you’ve always wanted to take a cruise through the Norwegian fjords and you save up and that becomes this one big thing that you do one time in your life; that’s a 9th house-type experience.
AC: Yeah, and for language that contemporary people would probably be more comfortable with than ‘pilgrimage’ is going on ‘a journey’ or ‘a quest’.
KS: Yeah, a quest.
AC: It’s the travel with meaning.
KS: That’s a huge way of putting the 9th house together I think in its most uplifting sense.
AC: And if you’re on the ‘quest for truth’, which is a very 9th house activity, you usually don’t get to stay at home the whole time.
KS: No, you cannot.
AC: You usually have to find the person who knows something, or go and find the book…
KS: Yeah, and then the book tells you to go somewhere else.
AC: You don’t get that story of seeking what’s really going on or the truth without movement.
KS: No. And I think that’s really key because this gets into some big philosophical ideas about how our minds and our perspectives change when we go into environments that are different or unfamiliar to us.
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Because you can’t think in a bigger, newer way if you’re just looking at the same thing or talking to the same people everyday, and that’s the huge distinction between 3rd house versus 9th house.
AC: Yeah.
CB: And that’s one of the main, underlying archetypes or overarching archetypes of the 9th, just that which is foreign.
KS: Yeah, anything that’s different, unfamiliar. And then anything ‘overseas’, like ‘international’. Do people live overseas? Are you going to live in a country not your own? Are you attracted to people–we talked about that with the 7th and 9th. And then when you get 9th/10th house crossover, you get people who do perhaps international business, for instance; or you get the academic side.
AC: Or people who are astrologers.
KS: People who are astrologers.
AC: Like the ruler of the 10th in the 9th.
KS: Is that you?
AC: Yeah.
KS: I want to think about that. Oh, ruler of the 10th in the 9th is one of my favorite things. You could be an astrologer, but you could also be someone who worked in the academic, teaching, publishing–there’s a bunch of lovely crossovers there.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: And I want to go back conceptually to the reason why the 9th house indicates travel, because it also partially explains why the 3rd house doesn’t. It has to do with the conceptualization of what a cadent house actually is and what it symbolizes astronomically.
If you take a chart, let’s assume that this is a chart and it shows the 12 houses of the chart, all of the angular houses show planets that are present at the angles. And there’s a sense with angular planets of fixity or of permanence, especially in a temporal sense; it’s like that which is present at the present moment in time; the four angles indicate the present.
KS: The here and now.
CB: And what’s interesting about cadent planets, like let’s say planets in the 4th house, the 3rd house is the cadent house that goes along with the 4th. So planets in the 3rd, they are moving away or departing; they’re traveling away from where they just were in the 4th.
KS: Yeah.
CB: So if the 4th house, being the lowest part of the chart that’s under the Earth, represents the home and the foundation, then the 3rd house, being a cadent house, is like leaving home; the planets are literally leaving home. And I think that’s how you originally got some of the significations of short distance travel being associated with the 3rd house.
KS: Mm-hmm.
AC: Yeah, you’ve got to leave the house, got to run some errands.
CB: Right. So contrast that with if the 4th house is home, and is like you being in your own city, then the opposite to that is the 10th house. And so, then the 10th house is a fixed angular house indicating what is present, and then the 9th house is, again, cadent, and it’s traveling away from there.
It’s moving away from the angle, and therefore, the planets in the 9th are sort of like going out on a journey or setting out on a journey. But it’s the opposite end, the other side of the coin from the 3rd house where it’s not a short distance journey, it’s just in your own local neighborhood; this is a long distance journey that’s going abroad or going elsewhere, and going into the unfamiliar or foreign lands in some sense.
AC: Yeah, that’s perfect.
KS: That’s beautiful. And I think the idea of the Sun’s ‘joy’, and just a tiny bit there with the Moon in the 3rd is that we’re going away from the 4th, but we’re just doing it in a sort of a short or repetitive kind of way; whereas the Sun is more sustained. So if we’re going away, we’re going away. We’re going maybe further away or we’re going to be away for a longer period of time.
CB: Right, because the Moon just takes a month to do a complete circle through the zodiac, but the Sun takes an entire year to go all the way around the zodiac; or let’s say alternatively, all the way through the houses by transit.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And so, one way to think about that, going away from the house is the 3rd. So going away from your profession is the 9th, right? You’re like, “Oh, this is what I do for a living, but what’s the meaning of life?” It’s that kind of journey.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And so, that connects to one of the practical things that I find myself using the 9th for in consultations, which is 9th house stuff is about what direction a person’s going in life, it’s not exactly what they’re doing. Because just as by diurnal motion, we’re going from the 10th to the 9th, by the transit motion, we go from the 9th to the 10th. And so, with transits and profections, you see people in the 9th house year figuring out what direction to head, like, “You know what? I feel really good about moving in this direction. I think I want to do more writing next year.”
KS: Yeah.
AC: And when the transit moves or the profection moves to the 10th, it’s like and now you’re doing it. But you set the rationale, you set, like, “Oh, what’s meaningful? What’s the wise thing to do?” and then you do it.
CB: Yeah.
KS: Totally. And you do in the 9th house trigger, whether it’s profection or a transit, there has to be a little bit of exploring; there has to be the sense of the questioning. And that can feel–to go back to your point, Chris, around the moving away cadency–it can feel quite destabilizing to all of a sudden question things that you have even not thought about before or that you’ve previously held to be true; because that will kind of cause a little bit of shaking around the foundation.
AC: Right.
CB: Sure.
AC: It’s a cadent house; it’s a problem-solving house.
KS: Yeah, yeah.
AC: What’s the right thing to do? What’s the wise thing to do? What’s true? What’s the meaning of things?
CB:
KS: Where am I going to get that sunlight?
AC: In many ways, it’s a more profitable problem to work on or to be tasked to work on than 6th house stuff.
KS: Well, it’s more fulfilling, for sure.
AC: “Oh, I’m sick. I’ve got to figure this out.” You get a positive if you solve the 9th, whereas you get back to neutral…
KS: You get back to zero if you solve the 6th.
AC: And so, the 9th is I think, in every writer’s work, the most positive of the cadent houses.
KS: Yes.
CB: Yeah. And talking about the motion you were mentioning, Austin, of planets transiting, where by transit they have to go through the 9th before they get to the 10th, it has some sense of being preparatory or being a precursor, and I think it a preparatory or precursor for what you get in the 10th, which is ultimately your career. And I think this is partially where one of the major significations comes from with the 9th, which is education, especially higher education or college, to the extent of whatever the preparation or the educational preparation you need to do in order to get to what you want to then accomplish in the 10th.
KS: Professionally, yeah.
AC: And so, on this note or on this point, I would add that we grew up in a culture which sort of told us mostly a false story that what you’re going to do for a living is going to be super meaningful, and if it’s not super-duper meaningful…
KS: Then you shouldn’t do it or it’s wrong.
AC: …then you’re doing it wrong. So that’s true for some lives and some people.
KS: But not for everyone.
AC: For a lot of people that deeper meaning on a religious or a philosophical level comes from activities that aren’t work.
KS: Yes.
AC: If you have the rulers of the 10th and 9th entangled, then you should follow that advice. You’re not going to be happy unless those two are intimately connected.
KS: Yeah.
AC: If they have nothing to do with each other, then…
KS: Two separate things.
AC: …your spiritual stuff and your work stuff are going to be different and that’s okay.
KS: That’s okay. Yeah, that’s something I often will have a conversation with clients around. This is what it looks like you’re doing with work, but this is perhaps where the meaning comes, and the two are not always the same.
AC: Yeah, and even if they are entangled, it’s okay for them to be different.
KS: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And then you mentioned education, Chris. And I think of the educational environment, whether it is you doing a period of study, if it’s triggered by a timing factor. But if we’re looking at the natal context, it may be someone who becomes a teacher in a school or a university, or is in publishing, or could be in training and development and facilitation, something where you’re looking to kind of bring in that. I think of the 9th house as such a solar house from the lighting people up with ideas or wisdom, and you being in that environment in some capacity.
CB: Yeah, education, university professors, people that teach for a living.
KS: Yeah.
CB: People that are like gurus or philosophical, spiritual teachers.
KS: Like thought leaders kind of thing.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Yep. Public intellectuals.
KS: Yeah, people who’ve got that high profile.
AC: And so, truth is really a key thing here.
KS: It is.
CB: Yeah.
AC: All of those people are supposed to be good at some kind of truth.
CB: Truth and the quest for meaning and what is the reason we’re all here and broader questions in general and overarching life questions like that.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah. Even an economics professor is supposed to be able to teach you things that are true about economics, right?
KS: That’s true.
AC: It’s not just the intro. You’re like diving through the reams of statistical stuff and the different models in search of truth.
KS: Yes.
AC: So even for those that aren’t connected with meaning, which is a very important core signification of the 9th, it’s still truth, and truth is in and of itself meaningful. Even if it’s just the truth of how an industry works, it’s still the quest for truth.
KS: Absolutely.
AC: And the teachers are the people who have done the quest for truth successfully, hopefully; that’s what they’re supposed to be.
KS: In theory, yes.
AC: And just one thing.
KS: Yeah, yeah, you can go.
AC: The university system literally grew out of religious institutions. It’s basically ‘mutated’ monasteries.
KS: Yeah, which is beautiful.
AC: And so, in Firmicus, for example, 9th house is just stuff you do at the temple, whether you work there or…
KS: Yeah, it’s the setting of the temple space.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And so, religion, those who are religious, and all things religious are often connected with the 9th house. One of the things that I always find funny though in connection with that is that doesn’t just include those who are ‘religious’, but sometimes there are placements where you can see those who are opposed to religion, like atheism showing up in 9th house, or people that are heavily involved in skepticism.
There’s like a couple of major astrology skeptics, it’s really funny, that I know that have Saturn in a night chart in the 9th house and have dedicated themselves to proving that astrology is false; which I always think is really funny because the astrology itself is showing that they would.
KS: They would do that.
AC: “You hate divination. You have an out-of-sect Saturn in the 9th.”
KS: In the 9th.
AC: The people who favor a rational religion, it’s Mercury in the 9th, right? People who connect to other things through the aesthetic, that’s Venus there, etc. North Node or Rahu in the 9th is in Vedic like the classic sign or the classic indicator for someone who is very doubtful, skeptical, hates being in fucking church, “don’t tell me what to do, don’t tell me what’s meaningful.”
CB: Sure. And I want to be quick to say I’m not passing a value judgment on that. You don’t necessarily have to pass a value judgment on any of that, but it’s just that placements in the 9th house can show somebody’s orientation towards things like belief, religion, or even science or things like that and sometimes a posture that they’ll tend to adopt towards those things or gravitate towards in one context or another.
AC: Absolutely. So I have Sun and Mars in the 9th. So the Sun’s kind of natural there, but Mars is like, “Uh, I’m interested in mystical or religious things that can do something.”
KS: Yes.
AC: “So there are all these ideas about astrology, but does it work?” My interest in magic is the same. It’s like these are hypotheses about the truth of the way that reality operates. Well, how do they work, right? And that’s very classical Mars.
CB: And another funny one is sometimes your interest in martial arts or things that also are athletic activities, but also have some overarching philosophical or metaphysical basis.
AC: An attempt to elevate punching people in the face to a temple activity.
KS: To make it mystical.
AC: Right. And the sort of natural placement of that is certain martial traditions were cultivated in monasteries, and so I’ve studied several of those.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Any other thoughts that that sparks for you, Kelly, in terms of 9th house people or activities?
KS: We talked about education and teaching. We talked about travel. And again, travel can show up in a variety of ways. Because some people will be like, “Well, I don’t like to travel,” and then they tell you that they’re on their third degree or something. So we’re doing ‘mental travel’ rather than physical travel here and that’s a thing too.
CB: Yeah, like the three PhDs, the ‘eternal student’-type person, or the person that maybe grows up in a heavy religious context or finds religion at some point in their life. Let’s say they have a major transit through the 9th house, and all of a sudden, they go through a religious conversion.
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Yeah.
AC: A classic is Uranus transiting the 9th. If it aspects the ruler of the 9th or if it hits a planet that’s in the 9th, the person always has a worldview shift.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Sure.
KS: Yeah, what you believe in, the types of things that you’re interested in from a religious-type perspective, and then how you go about honoring that system or whatever it is that you happen to be oriented towards.
CB: Sure.
KS: It’s one of my favorite houses.
AC: It’s very ‘what do you think is true’ and then ‘what do you do’ based on what you think is true.
KS: Yes.
