The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 461, titled:
The Second House in Astrology
With Chris Brennan and Leisa Schaim
Episode originally released on September 5, 2024
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released September 29th, 2024
Copyright © 2024 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Leisa Schaim, and we’re gonna be doing a deep dive into the meaning of the 2nd house in astrology and explaining the significations of that house by looking at a ton of different example charts of different people that have 2nd house placements, either planets in the 2nd house, having the ruler of the Ascendant in the 2nd house, or looking at the ruler of the 2nd house itself and what it means when it’s located in different houses in order to get a comprehensive overview of what the 2nd house means in a birth chart. So hey Leisa – thanks for joining me.
LEISA SCHAIM: Hey Chris. Glad to be here.
CB: Yeah. So this is a big one. I did a big episode on the first house last time with Nick Dagan Best, and today I’ve been talking to you about this as I’ve been researching it intensely over the past few weeks, and I found so many charts. You’ve also found some charts and I think we have a lot of good stuff to say about the 2nd house today.
LS: Yeah. We have an abundance of charts, pardon the pun.
CB: Abundance. A plethora. That will come into play as we talk about some of these charts; we have some like, billionaires and millionaires, including charts for some of the richest people in the world that I wanna go through a little bit today. So let’s start off first by – I wanna share a diagram that I have that shows the significations of the houses, and it shows where the 2nd house is relative to the first house.
So this is a diagram, for those watching the video version, that shows the significations of the houses. And the thing that’s important here that I wanna emphasize at the beginning is talking about the astronomical situation of the 2nd house, because once you figure that out, it becomes pretty clear why the 2nd house means what it means. So in the previous episode, I talked about the first house and how the first house, using whole sign houses used in ancient astrology, the degree of the Ascendant which represents the eastern horizon will fall somewhere in the 2nd house – or, sorry, somewhere in the first house. And then part of the first house then will be above the horizon in the sky, which is the area of the chart that the ancient astrologers associated with the spirit and the mind and the intellect – basically everything in the top half of the chart. And then part of the first house is below the degree of the Ascendant and is below the earth, so it represents everything that’s below the earth in the material realm, which is the realm that they associated with the concept of fortune, with chance, but also with the body and the physical incarnation. So it’s such a simple distinction, but it’s one that had never been properly recognized in contemporary astrology until I started doing some work in 2012 on the planetary joys scheme, which is a system of assigning planets to the houses, and saw that it’s built into the concept of houses. Just this idea that the top half of the chart with the sky is like, the mind and the spirit and the intellect, and the bottom half of the chart is like, the body, the physical incarnation, and the material world.
So why that’s important when it comes to the 2nd house is the first house – part is above the horizon, part is below the horizon, and so it’s the meeting place between sky and earth, and also therefore it’s the place where you are born, and you come into this world and your spirit is sort of merged with your body. So the first house represents the self; it represents you in the chart and all the things associated with it.
So the next house in order, the 2nd house in whole sign houses, is the 2nd sign relative to the rising sign. So it’s the sign that falls after the rising sign, and the 2nd house is the first house that’s fully submerged under the earth in the material realm, in the realm of physical incarnation. And so the 2nd house, as a result of that, has a lot to do with material things and with the material realm and everything associated with that, which functionally ends up resulting in it meaning that the 2nd house signifies possessions, money, finances, income, and basically everything related to the material world when it comes to the native’s life becomes the core meaning of the 2nd house.
LS: Right. Like, for instance, when a baby is born, the first things it more or less gets is, you know, some sort of nourishment, like either breastfeeding or some sort of food. And then they’re either put in some sort of clothing or wrapped in a blanket or something. Regardless of the specifics, like food and clothing are like your first things that are supporting your life as soon as you’re born. And so it just keeps extending from there in terms of just the physical things that support the first house life.
CB: Right, exactly. So there’s this notion – so in ancient astrology, it was referred to as the Gate of Hades or the Gate to the Underworld, because you’re fully entering this realm of like, the underworld or going under the earth at this point and being fully enmeshed in the material realm. And I like what you said, though, that the 2nd house as a succedent house that follows after the first house, it supports the first house. So it supports the native, and therefore it is those physical things that come to support you during the course of your life, and what your relation is to them and how well you’re supported materially and financially during the course of your existence and the course of your, like, you know, occupation of this birth chart that will represent the rest of your life and your life journey.
LS: Right. So as an extension of that, it can show your literal finances or possessions. It can also show your orientation towards the things that you need for life, i.e., money or possessions, so how you go about getting money, your sort of style of dealing with finances – which can be very different for different individuals – and so forth.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So livelihood. Like, what do you do to support yourself? Livelihood is the primary keyword that was used for the 2nd house in ancient astrology; it was the Greek word bios, which means life or livelihood. And so it means like, making a living. Like, what do you do to make a living? And that when you’re making a living, you’re making an income; that’s what’s the thing that’s necessary materially in order to support you and in order to get by and survive. And some people have different orientations towards that in terms of for some people, that’s an area of struggle, where maybe material or financial things are a constant struggle for them that does not come easy. Versus for other people, as we’ll see, material or financial things is something that does come easy, or in which they’re tremendously fortunate. And that can really affect a lot of other things in the life if you, you know, depending on how things go in that area.
LS: For sure. So in some charts, we’ll see, you know, it says something specific around the type of thing that person does to make an income. Like, literally the type of work they do. But of course, there’s other work houses in the chart, so that can vary. Sometimes it is that specific, you know, the connections between the 2nd house and other houses. At other times, it speaks more in other charts potentially it speaks more towards, you know, their orientation towards money or, you know, like you were just saying, how easy or hard it is to get money. There are different facets that kind of show more in some charts than others.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And you know, for some people, it’s like a major part of the life, whereas for other people it’s not. And that’s also sometimes reflected in the chart as well, if a person has like, a lot of planets in the 2nd house and that’s like, a major area of their life for some reason, or if a person doesn’t have as much going on there. One thing I meant to mention because I got a ton of questions after the last episode – if you don’t have any planets in a house, it doesn’t mean that there’s nothing going on there. You just have to look and see what the ruler of that house is doing in order to get information about that house.
LS: Absolutely. Yeah, that does come up a lot.
CB: So that’s something we’ll be seeing a lot of. Okay. So just to finalize significations and run through them – so it’s like, money, finances, possessions, livelihood, income, resources, assets. One of the ones that came up that I was surprised of but it made sense as I was doing this research was that lifestyle seems to be a signification associated with the 2nd house, because I was noticing especially in the instances of some people that had like, really extravagant lifestyles that were sort of like demonstrations of their wealth that it was really coming up that lifestyle was like, a core meaning in some ways, especially in terms of how do you maintain your lifestyle. Because sometimes like, people have a certain type of lifestyle that they want to support, and it becomes a question of like, what do I need to do financially in order to have the money to support that? As well as sort of adjacent things, like what kind of lifestyle does a person lead, and what do they do in order to support that life?
LS: For sure. Yeah. And even, you know, with all things being equal, say like, you know, two different people who have lots of money, their lifestyle can still look different in terms of like, how they spend that money, how they save that money, et cetera.
CB: Definitely. All right. Other significations – making a living, attitude towards money and material possessions – like, some people have different attitudes towards these things – earning potential, issues of wealth versus poverty can sometimes come up in terms of the 2nd house and in terms of what planets are there or how the ruler of the house is situated and whether it’s in good shape in the chart or poor shape in the chart. Spending habits – that’s one of the things we’ll see when we talk about planets in the house especially that sometimes it can very much characterize the person’s spending habits. Financial stability or lack thereof. Demetra in her book, Ancient Astrology Volume Two, she has this amazing treatment of the significations of the houses starting with the ancient astrologers and then going through to the medieval, Renaissance, and modern times. Some of the other significations she put in her chapter in Volume Two of that work were expectations of prosperity, fears of financial lack, earning, saving, and spending habits, and one of the topics that can sometimes come up potentially is issues surrounding like, greed, for example, can come up in connection with the 2nd house. As you said, the 2nd house is also part of the trigon of houses that all have to do with like, work and what you do to make a living, and the 2nd house is like, your livelihood and your income; the 6th house is work, subordinates, and also like, labor or just areas in which you have to work for something and may not be in charge; and then the 10th house is like, career and reputation and your overall life direction, and especially those areas of your life where you are in charge and you do some of your most important work or actions.