AC: Or we can go classic philosophy: What is your method for ascertaining the truth? What is then true according to that method? And then based on what’s true, what do you do about that? Epistemology, metaphysics, and then ethics.
CB: Yeah. And even though we did this at the beginning, I just want to touch on it again really quickly. We’re talking about broader meaning and metaphorical ways that ideas and belief in religion and what you think manifest, but often, one of the most literal forms of 9th house things is just somebody that is from a foreign country, something that is foreign, or a foreign culture to you and different exposures or interactions with that in your life, and how sometimes that can give you a different perspective on things…
KS: Absolutely.
CB: …but in very literal ways, like ruler of the 4th in the 9th, going to live abroad. I had one example I think I use in my book, which is they had ruler of the 5th in the 9th, and one of their kids, as soon as he turned 18, had a fascination with this country and he moved there immediately, and has lived the rest of his adult life there.
KS: Moved away, there.
CB: Although it was funny because then her other kid grew up in a largely non-religious household, but as soon as she grew up, she ended up getting interested in this specific religious denomination and then moved across the country and converted to it and then lives in a religious community.
AC: Oh, that’s funny.
KS: That’s so interesting. We’ve got either side, if you like. Different aspects of the 9th coming through with both children.
CB: Yeah. And so, there’s many things we can learn from that in terms of the different ways that each of the houses have these multivalent meanings, different manifestations that can manifest at different points in the native’s life or in different ways. It doesn’t always have to go one way or another; I mean, there’s lots of things.
KS: Yeah.
CB: What else? We’ve talked about ruler of the 7th in the 9th, sometimes getting married to a partner who’s from a foreign country or a partner who’s into 9th house activities.
AC: Yeah.
CB: One example I use, they had the ruler of I think the 9th in the 7th or the 7th in the 9th, and it was their partner who got them into astrology and imported astrology into their life.
KS: Oh, fantastic.
CB: And then as a result of that, the native ended up finding his life’s work was connected with astrology, but he never would have gotten into it if his partner hadn’t first, like a decade before he did.
AC: Yeah, perfect. Firmicus says that with Venus in the 9th, a man will marry the daughter of a high priest of the temple.
KS: Right. Yeah, so we’re still doing the temple here.
AC: If you are interested in marrying women, that’s the preacher’s daughter configuration.
KS: Yes, the preacher’s daughter. That’s fascinating. Yeah, I mean, one 9th house example on the workfront that comes to mind is Barbara Walters who has a Cancer MC, with the Moon in the 9th in Gemini, with Jupiter. And so, she does 9th house-type things of a Gemini nature for her career because she was a broadcaster and a journalist. But she had a worldwide profile. She wasn’t a broadcaster on the local news and stayed there; we had the kind of global reach which you can get with the 9th as well.
AC: And I would say that as a like a secondary or tertiary thing, 9th house is very visible and it can contribute to reputation and visibility.
KS: Yes.
AC: In terms of how prominent is this person, what are they known for.
KS: Yeah, how are they seen.
AC: It would be something I would consider after a couple of other things, but I would consider it.
KS: It would be on the list.
CB: I think one of you mentioned this in passing, but ‘publishing’ is a modern signification with the 9th house, but I think that is one that works out. I think I was in a 9th house profection year when I finally published my book after 10 years.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And I would say ‘publishing’ more singular works. Regular publishing, like a horoscope column…
KS: Yeah, within periodicals in the 3rd.
AC: …you’re going to tend to find that more in the 3rd.
KS: Yeah, the one-off book-type thing.
CB: Okay, any other major significations of the 9th house that we’ve completely forgotten or spaced out before we move on to the 10th?
AC: ‘Magic’.
KS: You mentioned it, didn’t you?
AC: Magic is temple science.
KS: Yeah, and astrology.
AC: Temple science.
KS: Temple science. I like temple science. That sounds good.
CB: Maybe that’s good.
KS: I think so.
AC: Yeah.
CB: All right, so let’s transition into talking about the next house, which is the 10th house. So the 10th house is known as the ‘Midheaven’. That’s just generally the name that is always there. That’s the name that it was called in Hellenistic astrology. Technically, there’s a little difference there because sometimes in modern astrology, it’s only the degree of the MC or the meridian that’s called the Midheaven, but in Hellenistic astrology, it tends to call the entire 10th house the Midheaven.
In terms of significations, the 10th is an angular house. It’s one of the most powerful angular houses between the 1st and the 10th. In terms of significations, it signifies ‘career’, ‘actions’, ‘reputation’, and ‘the native’s public life’ as opposed to the 4th house, which is more about their private life. So the 10th is the most public part of the chart, and so we tend to get most of the themes surrounding being in public and visibility when it comes to this house. All right, so where should we start with the 10th house?
AC: Well, the thing that comes up most often is ‘profession’.
CB: Right, profession or career or occupation.
AC: And I like ‘occupation’ in that it’s what you’re occupied with. It’s what you’re doing in the world.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And sometimes that looks like a profession, and sometimes it looks like other things, but it’s still the question of what are you doing in the context of the world.
CB: Yeah, I like that you said ‘what you’re doing’ because in Greek, the term they use over and over again is praxis for the 10th house, which just means ‘action’; but it can also mean, more broadly, ‘what you do’. And when they use praxis in a 10th house context, they tend to mean occupation, like what you occupy your time doing.
AC: Mm-hmm. Does it have the quality of enactment?
CB: Yeah.
AC: Which suggests that there’s something to be enacted when praxis is used in a philosophical context. It’s usually putting an idea into action, and I do think that that correlates nicely with the often intentional character of 10th house activity. It’s not just doing the dishes because you have to, it’s action in the physical world, but it’s very often because you’re trying to do a thing.
KS: Yeah, you’re trying to achieve something or get somewhere.
AC: Right, like a profession is an intentional thing.
CB: ‘Achievement’. I like that keyword, Kelly. That’s a really good keyword for the 10th house; the idea of that which you achieve.
KS: Yeah, and I like praxis.
CB: Praxis. Actually I shouldn’t be cracking any jokes about the pronunciation.
KS: But it’s that energy of acting out in the world. I like that word, ‘enactment’ actually. It’s very deliberate, you’re right.
AC: Yeah, I was thinking of Praxidicae, which is the deity associated with one of the decans; so –dice is ‘justice’. Praxidicae is ‘the enactment of justice’, and so that’s the goddess of passing the sentence, which can be execution or whatever, but it’s the enactment.
KS: The enactment of it, yeah.
AC: Right, because we’re doing stuff in the 10th, but we’re enacting something. In terms of the houses and just the general topic in astrology of is this something you just kind of have to do, or is it something that you’ve chosen to do or is in accord with what you’re trying to do, the 10th very often there’s more intentionality there. It’s not always a hundred-percent intentional, but there’s more intentionality there. Somebody who’s building a career or a body of work or whatever, we see that in the 10th more than any other house.
KS: Yeah, and there is the sense of you’re making choices. You may not necessarily be doing work that is your love or your passion or your dream, but you do go to an interview, or you choose to accept the job. There is a real sense of engagement with that process. I think that speaks to the level of it’s deliberate, if you like. But it is very much about work. It’s about profession; how are you kind of known in the public sphere basically by what titles or what industry are you associated with, essentially.
CB: Right, your reputation.
AC: ‘Role’ and ‘rank’.
KS: Role, rank, reputation–all 10th house.
CB: Yeah. So we talked earlier about how the 2nd house–or the 1st house can be about your appearance and your character and how you come off to people in person. But sometimes if you’re not meeting somebody in person, what you’re seeing sometimes is their 10th house in terms of their public reputation.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: And just astronomically, we should touch base really briefly on what the 10th house is when we’re looking at it from an astronomical standpoint. Because that keyword of ‘Midheaven’, we’ve got dual meanings of being sort of in the middle of the sky, and therefore, being very visible as a result of that, and ideas that the Sun or the planets, they’re right in the middle of the sky at their most prominent or visible. And so, similarly, the native, this is the part of the chart where they’re at their most prominent or most visible.
When we were talking about the quadrant Midheaven or the Meridian Midheaven, this is also the point where planets reach their highest elevation; so reaching–another keyword–the ‘acme’ of something; like the highest point or highest…
KS: The highest point. Yeah, the peak.
CB: The peak, right.
AC: The highest is the most visible.
CB: Right.
KS: Yeah, the visibility is really key here with the symbolism of the Sun or the planets being at their peak. And yeah, that idea of being seen, that what happens in and around the 10th house is not secret. It’s not hidden, it’s not unknown, it is very obvious and very public.
CB: Yeah. And there’s also notions of, with whole sign houses for example, the 10th whole sign house is the culminating sign that has the superior square over the Ascendant. And so, sometimes you can get ideas of ‘superiority’ or ‘superiors’ or ‘people that are above you’ or outrank you in some sense, as well as what is ‘your own rank’ in society.
AC: Well, and your own rank or position–I think ‘position’ and ‘role’ might be a more modern way of thinking about it–puts demands on you, where you have to do this because it’s your station; it’s your job. If we kind of go back to a feudal model, if you’re a duchess or a duke, you have certain responsibilities that it doesn’t matter whether you like it or not, that’s your role.
KS: That’s your role.
AC: And that’s the 10th dominating the 1st.
CB: Right.
KS: And I do think that there’s inherent tension between the 10th and the 1st house, just by the square relationship between the two. So there can be that sense of being at odds within yourself between who you are and what is required of the work that you have to do in the world, so I think that’s an interesting piece to keep in mind as well.
CB: I mean, I guess it came up a little bit when we talked about the 7th house, but we haven’t touched on that a lot, or we haven’t repeated it a lot, but just that notion of what is the aspect or the configuration that the house has with the rising sign in sometimes dictating, especially in the whole sign house context, part of the reason why we’re drawing certain conclusions about certain houses and what their meaning is relative to the native.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And to add to that, you can have really good things happening in the 10th; for example, someone can be rewarded and honored significantly even if they’re kind of a shithead.
KS: Yes.
AC: And so, benefics or useful configurations that are in the 10th are very powerful, and a person can rise to a high station even if their character isn’t very good, or they’re just not very healthy. You can have not-very-good 1st house significations, but if the 10th is strong, honored and elevated regardless.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. I mean, that brings up a really good point that is something I see echoed both in modern especially, but also, in ancient astrology that hard aspects are not always bad, but they’re always powerful. Hard aspects are powerful, and they can be very powerful for good or powerful for bad; it partially depends on what planets specifically are involved. But that becomes relevant when we were talking about the angular houses of 4, 7, and 10 because they share those hard aspects with the rising sign or the Ascendant of the square or the opposition.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Yeah, but I do also like the ‘rewards’ and ‘honors’ or ‘recognition’. Because I think particularly when the 10th house is activated for timing purposes, and more with Sun-Jupiter-type stuff, we get those indications of honors or ‘glory’ or ‘success’, whether it’s ‘promotion’ or ‘acknowledgment’ of some kind.
AC: Yeah, and like you said earlier, ‘achievement’ is a really good word.
CB: Yeah, and it’s a good one because if you look at the diagram and think of the planets in the diurnal rotation, they start out in the 1st, in the rising sign, but then they rise and they sort of climb their way upwards. They’re really climbing slowly upwards, first, through the 12th, then they get to the 11th, and then eventually at the 10th, you reach the sort of high point before the circle pivots and turns and they begin declining down through the 9th, and then the 8th, and then the 7th.
KS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So this idea of achievement being the climb upwards, you eventually get to the highest point of what you set out to achieve or whatever you had your sights set on that you eventually get to, ideally.
KS: Yeah, I think that’s important because that goes into that sense of achievement and the peak, that you aspire to go up somewhere.
CB: Right.
KS: And we have more or less ability to do that depending on the signs and the planets connected with the 10th house.
CB: Sure.
AC: And so, on a very simple level, a planet that is placed in the 10th will be very visible in a person’s professional life once they have a professional life.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Right.
AC: You may not see it when they’re 12, but you might already be able to see it. But once you see a person in their 30s or whatever, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, you do that for a living.” I have Mercury in the 10th house. I do a couple of things now, but most of them involve talking. And then I would say I’ve built a lot of my career by writing, which is also very mercurial.
KS: All very Mercury.
CB: Sure. Yeah, and a good thing to keep in mind about the 10th is how does the person go about achieving or getting what they want, and what kind of actions do they tend to take in order to get there, and that can be described by 10th house placements.
AC: Yeah.
KS: Yeah, absolutely. Even the types of ‘talent’, ‘skill’, ‘interest’. It varies depending on the condition of the planet and what have you. But yeah, the kinds of things that in your ideal setting would form part of your career.
CB: Sure. So it can sometimes be skills or ‘technical abilities’.
KS: Yeah, whether it’s a talent or a particular set of problems that you’re drawn to solve in a work environment. I mean, Mars indications can talk about military, for instance. It’s not the only indication of Mars, but it’s one.
AC: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Right. And so, when we’re talking about career, one of the things that’s sometimes tricky is people want it to be very clear and specific. They want to come to an astrologer and have the astrologer point to their birth chart and say, “You will be this,” or “You will do this.” But one of the tricky things about vocational astrology–of being able to try to determine a person’s vocation based on their birth chart–is that some of the placements when they are there in the 10th house, or when you’re looking at the ruler of the 10th house will give you an archetype, which will give you a range of possible manifestations of possible career choices that would be in alignment for the symbolism of that placement.
And that can be, on the one hand, useful sometimes to narrow it down if you have no idea; but on the other hand, it can sometimes be frustrating if somebody comes in wanting very concrete and singular, ‘this is the only thing that you were meant to do in your life’.
AC: And that’s an error in thinking for most people that there is one career out there for me, and I have but to find it.
KS: Yes.
AC: That’s simply not true for a lot of people.
KS: No, it’s not.
AC: Some people have that and that’s going to look different in a chart. Some people are going to do one thing for 20 years and another thing for 30 years. Some people are going to try to juggle two or three things the whole time.
KS: Yeah, and other times, you’re working within a range because the planets are associated with the 10th, if it is Mercury, for instance, there’s a variety of things that you could do that would fulfill Mercury in the 10th, but you may not do things that were more Saturnian, for instance. So Mercury can do writing, could be journalism, could be broadcasting. You could do radio. You could do podcasting. There’s a bunch of things that Mercury there could do, but it’s probably not going to do the Mars things, maybe not the Venus things, unless Venus is involved in some capacity.
AC: Yeah, and you would look at the ruler of the 10th in relationship to whatever planet’s in the 10th. Vocational astrology–just like with the 7th, the 7th tells you a lot about relationships; you wouldn’t only look at the 7th if you’re going to do a complete portrait of relational stuff. The 4th tells you about family; it’s not the only thing that will tell you about family. So you would never do a vocational analysis without including the 10th, but you would be incomplete if you only included the 10th.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so while sometimes 10th house placements or the ruler of the 10th can describe specific careers, vocations, or occupations the person will gravitate towards, sometimes it can just describe types of experiences that they will have in pursuing their vocation or in pursuing a career at different points in their life.
KS: Yes, and even whether you would have a steady, consistent career, or whether you have a career that is marked by a lot of chopping and changing, that type of thing.
CB: Right. Like let’s say somebody has Uranus in the 10th and maybe they have predisposition to have a unique career, or a unique vocation that is outside of the mainstream or something like that.
KS: Yeah, yeah, and even just mutable signs versus fixed signs, for instance; the need for variety and change versus the need for stability and consistency.
CB: Sure. What are some other things like that? So we’ve mentioned Mercury. You mentioned Mercury, for example, and something about communications being involved in the career, like writing or speaking. Venus could be something having to do with artistic matters or the arts.
KS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Mars, you mentioned military things potentially. But also, we could say athletics, sports.
AC: Engineering. If you work at a steel plant. So premodern, if somebody had Mars in the 10th, you’d be like, “Oh, yeah, you’ll be the blacksmith.” So that looks like working in a steel foundry or even working in a factory. Working either as an engineer or, I don’t know, dunking the tubes in the acid bath to remove impurities; heavy, gnarly, metal stuff.
KS: Very intense.
AC: One of the ways I see Saturn a lot is, Saturn in the 10th, depending on all the things it depends on, administrative roles, where it’s like, okay, it’s your job to make sure everything’s organized.
KS: Yeah, to manage it.
AC: And of course in accord with Saturn in the 10th, if you’re trying to make sure everybody else is on the same page and coordinated, that means you kind of take on everybody else’s problems. You get to experience that malefic quality.
CB: And that brings up another thing because Saturn sometimes, especially if it’s having problems in chart and its place in the 10th house, can sometimes show, on the one hand, inhibitions in the person’s actions. Sometimes their initial response when presented with the need to take action can be inaction or not taking action; because one of Saturn’s significations is inaction. So sometimes it describes a person’s initial impulse in taking action. So Mars might be the opposite in being too quick to take action, or jumping into things or diving into things prematurely.
KS: Like an impulsiveness.
CB: Sure. But also, I think I had a client once where they had Saturn in the 10th and somehow it was connected with the 4th or something, and there was some career that the person wanted to pursue. It was like the ruler of the 9th was in the 10th and it was Saturn, and it was connected somehow with the parents. And the issue was that her mother, when the woman was in college, dissuaded her and stopped her from continuing to go to school, to stay in college.
And she ended up regretting that in the long term and felt like that inhibited her in the long term in terms of her career, and that was something that came up at different points when Saturn was activated later in life by the Saturn cycle, just that feeling that she had been inhibited in some way through this connection between the 9th and 10th house topics. So sometimes seeing connections between the 9th house of education, and remembering that the 9th house as a precursor to the 10th is sometimes the education or training that goes into whatever you end up doing in the 10th house.
KS: Yeah. Yeah, so in your example, I guess she constantly had these doors closing for her professionally because she didn’t have the right education or training.
CB: Yeah, just that Saturn in the 10th described not her career so much, but more that she had this feeling that she had been held back by a choice that she made early in life and that it was something that continued to be a struggle for her. So let’s say a delineation of Saturn in the 10th where maybe you struggle in some ways with career or even have fears surrounding matters pertaining to your career that become something that you have to work through at different points in your life with greater or lesser success, depending on how you sort of navigate that.
KS: Yeah, absolutely. One of the other ways that I see Saturn connections to the 10th show up is for people who work for the government in some capacity.
CB: Okay.
KS: So something about the structure and the stability and the pension setup that is often, certainly in Australia and Canada, where there is a generally good health benefits package and retirement savings. And I think what you’re saying there, Chris, is Saturn has that inhibiting factor, so it can delay or it can deny, so it may, again, be doing work that creates stability and security rather than work that you love.
CB: Sure, or finding one’s career or life’s work later in life.
KS: Later in life, yeah, like fine wine.
AC: It’s going to work out better later. Also, as we’ve said with the other houses, the house in which the ruler of the 10th falls gives you a lot of information.
KS: Hugely important.
AC: You mentioned the person who was an acolyte of mortuary science with the ruler of the 10th in the 8th.
CB: Yeah.
AC: So I have the ruler of the 10th in the 9th, so I do astrology, which helps refine ‘what is Austin going to talk about’ if Mercury’s in the 10th. Well, the ruler’s in the 9th, so it’s going to be 9th house topics.
KS: Yeah.
AC: If the ruler’s in the 2nd, then your job is stuff and money.
KS: Money, yeah.
CB: Yeah, I’m thinking of some other delineations. So we’ve talked about ruler of the 10th in the 7th, and maybe ending up in a career field and finding your partner there at work, let’s say, or working with your partner. Ruler of the 10th in the 4th and working from home can be a delineation.
AC: Or a family business.
CB: Okay.
KS: And then ruler of the 10th in the 5th can be even working with children, but it can also be working in a creative industry as well.
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: I think Tina Turner is someone who has the ruler of the 10th in the 5th. And I have a feeling–I want to say it’s Venus in Sagittarius. I’m just trying to think if that makes sense. Oh, yeah, it would. Yeah, Taurus 10th with Sag on the 5th.
CB: Okay.
KS: Yeah. And so, like the legs and the dancing come in.
CB: Sure.
KS: In some ways, this is a little bit literal, but yeah, the ruler of the 10th in the 5th; the children versus the creative, artistic outlets.
CB: Yeah, definitely. I’ve definitely seen that, working with children.
KS: Yeah, and you can work with children in a variety of ways. You could be a child psychologist. You could be a teacher in a school. You could do early childhood education or childcare of some capacity. Then you’d have to obviously get into the nuances of the elements and the modes and the other aspects and configurations.
CB: Yeah.
KS: But the house placement of the ruler of the 10th is hugely critical to giving you the complete story around career in the chart.
CB: I think it’s Judy Blume who writes children’s books–and she is an award-winning children’s book author–has the ruler of the 10th in the 5th. Although she also has a stellium of four planets in the 5th.
KS: Right.
CB: So it’s a little complicated.
KS: Well, yeah, but she was writing children’s books when I was a child.
AC: I don’t think there are a lot of famous children’s writers named Judy Blume.
KS: Yeah, she’s long-time famous.
CB: Sure.
AC: Is she still alive?
KS: Yes.
CB: Yeah, I think so.
AC: Okay, good for her.
CB: But we have a timed chart for her, and she’s one of my favorite examples. Leisa actually found that example.
KS: Oh, she’s on the ‘gram all the time.
AC: Oh, is she?
KS: She’s teaching, writing, or something.
CB: Okay. Other 10th house stuff: ruler of the 10th in 3rd, I’ve seen with somebody who teaches elementary school.
KS: Mm-hmm. I’ve also seen that with some people who do writing.
CB: Yeah. Ruler of the 10th in the 11th, you might end up working with groups or with your friends, so on and so forth. Ruler of the 10th in the 6th, there was the doctor we mentioned earlier that worked with patient care and improving their experience.
KS: Yes.
AC: One of the things that’s nice about doing ‘ruler of the 10th in’ is that it’s often pretty literal.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Right.
AC: And again, these are significations that take a while to bloom. Because if we’re looking for a career which is intentionally sought and built, and you get into the right thing rather than just what’s around, that takes time.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Right.
AC: In some ways, something like a health problem is easier to see because you don’t have to work to get to the right health problem.
KS: No, no, no, it’s like, “My back is sore.” “Okay, well, let’s treat the back.”
AC: It finds you, whereas you have to kind of work to get the right 10th house thing.
KS: And by working at it, which is a little bit of a play on words there, you sometimes have to do a few jobs that are close to what you’re looking for to get clarity on exactly what it is that you want.
CB: Right.
AC: When you have multiple significations around the 10th, you’ll see that that person will probably do a couple of things, and they’ll probably try to stick with the thing that’s the good fit.
KS: Yes.
AC: Like I have significations for extremely low-wage labor, and so I did that for a while.
KS: For a long time.
AC: I also have significations for being an astrologer, and I decided that that would be something I would stick with.
KS: What was the labor part? How did you say it?
AC: Oh, I said low-wage, skilled labor.
KS: Low-skilled labor.
AC: I did light assembly work at the factory greasing oven door hinges.
CB: Right. Or think about James Holden who worked for a full 40 or 50 years–I think he was an electrician or something like that–and then eventually retired from it. But on the side, ever since college, he’d been just translating ancient astrological texts in his spare time. And then eventually after he retired from engineering job, he decided to publish 30 translations or something like that over the course of the next 20 or 30 years until he eventually passed away I think in 2013.
KS: Yeah.
CB: There’s also sometimes a difference between what a person does for a work or what they do in one phase of their life versus what they end up becoming known for or what they do in another phase of their life.
KS: Totally.
AC: Yeah. And worth noting, as with all the angular houses, the 10th is really strong. Any planet that’s placed in the 10th will have a global impact on the chart.
KS: It’s very potent. It sits at the top. When we talked about the 4th house as being like the foundation, I always think of the 10th house stuff as–this is just a made-up Kelly thing–but the planet that sits on the top of your head is like a crown almost.
AC: That’s great. I was just going to say, again, if you…
KS: You won’t find that in the ancient texts. I wanted to give you a visual.
AC: No, but you will. For ascertaining the rank of the native, any of the systems that do that, 10th house planets are going to give you a higher rank. Like if you were born a duke or a duchess, then that changes everything, right? You can have exactly the same character and interests, but if you were born a commoner versus you were born a viceroy, it’s a different life.
KS: It’s a different lifestyle, you have different opportunities. Yeah, absolutely.
CB: So before we move on from the 10th house, I know it gets us a little bit into the house division thing, which I don’t want to dwell on too much, but we’re using whole sign houses here in our approaches; the three of us are using the degree of the MC. And the fact that we still do that, that is important and can import 10th house significations into whatever whole sign house it falls in.
AC: And especially planets conjoined it.
CB: Right.
AC: Like if you have a planet on the Midheaven in the 9th, that planet is super important for reputation and career.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, if it’s in the 9th whole sign house, it’s also going to indicate 10th house career matters, so there’s a doubling-up of significations.
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Yes.
AC: It’s like a roving point that can pull things into 10th house topics.
CB: Yeah, and I think that’s really important just because people, when they first learn about whole sign houses, don’t realize that you need to pay attention to that or you need to do that, and they might reject it because they’ll say, “Well, this planet conjunct my Midheaven clearly is having something to do with describing my career. So therefore, maybe only quadrant houses work.” But if you pay attention to it, and you know that you’re supposed to be paying attention to the overlapping of significations, that becomes an important factor in terms of judging how these different approaches work.
AC: Yeah, absolutely.
KS: Yeah, the MC is so critical, it can’t be ignored in this regard.
CB: Sure. And also, sometimes the MC falling in whole sign houses other than the 10th sign can import and tell you career things that the person will gravitate towards.
KS: Actually it’s kind of helpful when that happens.
CB: Yeah, it’s really helpful.
KS: Because it’s like, “Oh, your MC is in the 9th, we just need to talk about 9th house things,” because the 9th house topics become relevant to the career.
CB: Yeah, so a good example of that, one of the first discoverers, or guys that helped to rediscover whole sign houses and wrote one of the first monographs on it was Rob Hand, the famous 20th and early 21st century astrologer. Even though he has Cancer rising and Aries as the 10th whole sign house, the degree of his Midheaven falls in Pisces in the 9th whole sign house, so it imports 10th house career significations into the 9th house. And of course he ends up making a lifelong career as an astrologer and becomes one of the most famous astrologers in modern times.
KS: Yeah, and partly because of some of the books that he’s published on astrology too, if we go back to the publishing and 9th house piece.
CB: That’s really good. Other possible combinations of that, I have my Midheaven in my 11th whole sign house, so importing career matters over into ‘the place of friends’ and the idea that perhaps friends might be involved in my career. I’m still trying to figure out how that might be the case. I don’t know.
KS: It’s really hard to figure that out.
AC: Yeah, it’s kind of abstract.
CB: Let’s keep thinking about it. If any listeners have any ideas, write in and let us know, or let us know in the comments section below, and hopefully I can figure out what I’m supposed to be doing at some point.
KS: We can try to solve that problem.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Kelly, do you have the Midheaven in the 10th?
KS: Yes.
AC: Yeah, me too.
KS: My chart’s pretty consistent. You could put it in any house system and it’ll come out.
AC: I’m thinking of someone I know who’s life’s work, they were an academic and a Taoist priest; Midheaven in the 9th.
KS: That’ll be a Midheaven in the 9th.
CB: Nice.
AC: Pretty simple.
CB: And it’s not just the natal placement, but what’s really cool and how you can verify that especially is by following transits, especially outer planet transits when they start going through that other whole sign house. Like if you have the MC in the 9th whole sign house, and the planet–let’s say Saturn–hits the degree of that, and you see both the 9th house and the 10th house topics coming into play at the same time, then you can kind of validate it from a more practical or empirical standpoint.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so transits through the 10th impact your career and reputation.
CB: Yeah.
KS: And transits through the sign of the MC.
CB: Right.
AC: Uh, I wouldn’t say the whole sign of the MC.
KS: Just the degree?
AC: I would look at maybe 5° or 6° out from the MC. Like if somebody had the MC at 27 Pisces in the 9th, I wouldn’t be looking for professional outputs if Saturn was at 2° of Pisces.
KS: Okay.
CB: I think you will start seeing, as soon as that planet goes into that sign, inklings of that starting to build up on both of those topics. Also the same with the IC. Like if the IC falls in the 3rd house, it’ll be importing 4th house topics into the 3rd house. So sometimes when you have an outer planet going through that sign, you’ll see matters pertaining to siblings, as well as the home and living situation coming up at that time.
AC: Yeah, I treat it as an outpost rather than a whole second 10th house.
CB: Okay, got it. All right, I’m trying to think of anything. But is that it for the 10th?
AC: We’ve kind of come to this point with all of the angular houses where they’re powerful and they’re kind of simple. It’s just what do you do?
KS: It’s not that they’re just the one topic, but it’s the main thing.
AC: But it’s such a big thing that it has a giant impact.
KS: Yeah.
AC: With 1, 7, 4, 10, it’s the four basic questions about a person. 1st: I don’t know. What are they like? 7th: Who are they with? 4th: Where are they from? 10th: What do they do? And then everything else is details.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And also it’s worth mentioning in an electional context that over and over again, if you read the ancient electional texts, they have this system that’s just based on the four angles where the 1st house represents you, the one initiating the action, the 7th house represents if there’s another party, the person receiving the action, like in a buyer/seller relationship. The 10th house represents the action that is taken, like if it’s a buyer/seller thing, it indicates the product. And then the 4th house represents the outcome or the end result of the action.
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that’s a really useful thing to keep in mind in electional charts, but it also gives you a framework for understanding the broader, underlying, archetypal meaning of the four angles as well. 1st house (you), 7th house (other), 10th house (action), 4th house (outcome).
KS: Outcome, yeah.
AC: Yeah, and in other electional horary contexts, if you’re like, “If I do this with my boss, if I propose this,” you would take the 10th as the indicator of the boss and the 1st as the indicator of you.
KS: Yeah.
AC: I was doing a unit on electional astrology in my year two class, and I basically said elect any kind of thing that you want for the next class. And so, one student elected a prison break. It was genius. It was beautiful except they had elected the ruler of the 10th on top of the ruler of the 1st. So I was like this is a beautiful plan, but the warden is going to be looking right at you.
KS: Yeah, the boss has got their eyes on you.
AC: Everything else about it was just genius, but yeah, it was fun.
KS: That’s a very creative approach to that.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, and it’s a good exercise to think about different things like that and what would the electional chart be if you were to try to initiate this action, and symbolically when did it indicate success in that action from your standpoint versus what would indicate your failure and if another party involved might be the one successful in that action.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah.
CB: All right, I think that’s it for the 10th house.
AC: Yeah.
KS: Cool.
CB: Cool. Well, let’s transition into our next house, which is the 11th house. So traditionally, in ancient Hellenistic astrology, the 11th house is known as ‘the place of good spirit’ and that is opposite to ‘the place of good fortune’, which is the fifth place. The 11th house is said to be the ‘joy’ or said to be the place where Jupiter rejoices, so the 11th is traditionally associated with Jupiter. In terms of significations, a pretty standard set of significations for most of the astrological tradition. It’s ‘friends’, ‘groups’, ‘alliances’, and also ‘hopes’ or ‘wishes’.
The 11th house is a succedent house. And I think going back to the very earliest strata of the tradition that’s a large part of the reason why the 11th house signifies ‘hopes’, which is kind of like a weird, abstract signification until you look at astronomically what planets in the 11th house are doing; which is they’re rising up towards the 10th house.
KS: They’re aspiring.
CB: Yeah, they’re aspiring or they’re reaching for something, but they’re not there yet. They wish to be there, and they’re sort of reaching out for it in that way, but they haven’t quite got there yet.
KS: Yeah, I think when you understand that, understanding that hopes and wishes are part of the 11th house, it just kind of makes so much more sense. Otherwise, it is this weird thing that’s just tucked in there and you don’t know why.
CB: Right.
KS: But it is. It’s like you’re three-quarters of the way up the mountain, and you’re seeing where you’re going and you want to get there; you’re just not quite there yet.
CB: Sure. So primarily, in terms of practical significations that are really useful and come up super frequently is just the 11th house is the primary place that represents ‘friends’, and the role that friends and friendship plays in your life, for better or worse.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, I also extend that to ‘colleagues’, you know, the people that you’re in the same group as. Like when we go to an astrology conference, we’re in our 11th house.
KS: Yes.
AC: And we’re like friends with some people and good friends with other people and colleagues with other people, but they’re still all in the 11th. And so, the 11th is both relational–it has a trine to the 7th–but also because it’s pretty high in the sky, it’s ‘reputational’. Planets in the 11th will definitely affect the way that people think about you.
KS: Yes, absolutely, for better or for worse, and then what you can do based on that reputation.
CB: Yeah, so affecting your reputation, friends, groups. ‘Groups’ isn’t a traditional signification. Valens says ‘friends’ and ‘alliances’, which is pretty traditional, but ‘groups’ is more of a modern one. But it definitely comes up when you see a career significator placed in the 11th house. Working with groups or large organizations can often be a common manifestation of that.
KS: Yeah, community projects, that type of thing.
CB: Right, like projects where people are working together for some larger purpose or some social purpose.
KS: Exactly, yeah. It is to sort of contribute to the group in some way. Like social services-type of things can come up there.
CB: So the 11th house can also have to deal with not just literally things with friends, but also a person’s ‘attitude towards friends’ or towards friendship.
KS: Yeah, I know one astrologer years ago said to me, “I’ve got the South Node in the 11th house. I don’t like going to conferences.”
CB: Yeah, and there’s somebody that had Saturn in the 11th and had a fear of social things, and he didn’t have that many friendships because he feared putting himself in social situations and actively avoided it.
KS: Yeah, yeah.
CB: But then had a major Saturn transit at one point, like a Saturn return, and part of that transit was pushing himself to sort of push through that.
KS: To do that more.
CB: Yeah.
KS: And then obviously you have the friendlier planets, if you like–Venus, the Moon, the Sun–potentially that are going to be more warm, more enjoying the social group, conference-type environment.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah. Or let’s say another one could be having benefics there, like Venus and Jupiter, and having it very well-situated and having benefits from friends; like sometimes getting a leg-up in your career as a result of your buddy who helps you out, for example, or something like that.
KS: Yeah, having well-connected individuals or having almost like a benefactor who might speak on your behalf.
AC: Yeah, I also see it in terms of people who have audiences. You very often see the audience clearly described by what’s going on with the 11th. So if you’re a writer, you’re a performer, or you run a podcast, what’s going on in the 11th will often give you a lot of information about ‘audience’.
CB: Sure.
KS: Yeah.
AC: One of my favorite examples is Kurt Cobain who had a Moon-Jupiter conjunction in the 11th in Cancer, which is fantastic.
CB: Yeah, I mean, I partially always associated that with him getting tethered with his high school buddy, Kris Novoselic, and then forming this band, Nirvana, which ended up becoming a huge band at the time.
AC: Yeah, but if you read it as ‘audience’, he had an audience that was loyal 30 years after his death, like crying at his grave every year, it’s tremendous; and also just a huge financial gain as a result. And that’s actually one signification that I’ve become I would say more interested in over the last year because I’ve seen it more.
You will see as a secondary signification the 11th being the second from the 10th and being gains from one’s professional action. And I’ve seen 11th house stuff, the 11th house ruler and benefics in the 11th when triggered turning into money lots and lots and lots of times. I will use it as one of the financial indicators now for timing.
KS: Yeah, well, it’s the substance from the 10th, right?
AC: Yeah.
KS: The material from the 10th.
CB: And it’s definitely one of the most positive houses in terms of just the qualitative…
KS: Did we say that?
CB: No.
KS: I think we missed that part.
AC: Well, we haven’t said anything negative yet.
KS: No, we haven’t, but we haven’t been explicit to say why. One of the ways that 11th was described to me is like ‘manna from heaven rains down on you’, and I’m like this is pretty good.
AC: Uh, I don’t know.
KS: I don’t know if I would quite go with that. But, Chris, sorry. Do you want to fill in the gap?
CB: I mean, one of the things I would say is just it’s a succedent house, it’s configured by a superior sextile to the rising sign, and it’s also said to be the place associated with Jupiter. So you sort of put all of those together and you end up with a pretty good picture in terms of it being one of the most positive houses in terms of the usual ranking, which puts the 1st, 10th, I think 11th, and then 5th as being probably the best houses.
KS: Yeah, I would agree.
AC: In terms of favorability.
CB: Sure.
KS: Yeah.
AC: One of the things about the 11th that keeps it from the ‘top’ spot is that it is less volitional than say the 1st and the 10th.
KS: Yeah, it’s not angular.
AC: Because you benefit because you know the right person, or you’re part of the right network. You are to some degree dependent on others.
KS: And the quality of the network counts: your ability to access it and then the quality of it.
AC: Yeah, and it gets configured to the rising by sextile, but it’s configured to the 7th by trine. And so, we see from the very beginning, we’ve been talking about it in very social terms. And so, you are to some degree dependent on the whims of the audience, who you happen to know, who you happen to be around, who you happen to meet, who you happen to be colleagues with or whatever.
KS: And to a certain extent, who you gel with in that department.
AC: Yeah, and it doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of benefits, but it’s less volitional than the 1st.
KS: You don’t control it as much directly.
AC: We could say, “Okay, work really hard on your career,” that’s 10th house. “Work really hard on making friends,” you can put energy into that, but there are literally lots of other people involved. You can’t fake chemistry.
KS: No. Just to stay on the friendship track, you can put a lot of effort into meeting people, but you can’t always control what the outcome of that meeting is going to be.
AC: Right, that’s a good way to put that.
KS: That’s the magic or the chemistry–it’s either there or it’s not there.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Although typically with the 11th that is where you find people that are on the same wavelength with you, and you just happen to jive with either intellectually or on a spirit-type level versus the 12th house, which is where you run into people that you just don’t jive with or that are working at cross-purposes to you sometimes through no fault of your own.
KS: Yeah.
CB: And I think that’s where the 11th house significations came from, going back to some of the work that I did on the planetary joys. The original author or authors or whoever that came up with this system of planetary joys divided the chart into those two halves where the bottom-half was the lunar realm that was under the Earth and had more to do with the body, and the top-half of the chart was the solar realm that had more to do with the spirit and the mind.
And so, when you look at the 5th house, ‘the place of good fortune’ associated with Venus, that’s a place that has to do with good things that pertain to the body, because it’s in the bottom-half of the chart, but the 11th house then becomes a good house that has to do with things that pertain to the mind or the spirit.
KS: Yeah.
CB: And one of the things or one of the ways that that’s connected is that in some of the ancient definitions that’s what friendship is, just a connection and being on the same wavelength with somebody in terms of a connection in spirit or in terms of your intellect or what have you.
KS: Like the ‘like’ mind.
CB: Yeah, even if you’re not necessarily getting together like you would with a 7th house person or something like that.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, and if we think of Jupiter being in its ‘joy’ there, one image for Jupiter could be the preacher. Like the 11th is the preacher at their congregation; that’s literally the best place for that figure.
KS: Yeah, to be with people of ‘like’ mind.
CB: Sure.
AC: Rejoicing in the good spirit.
KS: Yeah.
CB: I would almost think of that more in the 9th house, whereas the 11th house is more like the community organizer, or the person that gets involved in politics and finds other people who have similar political views and then they organize together to accomplish something as a team.
AC: But that’s what a congregation is. I would say Jupiter in the 9th is like being at seminary, right? That’s at the temple. Preaching onto the people of a community, that’s the 11th house. And Jupiter imports all of the Jupiter significations into whatever house it’s in. But who’s it easiest to speak the truth to? The people who are like, “Yes! I totally agree with you.”
KS: Yeah, like that ‘preaching to the choir’ idea.
AC: Yeah, Jupiter in the 11th is ‘preaching to the choir’.
KS: Yeah. Well, the 11th as a great example of the gathering of the like mind would be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I don’t know if you remember her chart: Sun-Mars Midheaven, Mercury, all in the 11th.
CB: Is it? Okay.
KS: Yeah, so she’s got a very strong focus. And if you see the Netflix documentary, ‘Taking Down the House’, ‘Burning Down the House’, I can’t remember what it’s called, about the new Democrats, it follows her campaign to get elected; and it really speaks to how she had to mobilize the community to get onboard and get her elected. So there’s some 3rd house things there as well, but that idea of finding a tribe of people that are sharing that sort vision or that good spirit, like, “We are passionate about that same type of thing.”
AC: Politics is a really good topic because you will find in most very successful politicians’ charts something very strong in the 11th.
KS: Well, Bill Clinton had the Sun in Leo in the 11th specifically.
CB: And the ability to network. ‘Networking’ is a very 11th house activity because it’s a social activity, but it’s a social activity involving many people or involving lots of people in groups. Rather than just sitting down, one-on-one, and spending an extended period just trying to build one relationship, you’re trying to build many relationships.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, if you’re in a democracy or something like that where you get positions of power through popularity, then the 11th is incredibly important.
KS: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: And also, benefits with friends. And we’ve talked about benefits with friends in terms of if you have positive placements.
AC: As opposed to the converse.
KS: Like different from ‘friends with benefits’.
CB: Right. Well, no, but we should talk about the actual converse, which is let’s say you have challenging placements in the 11th house. The most broad statement you could make is difficulties with friends or difficulties with the topic of friendship.
KS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So we talked about an example of somebody who had a fear of friends or had difficulties making friends. I’ve seen other scenarios of somebody that had one main friend growing up, but they had the ruler of the 11th house of friends in the 8th house of death. And that person passed away relatively early in their lives and it kind of traumatized the native where the death of her friend was a major negative turning point for her in her life.
KS: Hugely so.
AC: Yeah, or you have the situation where somebody’s a good kid, but they’re hanging out with the wrong crowd.
CB: Yeah, getting dragged down by your friends or having your friends qualitatively make your life worse in some way, I would say.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah.
KS: Yeah, I had a horary years ago where there was an 11th house, and the mother was asking about the daughter, what’s wrong; she seemed to be struggling at school, blah, blah, blah, and there was a malefic in the 11th house. And I was like, “Well, can you change her social network somehow?” So basically, it’s going to tell us about the experiences with friends, whether they are positive and supportive and you enjoy them, or whether there are some challenges or limitations or restrictions there.
CB: Sure. And also, transits through the 11th house can sometimes indicate the timing or the triggering of events related to that.
AC: Oh, I’ve got a good one.
CB: Okay.
AC: So when Jupiter was in my 11th house some years ago, and when it perfectly sextiled the degree of my rising, you handed off the presidency of the AWA to me.
CB: Okay.
AC: And we didn’t plan it for the transit. We were like, “Oh, we’ll do it at the conference,” which was UAC 2012. And I remember looking at my transits, and I was like, “Oh, Jupiter in my 11th is perfectly sextile my own rising in Jupiter that week.”
CB: Nice.
KS: Yes.
CB: Yeah, I think I was in an 11th house profection year when I became president of the Association for Young Astrologers several years prior to that.
KS: Did you start that organization?
CB: No, I was like the third president or something. They had started it several years before I came along, but I had the degree of my Midheaven in the 11th whole sign house as we mentioned earlier. But that activation of going into an 11th house profection year was like being involved in a group, but with the Midheaven career significator also there, it was also like that being partially a job, becoming president of that group; so rising to prominence within the context of a group situation.
KS: Yeah.
AC: So for me, I obtained the presidency in a 10th house profection, so that’s like getting a new role.
KS: Becoming the lead person.
AC: Yeah, we just finished talking about how that’s what the 10th house is.
KS: Absolutely. The prominence, yeah.
AC: But what was the transit that did that? Oh, it was an 11th house.
CB: Right.
KS: Yes.
CB: And I think I had Jupiter going through there as well at the same time. So to echo the transit you had, Jupiter was going through my 11th house.
AC: Oh, that’s funny.
CB: Yeah.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Any other 11th house transits or observations that you guys have seen? I mean, I’ve seen people have a difficult transit through the 11th and losing a friend.
KS: Oh, I had that. I had that last year with the Mars and Saturn conjunct in Capricorn. And there was this very bizarre altercation with a friend where I got attacked actually by this friend at my house while I was hosting an event for this person. It was so bizarre, but I had two other friends there that kind of stood up.
You know when you’re not aware or you kind of miss something? They sound like they’re defending me, what’s really going on here? But anyway, it ended up causing this huge drama in the social network, and the person who sort of started this big drama ended up just sort of being lost as a friend and lost to the whole group, if you like.
CB: Okay.
KS: Yeah, that was a bit of drama to do with, yeah, just a combination of both malefics there.
AC: And you have a benefic natally there.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Even though the transit was negative, the native pattern was like, “No, no, there are people who rose up.” That was great.
KS: “No, no, we’ve got her back.” You’re right, absolutely, the challenge of losing a friend.
CB: Yeah, I had something similar where there was a Mars-Saturn conjunction once on the ruler of my 11th, and I had a friend who had a mental breakdown and suddenly started struggling with mental health issues to an extent that I had never experienced before. And the culmination of that transit was having to talk with their family and attempting to get them committed to a hospital because they became a danger to themselves and it became a really serious situation.
KS: Yeah.
CB: So sometimes, again, that’s a situation of not always representing you, but sometimes other people in your life that are important to you in different ways and what’s going on in their lives.
KS: Yeah, and the ruler of your 11th is in?
CB: It’s in the 12th.
KS: It’s in the 12th. It sounds like the things you’re talking about; they’re all 12th house topics.
CB: Yeah.
KS: Super interesting. So it all comes down to the 11th house, all the friendship stuff.
CB: Yeah. Did we go through house ruler delineations? I guess maybe we did. Let’s say the ruler of the 11 in 10 and maybe career matters being tied up in friendships or groups. Ruler of 11 in 9 could be like making a friend who’s from a foreign country, religious friend. Ruler of 11 in 7, I’ve seen that manifest as people who end up getting in a significant long-term relationship with somebody who started off as a friend.
KS: Yes.
AC: Ruler of the 11th in the 4th, you hang out with your family.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Extended family networks.
CB: Sure, or you’re friends with your parents or something like that.
AC: Or you hang out with your cousins and your uncles or whatever.
CB: Yeah.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Okay, that’s good. So is that it for the 11th house? Is there anything we need to touch on that we didn’t before we move on?
AC: It’s a good, workable place for any planet.
CB: Yeah, and it also is one of the most positive houses. One of the reasons why that’s important is because oftentimes if the ruler of another house is in the 11th, it will often indicate that the topics associated with that ruler will tend to go a little bit better than if they were placed in other parts of the chart.
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Yeah.
CB: So it can be an automatic indication of favorable or more favorable outcomes for the topic of the ruler of whatever house that is placed in the 11th.
AC: It’ll tend to find itself in a supportive network.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Sure.
AC: Unless there are specific things that say otherwise, you can assume that’s the case.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, and as a succedent house that’s building up, it’s usually something that gets better over time or increases and becomes better over time.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Mm-hmm. So in terms of the succedent houses, I do tend to look at them as resources. 2nd house, it’s literally the stuff; 8th house, it’s other people’s stuff, 5th house, it’s your personal mojo–it’s an internal resource–and the 11th house is social resource.
KS: That’s a beautiful way of describing it actually.
CB: Yeah, definitely. All right, shall we transition into our final of the 12 houses?
AC: Ooh!
KS: Ooh, la, la!
AC: Into the darkness.
KS: Away from the good.
CB: All right, so transitioning into house 12. So the 12th house in ancient Hellenistic, Greco-Roman astrology was known as ‘the place of bad spirit’, next to the place of the 11th, which is ‘the house of good spirit’. So again, this is in the top-half of the chart, which is the solar hemisphere, and that’s why they’re calling some of these houses as having to do with the mind or the spirit, which is the solar realm as opposed to the houses below the horizon that have to do with the lunar realm, which they’re associating with the idea of fortune and the body.
So 12th, bad spirit. The 12th is said to be the place where Saturn ‘rejoices’ or the place where Saturn has its ‘joy’; and so, traditionally, the 12th has been always associated with Saturn in ancient traditional astrology. The 12th is a cadent house. It’s also a house that is not configured to the rising sign.
So as a result of this, in a lot of the traditional texts, the 12th house is treated as the worst or the most negative of the ‘negative’ houses or as the most difficult house in general. Since it doesn’t aspect the rising sign, it’s cadent, and also only has a weak sextile with the Midheaven or the 10th, whereas the 6th house, which is also cadent and not aspecting the rising sign at least has a superior trine with the 10th or the Midheaven.
In terms of significations, on the poster we’ve got ‘enemies’, ‘sickness’, ‘loss’, and ‘seclusion’ as being the primary significations in terms of trying to fit just four on there. I know the first three are definitely pretty standard traditional ones going back 2,000 years–‘enemies’, ‘sickness’, and ‘loss’ as general significations–but I think ‘seclusion’ is also more of a modern one that’s very relevant as well. What do you guys think of these four significations?
AC: I would go 6th for enemies, and I would go ‘self-undoing’ for 12th.
KS: Yeah, I do like the ‘self-undoing’ for the 12th.
AC: Because you see ‘self-sabotage’, you see a lot of ‘addictive behavior’. You see the native acting against their own interests with planets in the 12th so consistently.
CB: Sure.
AC: And if a planet’s in the 12th, it’s looking right at the 6th and vice versa. But yeah, enemies, I would go 6th primarily.
CB: Okay. Yeah, and the idea of ‘self-undoing’, especially in the past few centuries has become a major 12th house signification partially because the 12th is part of the angular triad associated with the Ascendant. And so, planets in the 12th are declining or falling away from the 1st. And if the 1st house is the native or the self, then the 12th is something that might decline, take away, or detract from the 1st.
KS: Diminish you in some way.
CB: Right.
KS: The one other word that I really like for the 12th house is ‘suffering’. It’s appropriate for the 12th house.
AC: It is.
KS: It’s very appropriate. I know. I was very excited about that word though, wasn’t I? It’s very relevant to the nature of the 12th house because whether it’s ‘self-undoing’ or otherwise, when we’re suffering, we’re often isolated. But because of the ‘bad spirit’ piece, part of the suffering is this is where we get the mental health and the psychological pieces coming in. The suffering is to do with those intangible things that kind of just sit inside us that we churn around.
CB: Sure.
KS: And depending on what planets you may have in the 12th, it can indicate your personal suffering or it may indicate you being a helper for people who are suffering along those lines.
CB: Sure.
AC: It’s involved with usually invisible suffering because it’s invisible and it’s in the realm of spirit. And so, it does a very good job of framing what we now call mental health issues. It’s in the realm of spirit, but it’s the worst house in the realm of spirit. It’s invisible, right? It’s not configured to the rising. It’s the silent suffering of being depressed or whatever.
KS: Absolutely. And the fact that many mental health conditions look invisible in the sense that you can look at someone and not realize that they are sick or unwell because it’s not like they’re walking around with their leg in the cast, or they’ve lost their hair because of chemotherapy; they are suffering in a way that seems invisible.
AC: Yeah. And if you look at some of the more enthusiastic forms of self-undoing, like somebody’s nurturing a big, strong addiction, they conceal it.
KS: Absolutely. Keep it a secret.
AC: You try to keep it invisible if you’re drinking all day at work or whatever. So the ‘isolation’ is interesting; there are locations that we can associate with different houses. And so, ‘hospitals’, mental and otherwise, are strongly associated with the 12th.
CB: Right.
AC: And one thing I think is interesting is the 12th is maybe seemingly ironically a very spiritual place.
KS: Yes.
AC: Because when you’re just there with your thoughts, well, that’s the practice of meditation, or it’s getting savaged by your thoughts. But that invisible struggle in the mental or spirit realm, that is by nature a spiritual contest. So I think about the 6th and 12th often in relationship to each other. In the 6th, we’re contesting with things externally, whether it’s enemies, or we’re trying to fix our stairs, or we’re struggling with our body; whereas in the 12th, we’re struggling with our mind.
And in a number of horary texts, I believe Lilly included, if you do a horary to see whether someone is cursed and there’s an invisible spirit fucking with them, you look at the ruler of the 12th as the indicator of the curse, if there’s a curse. And that’s what it feels like. People will use the language of a curse, like, “Oh, I’m cursed with this addictive tendency,” or it can feel like a curse if you have to struggle with depression or anxiety or whatever and it’s invisible. You can’t see where it’s coming from, and so it’s just your mind versus whatever.
One thing that’s interesting is in Vedic astrology, the 12th as the place of self-undoing, it’s 90% the same as what we’re talking about. But in the context of spiritual practices where you’re trying to undo the ego, you’re literally trying to undo, it can be positive in that sense. For normal life stuff, it’s all of the same significations we’re talking about.
But what’s interesting is if you think of places of seclusion that people go to be by themselves to do this sort of spiritual contest–like a ‘monastery’, an ‘ashram’, or a ‘retreat’–the structure of a monastery and the structure of a hospital or ‘jail’ is another 12th house thing, it’s very similar. What do you call the rooms in a monastery? You call them cells. And what do you do? You go there and you sit by yourself, and you think about what you’ve done. Which is exactly what you would do if you were committed to a mental institution, or if you were forced into jail.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Galileo famously had Jupiter in Pisces in the 12th and predicted that he would be jailed for his beliefs.
KS: Yeah, and he was.
AC: Which he was.
CB: Right.
KS: And he was under house arrest, so he had a slightly more comfortable imprisonment environment.
AC: It was Jupiter in Pisces.
KS: Yes, that’s what I mean. So he still had the 12th house imprisonment, but he got to do it in the comfort of his own home.
CB: Right, and then it was connected somehow with the ruler of his 10th, and he ended up writing some of his most important works later in life when he was under imprisonment. But also, unfortunately, he died under house arrest.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, ‘isolation’, and I think that’s one of the reasons why places of isolation can be one of the significations associated with the 12th.
AC: Let me jump in on that. I have the ruler of my rising in the 12th. I need places of isolation.
KS: And that’s the thing is that it’s not always like you’re going to end up in prison; but it’s like you need to spend time alone and you need to spend time in quiet, secluded settings. Because I see the 12th house as being away from the rest of the chart, if you like. It’s very set apart in the same way that anyone in a hospital or in a monastery, or in what we used to call the nunnery when we were kids because my aunt is a Catholic nun, but the convent. You are separated, but it can be to your own benefit to be in that space at times.
AC: Mm-hmm. And so, worth noting that the 12th and the 11th have really, how should we say, almost polar relationships to the social.
KS: Yes, completely different; opposite.
AC: There are more people around in the 11th than any other house and there are the least people around in the 12th.
KS: In the 12th, yeah. And then one way that I do see the 12th coming up in a very modern, 21st century context, although it’s not as though it’s never been around before, is when people take themselves off to a retreat. They go on the silent meditation for 10 days, or I’m going to Bali to do a yoga thing for two weeks, and I won’t have any connection to the rest of the world.
AC: And a traditional signification you see for the 12th is ‘exile to foreign lands’.
KS: Oh, my gosh. Now I’m getting on my soapbox here. Yeah, I love the ‘away’ part of the 12th house. So Grace Kelly has the ruler of the 7th in the 12th, and she’s an example of going away to foreign lands for her relationship; because Grace Kelly of course married the Prince of Monaco and had to go through all of that. So yeah, you do see this ‘away’, of people going away from their original place with the 12th house.
CB: Yeah, that’s because it’s a cadent house. So it’s another one of those houses where it’s falling or it’s moving away from the stability of the 1st house.
KS: Yes.
AC: If you think about being forced to live in a foreign land it’s different than taking a trip.
KS: Yeah, absolutely.
AC: And so, think about that before airplanes and before ‘handy-dandy’ language guides.
KS: Oh, yeah, you were on a boat. I mean, even in the mid-20th century, many people were going back and forth between England and Australia and it would take you weeks.
AC: Well, and it was dangerous.
KS: Yeah, you could die. You could get sick. You could get scurvy.
AC: Yeah, you don’t know the culture, you can’t Google stuff.
KS: You can’t speak the language. If you’re going on a trip like that…
AC: And it’s isolating.
KS: …you’re leaving behind everyone you know because a letter is going to take months to get back to them too; weeks maybe.
CB: And there can sometimes even now still be an inherent vulnerability or sense of unsteadiness in traveling and in that place where you’re sort of not in limbo, but you’re in a transitional state. Transitional states can be places of vulnerability in some sense.
AC: Absolutely.
KS: A hundred-percent.
CB: So in the 7th century, Rhetorius refers to the 12th as ‘the place in-between worlds’ because he says that the 12th house is the sign that was rising in the hour or two before birth. So as a cadent or a declining house, it means while the mother was in labor, the sign that’s on the 12th in the birth chart is the sign that was rising while the mother was in labor.
So he talks about the mother being in labor and the native being in-between life and death at that point. And so, this notion of being in-between worlds becomes part of the underlying motif of the 12th house from that perspective.
AC: Also, that means that you are going through the most painful thing that you’ve ever experienced during that 12th house period because you’re being squeezed.
KS: Through the birth canal.
AC: All of the happy fluid that you were floating in, that’s gone.
KS: It’s gone now.
AC: You’re now getting crushed and pushed.
KS: Your skull is being crushed, and your lungs are being compressed to try and force breath into them.
AC: Yeah, birth trauma.
KS: It’s a thing.
CB: Sure. So you’re in that transitional state, but it’s also a state of potential danger.
KS: It’s a great vulnerability because up until a couple of hundred years ago, childbirth was the leading cause of death for women, and many children didn’t live out of their childhood.
CB: Right.
KS: It was phenomenally risky to be pregnant at certain points in history. There was a Greek word that I heard Demetra reference, and I may be bastardizing it here or pronouncing it incorrectly, but the idea of metakosmia, which I think speaks to that ‘world between worlds’-type of energy.
CB: It can be interpreted to mean ‘in-between worlds’.
KS: In-between worlds, yeah.
AC: And also, if we take some of the potentially useful fruitful activities, you ended up in the 12th house place of seclusion maybe because you were exiled, maybe because you went to a monastery, maybe because you’re in jail. But now, you’re in a seclusion place and it’s just you and your mind.
KS: Yes.
AC: Uh, I just lost the point that I was going to.
CB: That’s all right. Before you move on, can we just think with–because I want to read Valens’ significations of the 12th really quickly from the 2nd century. So he says, the 12th: “Foreign lands, enmities, slaves, injuries, dangers, judgments, suffering, death, and sickness.” There’s a recurring one all over the Hellenistic and even some of the Medieval authors, even though there’s a tendency to move towards treating the 12th as just ‘self-undoing’ in the later tradition. A lot of the earlier authors are treating the 11th as ‘the place of friends’ and the house that follows after that, the 12th, as one of the places of ‘enemies’.
KS: Yeah.
CB: So I just want to make sure that that’s represented. That’s why I put that on there because it’s a pretty consistent traditional signification. If there are friends, or if you can find the topic of friends in a person’s chart and that’s primarily associated with the 11th, the 12th is one of the primary places where you find enemies. And what you mean by that in some sense is people that work at cross-purposes to you.
KS: Work against you, undermine you.
CB: Yeah, because sometimes if a friendship is partially a connection between the spirit or an affinity between the spirit of two people that just get along for sometimes reasons that are outside of their control due to a sort of affinity, the 12th relative to the rising sign is a sign that shares no affinities with the 1st.
And sometimes you just run into or meet people who you share no affinity with or who you just don’t get along with for some reason that may not even necessarily be either person’s fault, but for some reason, you end up running at cross-purposes to each other. And I think sometimes when you meet objective, 12th house individuals, those are the ones that sometimes the ancient authors might be qualifying as ‘enemies’.
KS: Yeah, I do see the ‘enemy’ configuration, that idea of someone undermining you. And I do think it goes with the ‘good spirit/bad spirit’ to a certain extent, but I know that you see it differently.
AC: Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised to find an enemy in the 12th, I would look first at the 6th.
KS: In the 6th, okay.
CB: And I just want to mention it because it is a really consistent Hellenistic signification in terms of assigning ‘enemies’ to the 12th. And that can come up sometimes in different ways when the ruler of let’s say different houses are in the 12th or in a house where you find difficult things, like the 6th or 12th.
Sometimes the person in your life that’s represented by the house ruler can sometimes start working at cross-purposes to you, which sometimes can mean they become like an enemy or somebody that works against you; somebody that ends up undermining you. Let’s say the ruler of the 3rd is in the 12th, then it can indicate loss or enmity with a sibling. Like having a falling out with a sibling at some point in your life I think is a delineation that’s in some of the texts pretty traditionally, or just going through various other houses.
AC: I mean, to a certain degree, any house ruler that’s in the 12th, there’s going to be…
KS: Problems.
AC: Yeah, there are going to be problems. And if it’s a social house, then there will be problems with whoever those people are.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, of sometimes just loss; like ‘loss’ being a 12th house signification.
AC: Definitely.
KS: Absolutely.
CB: The 11th tends to be associated with gain, so sometimes it can mean losing and the dissipation of that person, or the loss of that person from your life. Like Yoko Ono, for example, had the ruler of the 7th in the 12th and experienced her husband getting shot; the loss of a husband, for example, or various other challenging configurations that you could have. The ruler of the 5th in the 12th.
KS: Absolutely, loss of child.
AC: It is generally unfortunate. Like 6, 12, and 2, to a fair degree 8, whatever planet is there, whatever houses it rules will tend to suffer.
KS: Yes.
AC: And I think that we can have misfortune in terms of something turning bad but still existing. I would agree that the 12th is specifically associated with ‘dissipation’ or ‘evaporation’…
KS: Vanishing.
AC: …like they’re not there, and I think that ties in very well with the ‘isolation’. Because if you’re isolated it’s because people aren’t around, right?
KS: Yeah, they’re all vaporized. Not literally, but it’s like they’re vapors.
AC: But they’re not part of your world, right?
KS: No. And that’s where I think the 12th, when it gets triggered by timing factors, you are away from the normal things, people, or places that are in your world for a temporary period of time.
CB: And there’s definitely ways that that can work out positively, or if you have mitigations going on. Like if planets in the 12th are sextile or aspecting the degree of the Midheaven within 3°, that can mitigate it, and you can see more constructive manifestations of the 12th house.
AC: I have a funny example for that.
CB: Okay.
KS: Yeah.
AC: I knew a shady real estate person maybe 10 years ago who had a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in the 12th exactly sextile the Midheaven. And they made a lot of money, it was pretty shady.
CB: They made it work for them in their career by doing shady stuff.
AC: It was favorable for this person.
KS: Yeah, I mean, I always think of the 12th house as the ‘writing cave’ for me personally from a sense of how is the 12th house productive. If you do have to get a project done, for instance, being productive in private or in seclusion can be helpful in that regard. So there are things that you can do when you are disconnected from the normal stuff.
CB: Yeah, when I was in my last 12th house profection year, right at the beginning of the year, I lost my sister. She passed away and I moved back home, out to the middle of nowhere, in this tiny town in Colorado to support my Mom at the time. And I just ended up spending that 12 months in the middle of nowhere, and I immediately set myself to trying to write my book and do all the research. And I spent most of the year writing in isolation for the most part that year.
AC: Yeah, you were Galileo.
KS: While you were in a 12th house profection. Yeah, but that’s where you can do productive things from the 12th house space..
CB: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, a few other things. One, when there are reasonable mitigations, when someone’s ruler of the 10th is in the 12th with some other helpful stuff, you’ll see people who are very effective behind the scenes.
KS: Oh, yes.
AC: I’ve seen that a lot. And also, some people have associated ‘magic’ or ‘occultism’ with the 12th, which I think is in error. Spiritual things can happen there, like you can get cursed according to Lilly, right?
KS: Mm-hmm.
AC: But in that we’re wrestling with the kakodaímōn, or ‘the bad spirit’ in the 12th, that is fourth from the 9th. It is the supportive foundation of your quest for truth or any sort of 9th house capacity for divination or magic, clear thinking, or publishing. Did you solve the 4th house thing?
KS: That’s how you can do the 9th house thing.
AC: Yeah, that’s a fourth route to the 9th. That’s a secondary thing, but it comes up.
CB: Have we talked about ‘sickness’ or ‘illness’? Because this is part of the axis of the 6th and 12th house. And while there’s certainly a tendency for the 6th house to be more like physical ailments and illness and the 12th house to be more mental, or that might be where you might look if you’re looking for mental disturbance or illness, there also still can be…
KS: A physical…
CB: Yeah, like physical illness and sickness components to the 12th house.
KS: Yeah.
AC: It’s very rare to find a physical illness that does not cause mental suffering. It’s very difficult to find a significant mental illness that does not cause the body to decline.
KS: Yeah, one of the food bloggers that I follow suffers from a condition known as ulcerative colitis.
AC: Ooh, yeah, that’s rough.
KS: It’s really rough. And she’s been I guess in remission for a number of years, and she’s been publishing books and having her family and really living a very full life. But she’s had a really bad flare recently and she’s been in hospital for the last couple of weeks away from her family.
She’s been in isolation because her immune system is completely shot, so her three young children haven’t been able to come visit her. So she is in a 12th house environment. She’s isolated in a hospital, but because of a physical problem. That’s just one very current example of the links that you were talking about, Austin.
AC: Just like 1/7, 6/12 is a hell of an axis.
KS: So the trigger is the physical problem, but she’s got a public profile, so she’s shared stuff via the ‘gram about how hard she’s finding it. And I think she’s seen her kids like twice in the last two-and-a-half weeks or something.
CB: Right.
KS: It’s just very, very distressing. And one of her children is only a couple of years old.
CB: So you get some of the isolation stuff as well.
KS: Total isolation. So yeah, I think the sickness and the suffering, while we probably do tend to prioritize the mental component in the 12th, they are connected. You can still be suffering in the 12th from a physical problem.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Because it’s a house that’s declining and detracting from the 1st. And the 1st is not just the mental, but also, the physical.
KS: The body, yeah.
CB: So that which detracts from the 1st, or the falling away or wasting away of the 1st is part of what the 12th signifies, and it can be both mind as well as body.
KS: Yeah.
CB: All right, what else? So one last thing, conceptually, this has brought up something we can do to round this out, which is that last point brought back something that goes back to the very beginning of the tradition, which is just the interconnectedness between opposing houses and the interrelationship between houses that are opposite to each other.
So there’s a lot of different interrelations. We’ve talked about angular triads and the sequence of three houses grouped around the angles. And we’ve got sometimes pairs of houses that are very closely paired together next to each other, like the 5th house (the place of good fortune) next to the 6th house (the place of bad fortune), or the 11th house (the place of good spirit) next to the 12th house (the place of bad spirit).
But then we’ve also got this polarity and this interlinking in relationship between the significations of opposing houses that’s so crucial and important and is probably another key to understanding the significations of any one house looking at and opposing the significations of the opposite house.
KS: Yeah, absolutely.
AC: Yeah. And so, on a practical level, if there are rough oppositions in the sky and they’re in 6/12, it’s not going to be a physical or a mental; there will be suffering on multiple levels of being.
KS: Unfortunately, both, yeah.
AC: Yeah. And so, you just know that if that axis gets pinged hard, that’s bad news, and it’s not one or the other.
KS: Well, in the same way that if the 5th/11th axis gets pinged, this is generally going to be positive, and it can be positive in more than one way. I’m hoping that between this episode and the first episode people are really starting to see some of those connections between the pairs of the houses, and how they’re like opposing topically, but complementary or still interconnected in terms of the theme.
AC: Yeah.
CB: And it creates also a frustrating ambiguity because they can exchange significations and you can see the same significations in both houses. And while sometimes we want to create very strict distinctions between the two, sometimes they can share significations in weird ways.
KS: Yeah. Does that mean we also need to talk about ‘large animals’ in the 12th house?
CB: I don’t know. I mean, we have pets in the 6th, which is a more modern one.
AC: I don’t know anybody with any large animals.
KS: Horses.
AC: Okay.
KS: I’ve had a few charts over the years with people who are into the horse culture or the horse community…
AC: That ‘horse’ life.
KS: …and they’ve got a strong 12th house.
CB: Because I think this shows up already in Rhetorius in the 7th century and it starts by then assigning animals to 6 and 12, but I’ve never fully understood why. Like I can almost get that with the 6th where they’re assigning slaves to the 6th, and they also end up putting pets to the 6th.
KS: Or domesticated animals or something.
CB: Yeah, but I’ve never understood otherwise symbolically.
AC: Is it because a big animal can trample you?
KS: I wonder about that.
CB: Maybe.
KS: Yeah, and also, the lack of containment, like an elephant. Of course you can contain a horse, but they do still have that kind of wild…
AC: A horse decides to kick you…
KS: That’s what I mean.
AC: …you can die.
KS: Exactly, exactly. My grandfather lost an eye because of a horse.
AC: My great-grandfather died after getting kicked by a horse.
KS: Yeah, so like a dog or a cat is less likely to kill you. Although maybe they could through infection, like a bite; but yeah, the large animals.
CB: Yeah, I’ve never dwelt on it very much because I just don’t fully understand symbolically how they got there.
KS: How they got there. Yeah, I don’t know that either, but I do know that occasionally I will see it if somebody’s really passionate about elephant conversation or large animal conservation.
CB: Okay.
KS: It’s very weird, but it’s like, oh, okay, this is where we get this 12th house little piece coming from.
CB: Sure.
AC: Just the large animals.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Fuck the small animals.
KS: If they were just interested in the small animals, they’d have the 6th house.
CB: Sure, which I have seen. I haven’t done a lot with that, but I have occasionally seen that 6th house thing.
KS: Yeah.
AC: I see pets in 6.
KS: In the 6th, for sure.
AC: And they are totally your enemies. They are bad for your health. At least cats are.
KS: Cat litter. Oh, my god, yeah.
CB: There’s an argument with modern astrologers about whether to put them in the 6th or the 5th to the extent that some people treat their pets like their children. I don’t know, we don’t have to go into that.
AC: They’re not your children.
CB: They’re not, yeah.
KS: I’m a loving pet parent and my cats are very well-treated, and I’ve talked about them so often on the podcast, but I still would insist that they are a 6th house part of my life and not a 5th.
AC: Yeah, Kait will refer to me as ‘the father of her cat’.
KS: Yeah, and I’ll call them my furbabies.
AC: That’s fun, but I don’t actually think that I’m the father of the cat.
CB: Right.
KS: It’s a genetic impossibility.
CB: It’s not like continuing your family lineage.
AC: Right, like the cat is going to do me proud.
KS: Yeah, I can understand the love, and I guess that’s what I’m trying to acknowledge. I totally get the love that you have for a pet; they get into your heart.
AC: Not everything you love is your child.
KS: That’s exactly it, yeah.
AC: Your spouse is not your child, but you love them.
KS: Yeah.
CB: I mean, pets do become part of a person’s family and the loss or death of a pet can be major; but it still does show up in the 6th house when I’ve seen it.
KS: When I’ve done timing about people losing a pet, 99% of the time there’s 6th house stuff going on: something in the 6th, a profection 6, or something to the ruler of the 6th.
AC: Yeah.
CB: One we completely skipped that I meant to do I think but we didn’t was we completely skipped over the debate about sex and the 8th house and whether to put it there at all.
KS: We talked about it in the 5th.
CB: Right, because that’s where most traditional astrologers put it. But I just know there’s a lot of modern astrologers and new students that are going to wonder why didn’t we talk about that at all with the 8th.
KS: Oh, because it’s in episode one.
CB: Did we?
KS: I thought we talked about it with the 5th.
AC: We did.
KS: We did pleasures of the body.
CB: Traditionally, or at least from the Medieval period onward, sex tended to be associated with the 5th house and the ‘joy’ of Venus.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Eventually, in modern times, through assigning Scorpio to the 8th house, Pluto, or whatever, they started assigning the 8th house to sex, but that was only in the past century or past few decades. So now it’s kind of a modern debate where some astrologers assign sex to the 8th, and others, more traditionally-inclined astrologers tend to put it in the 5th.
KS: Yeah, and I think you had also mentioned in the part one episode that there was some reference to it in the 7th house.
CB: Yeah, well, that’s one of the funny things. When I see traditional astrologers, usually Medieval astrologers, going too hard against modern astrologers, I sometimes like to pull out that, even in and of itself, was only a thing that was happening from let’s the 8th or 9th century until the 17th or 18th century where it was assigned to the 5th; whereas if you go back earlier, it was assigned to the 7th.
KS: Yeah.
CB: So nobody necessarily has full authority to say it’s definitely this house, and you’re an idiot if you assign the signification to this. Because I think what’s most important is just getting to the underlying symbolism and having a good reason conceptually and philosophically, as well as practically to assign whatever signification you come up with. And different astrologers are going to adopt and endorse different conceptual models that they think make sense to them and then use those to generate significations from the houses.
And that’s a real discussion that has to be had in the astrological community that’s recent because now there’s so many different conceptual models. There’s a real debate that comes up and can be legitimately argued one way or another. But I think the important thing is just being deliberate about what model you’re using and not necessarily taking things for granted; but instead knowing why you think certain things mean what they mean and trying to have a good rationale or reason for it.
KS: Yeah, so that’s good.
CB: Are you willing to be that charitable, Austin?
AC: Sure.
CB: Sure?
KS: Let’s hope you don’t make him say more about it.
AC: Why not. If I were going to put money on whether a person would have more sex, all other factors being equal, during a 7th or 8th house profection, I would bet 7th or 5th very strongly over 8th.
CB: And the one reason I say that is in my episode on this, whatever episode that was on The Astrology Podcast, I did throw out a bone to those who want to continue to try to argue the 8th from a different perspective. I think you could try to do it from a traditional perspective by saying that the 8th house is the succedent house that follows after the 7th.
And so, therefore, theoretically or conceptually, following the exact same model some of the traditional astrologers did, the 8th should follow that which comes after the partnership that you form in the 7th. And one of the things that does follow after subsequently to getting in a long-term relationship or a marriage with somebody is having sex as part of the relationship, theoretically.
AC: Yeah, I think you can make a decent argument for the 8th as connected to sex, I would say in a secondary way where it’s the substance of the other.
CB: Right.
AC: But I don’t think that makes it the primary house because there’s all this other 8th house stuff which is not sexy at all.
KS: Correct, yeah.
CB: Sure. Because one of the discussions we have to have…
AC: Actually let me strengthen that point. One of the primary significations of the 5th house is good things happening to the physical body.
KS: Yeah, I mean, that has got to be the primary part.
AC: Another primary 5th is things that are pleasurable and fun, and specifically, bodily. And then with the 7th, it’s all about the intersection between you and another. And so, the 8th is not primarily about other people’s bodies. You can get there; it’s not contrary to the house. But if you look at the 8th, the 8th doesn’t bring people together in happy union. You need something else besides just ‘8th-houseness’ to bring bodies together in joyful, loving, pleasurable union. You don’t have joyful, loving, pleasurable, fruitful as keywords for the 8th in the tradition at all.
CB: Right, but the 8th is also that which is of value, or seems to be value that the other has or possesses. And when you get into that as a broad 2nd house thing, while we usually put possession in that, I don’t know, you start getting into broader meanings where it could start heading in that direction.
AC: Again, you can get there, but it’s not nearly as primary as it is for the 5th or 7th.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I wouldn’t mind taking into account the 8th, but I would privilege the 5th and 7th above the 8th.
CB: Sure. And that’s fine, and I can get completely onboard with that. I think one of the discussions we need to have as a community at this point is when you go back and I read Valens, as I’ve done a few passages, one of the things you’ll immediately see is they’re often assigning a topic to multiple houses, and there’s not this preoccupation that we have that probably grew out of the horary tradition.
Because horary wasn’t really practiced that much, if at all, in the Hellenistic tradition. And then in the Medieval tradition, it started being practiced, and then by the Renaissance, that’s like the main thing that they’re practicing. Lilly opens up by teaching horary, whereas all earlier authors opened up with mundane or natal.
And with horary, you kind of do need to try to have one primary significator, one primary house that rules a topic. But in Hellenistic, we can see them having ‘children’, for example, they would say 5th house; but they would also say 10th house and 11th house, and maybe even 4th house for children as well.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Or ‘friends’, we see Valens assigning to several different houses.
KS: 3, 11. ‘Friendships’ came up three or four times.
CB: Right.
KS: I think the point, Chris, one of the larger points that I think you’re making here is that ancient astrologers didn’t all agree on a specifically one house per topic type of thing.
CB: Yeah, and it wasn’t just that they didn’t agree, but it was that they held that there were enough multivalents in different houses. Sometimes you could have a certain topic that could be assigned to multiple houses and that’s okay.
KS: Yeah, that it’s okay.
AC: Yes, but children is a pretty big topic, and sex is a big topic; each of the houses has a specific relationship to that topic. We’ve talked about 5th and 7th, those both have a relationship to sex, but they don’t have the same relationship to sex.
KS: No.
AC: There is I think a finer differentiation implied behind the assignment of this house will impact children; this other house will impact children. But sometimes we have to do a little thinking in terms of how does it impact this topic.
KS: In what way, yeah.
CB: Right. And I know that intellectually I want to do that and I want to go there with you and come up with the differentiation, so that we can say this house could be children in this way, and this house could be this other side of children. But I think originally they were getting there not from that, but instead just from the fact that if you’re trying to derive significations from symbolic interpretations of astronomical movements, there’s just different ways that you could end up with assigning certain topics to different houses.
So to go back to children, we’ve talked about astronomically how the 5th house is the succedent house that follows after the 4th. And if we establish that the 4th house represents one’s family, one’s parents, and one’s lineage, then the 5th is that which follows after that; so therefore, your family lineage and its continuation. And this is just an argument that I’ve made about how children got assigned there. But then they also assigned children to the 10th under the premise that the 10th is your praxis and is that which you do, or that which you create, that which you make.
KS: Mm-hmm, the enactment.
CB: Right. And therefore…
AC: Your work in the world.
CB: …your work in the world. For some people, having children is one of the things that they accomplish, do, or create in their lives and is a significant thing in that way, and that’s one of the ways that you can see how they would have gotten to children being something that could also be assigned to the 10th house.
AC: But do you have kids when you have 10th house transits? When do people get pregnant? The theoretical is very important and the rationale is important, but as practitioners, you have to look at what do these things do and take that into account. It’s not that the entire system of astrology was created purely mentally before ever being tested out at all. You don’t think that they were like, “Okay, I’m pretty sure if we do it this way, the theoretical/rationale, we should get children here,” and then they didn’t look at charts?
CB: People absolutely do have 10th house transits when they have children. I’ve seen some people in their zodiacal releasing for the Lot of Spirit periods, which usually just represents a person’s career, they’ll go into peak periods when they have kids. Or you’ll see a ‘loosing of the bond’ and that was them having children because for that individual in some instances, not in all instances, them having kids is something that’s tied into their overall career or life’s work. And while that’s not the same way for everybody, I do see that with some people or some clients.
AC: Yeah, that definitely happens with some charts.
CB: Sure. So that’s then an independent, not just symbolic, but also a practical reason why sometimes kids can be not just 5th house, but also 10th house.
AC: You can get indicators of children in any house, if you have the ruler of the 5th. I don’t know. I feel like we’re pursuing this point perhaps too far.
CB: Well, I just wanted to mention it because one of the things we did in this episode was to blend modern and traditional significations, and we’ve tried to be very specific and very deliberate about saying, ‘this house is assigned to this signification, this house is assigned to this signification’. And we’ve kind of glossed over and not focused or dwell too much on debates or differences between astrologers. We did run into a difference between, like the two of us, about whether ‘enemies’ should be assigned to the 12th; but otherwise, we’ve glossed over a lot.
I just want to make sure that as we contribute this to the astrological community that one of the things I want to do in discussions the community should have is about the question about whether you have to assign a topic to just one house, or can we have broader discussions about can a topic be assigned to multiple houses in the long term without ruining the consistency and the efficacy of the system.
AC: Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Like I said earlier, multiple houses can contribute to some topics in different ways.
CB: Right, and I would just completely agree with that. And I think that’s an important thing to think about because I don’t know that a ton of work has been done on that. Because we tend to have more discussions about singularly assigning one house to topics instead of…
AC: Yeah, I would say–and Kelly, tell me what you think–that comes up a lot in practice where someone’s like, “Yeah, I’m trying to do this,” and then I will look for everything that’s supportive of that and everything that can detract from that. And so, I think, again, that comes up in practice inevitably.
KS: Yeah, I think there is that scope for sure because you’re looking for, okay, this planet could signify this topic, I could get it out of this house and maybe a little bit out of that house kind of thing.
CB: Right.
KS: Because when your client wants to know about a topic, you want to make sure you give a really holistic or well-rounded response around that.
CB: Or like the topic of relationships and looking to Venus as a general significator, or looking to the 7th house, or looking to the ruler of the 7th house, so that you’re looking at multiple things that are all giving sometimes the same recurring or echoing the same indication; or sometimes they’re indicating different things depending on what significator you’re looking at.
KS: Yeah, they’re all pieces of the puzzle around the same topic, if you like. If we want to solve for relationships, we need to look at the ruler of the 7th, we need to look at what’s in the 7th, and we need to look at Venus as a starting point. There’s a couple of other things you can sometimes bring in depending on what else is happening in the chart, but they’re going to be your base, beginning points.
AC: Yeah.
KS: If I’m looking at fertility, I’m looking at the 5th, the ruler of the 5th, the Moon, the 1st house, and the ruler of the 1st. You’re looking at three or four different things, but you’re trying to get a whole picture. Are all of those things in good condition for fertility? Are they all in bad? Are some in good and some in bad? You weigh your assessment accordingly.
CB: Yeah, and that’s where something like the modern, which is also a traditional concept, ‘rule of 3’ of if you see something come up once, it’s a maybe; if you see it come up twice, it’s more certain or probably; and if you see it come up three times, in three different ways, then it’s almost definite that the person’s likely going to experience whatever that is symbolically that’s being pointed to in the chart.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah. And also, in terms of houses, I do a fair amount with derivative houses; not just houses from houses, but also coding those in terms of whether that’s supportive or not. A planet in the 11th house is going to support a planet in the 7th because it’s in an inferior trine to it, and a planet in the 7th is going to pull support from that.
KS: Yeah.
AC: It’s not that the 11th is inherently about one-on-one relationships, but in that chart, anything there is going to be in a position to support, which we can follow. If you’re around a lot of people, it’s going to be easier to find somebody.
KS: To find a romantic partner, yeah.
AC: 12th is sixth from the 7th. If you are alone and miserable, it’s going to be harder to find other people who want to join…
KS: Your suffering.
AC: …beings. And so, sort of outlining the task of the astrologer collectively as well as individually, I think we’ve done a good job of trying to sort what are the primary effects of a given house and then what are important secondaries. We’ve already spent six hours on this.
CB: Right.
KS: Yes.
AC: We didn’t dig into the tertiaries too much, but those are there.
CB: Right
KS: Yeah.
CB: Tertiaries are like derived houses that you mentioned. It’s like turning the chart and saying that the 10th house is the fourth from the 7th, so it might indicate the parents of the marriage partner or whatever.
AC: Right. Although some of the derived stuff is pretty strongly secondary. Like the second from the 7th, we did a lot with that and that’s used all the time.
KS: Yeah.
CB: You can get crazy. It starts getting kind of ridiculous if you go too far with the derived houses and there is a danger of that.
AC: Right, like the spouse’s brother’s children, which would be the fifth from the 3rd from the 7th.
CB: Or like the pets of the spouse’s children’s brother or something like that.
KS: Now I might go off the deep end.
AC: My uncle’s pet.
CB: Right.
AC: And so, if there’s a specific question about that, and you do that, it’ll be useful; but you don’t want to come into a natal where you’re like what’s their uncle’s cat fate going to be.
KS: Yes, that’s true. You want to keep the energy clear; the information clear.
CB: Well, and there’s probably diminishing returns at some point.
KS: Absolutely. That’s the better phrase.
AC: What is the value of knowing the fate of your uncle’s cat?
KS: Yes.
CB: Yeah.
KS: To what extent.
CB: Sure. All right, guys, on that note…
KS: On that crazy note.
CB: Yeah, I think we did it, I think we’re done, and I think we need to wrap up this two-part series on the significations of the 12 houses. So congratulations. Good job. Thank you for joining me for this today.
I think this was a really good and important discussion, and I think it’ll lay a nice foundation both for those that are new students, as well intermediate and advanced students that are trying to ground their understanding of this, which is basically one-quarter of our system of Western astrology, which is composed of the planets, signs, aspects, and houses. And if you can get this quarter down, then you’ve got maybe 25% of the system down; maybe that’s broadly speaking going too far, but it’s a huge chunk.
KS: It’s essential.
AC: I would say once you get all four, then it becomes operational.
CB: Right.
KS: Then you have a ‘stable’ table.
AC: Ooh.
KS: I’m a poet and I didn’t even know it.
CB: I like that.
KS: But four makes things stable.
CB: Yeah. All right, so obviously even though we spent a long time doing this, this was just a piece of a treatment of the houses that we all got together and did sort of off the top of our heads really quickly. If people, as we said in the previous episode, want to learn more, each of us has books, courses, classes, lectures, and everything else where we go into even more depth on this specific topic. Kelly, what have you done on the houses, if people want to study with you and learn more from your approach?
KS: Yeah, I cover it in my Practical Astrology beginners course, which is a six-week training. And if you’re on my website, and you go to the Learn Astrology tab, there’s a button that says Newbies Start Here, because it is foundational. And then I’ve also got a webinar on the rulers of the houses, which is a really important topic too. And that’s under the Learn Astrology Online Classes tab at KellysAstrology.com.
CB: Brilliant. Austin?
AC: All right, so I have a series of lectures recorded on the houses that are purchasable. And the houses are an important unit in my year-one astrology program.
CB: Okay. What’s your website?
AC: AustinCoppock.com.
CB: Brilliant. And I wrote the book, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, which has a chapter on the houses, as well as a chapter on house division and the origins of the different forms of house division.
And I also have a three-lecture series in the middle of my online course on Hellenistic astrology where I go through the 12 houses and how to interpret the ruler of the Ascendant and the ruler of different houses in each house, and then finally how to interpret planetary condition within the context of the rulers of the houses, so that you can know whether the ruler of the house is working out well, if it’s favorably-place, or if it’s poorly-placed and not working out and how that will turn out just by showing tons of example charts that I’ve collected in my practice. So you can find out more information about that course at courses.theAstrologySchool.com.
All right, that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. So thanks a lot to everybody who’s listened or who watched this episode on YouTube. Please be sure to subscribe. Rate it on iTunes. Give us a thumbs up on YouTube. Sign up for Patreon to support the podcast, if you want to see more episodes like this in the future. And otherwise, that’s it. So we’ll see you again next time.
AC & KS: Bye!
CB: Thanks to the patrons and sponsors who helped to support the production of this episode of podcast through our page on Patreon.com, including patrons Christine Stone and Nate Craddock; as well as the Astro Gold Astrology App available at AstroGold.io, the Portland School of Astrology at PortlandAstrology.org; the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs at Honeycomb.co; and also the International Society for Astrological Research, which is hosting an astrology conference in Denver, Colorado, September 10-14, 2020, and you can find out more information about that at ISAR2020.org; and the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is happening in Seattle, May 21-25, 2020, and you can find out more information about that at NORWAC.net.
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