LS: Right. So typically, if someone’s actually looking at a chart to see something about like, the type of work you’ll do or how you’ll make a living, you know, it’s not just one house. You would look at like, the first house and Ascendant ruler, 2nd house, 6th, 10th, and do some sort of synthesis of what does that all look like together? Because for some people, that’s all easily connected, and it’s like, “This is what I do for work and this is how I make a living.” Or “This is my profession,” rather, “and this is how I make a living.” But for other people, like say artists or, you know, people for whom it’s not always easy especially initially to make a living from what they wanna do for work, they’re like, two separate areas. So they’re making a living being a waiter or something, but they’re also acting as like, their profession, so you wanna look at all of that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And as we can see, as we’ll see in the chart examples, it’s rarely just a matter of, you know, the 2nd house but usually there’s many different things in the chart that are describing the overall picture of what happens in terms of a person’s work or income or other things like that. And sometimes those can be a little bit out of whack. Like, a person can have, you know, a great career that they really enjoy doing what they love, but it can not make them money, for example, and they could be struggling financially, you know, even despite doing what they like doing. Or alternatively, they could be making a lot of money and be really financially successful, but in terms of the 10th house and career, they don’t get to do the thing that they really wanna be doing or that they have a real passion for.
LS: Exactly.
CB: So there’s all sorts of different combinations in terms of that. In modern astrology, there’s some additional like, psychological significations that are sometimes emphasized. One of them is the notion of the 2nd house being that which you put value into, like what you consider valuable. So we’ll see a little bit of that to some extent, because I did notice in some examples that it’s like, one of the things is you only pursue something because you have value or you covet it. And there’s some examples I’ve seen with some people of pursuing some 2nd house things because they place obvious value or a unique set of values on that material thing, but you know, other times, that’s not necessarily always the case because people sometimes just pursue 2nd house things because they have to out of necessity.
LS: Exactly. Because we all at minimum need subsistence to survive, you know, however that comes about or whatever our sort of overlay values on top of that, it’s still like, a material reality.
CB: Yeah. So other things the modern astrologers sometimes associate in connection are how you acquire and manage things you value, your most valuable possessions, and sometimes in modern psychological astrology they get into notions of the 2nd house having to do with self-worth. And I’m not sure how much of that we’ll see; we’ll have to talk about that later. For the most part, we’re gonna focus – I did wanna say we’re gonna focus on more of a traditional approach to the significations of the houses in this series, and when it comes to the 2nd house, which is gonna be more limited in the sense that we’re gonna focus primarily on the 2nd house having to do with concrete meanings of like, finances and possessions and things like that. So the point is partially just to demonstrate and to show how those traditional significations actually do work out in people’s life. In the one hand, that’s gonna be a little bit more narrow in that we’re not gonna be extending it as much to psychological things, but on the other hand, even by narrowly focusing on some of the core significations as we’ll see in the examples there’s such a wide variety of ways that that can work out, especially based on the ruler of the 2nd house being in different houses, that yeah, there’s a lot of different ways it can manifest in a person’s life.
LS: Absolutely. And just kind of as a, you know, secondary note about that, part of why we’re doing that is, you know, traditionally, especially if you use whole sign houses and you look at the traditional placements and rulerships and so forth, you know, you can see a lot of the concrete reality of any given area of the person’s life, including the 2nd house and finances. And while I think there’s some credence sometimes to like, self-worth being tied into your money in terms of if you don’t feel you’re worth charging enough if you’re self-employed; there are things like that that can come into play certainly. But there’s also many, many instances in which you can think you’re great, and you could be authentically great, but you are not in charge of all of the circumstances in which, you know, the context either allows or makes harder your making a certain amount of money. And that’s not all up to you, even if there’s a self-worth component.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That’s a really good point. All right. And the last thing – I wanted to look up like, a definition of livelihood because it was really the primary significations that the earliest astrologers gave for the 2nd house, and I thought this was a good definition. So it said,
“Livelihood refers to the means by which a person earns the money or resources necessary to support their basic needs and existence.”
So remember the 2nd house is a succedent house; it rises up towards the first house and supports it, and the first house represents you. So the definition goes on; it says,
“This typically includes securing food, shelter, clothing, and other essentials for daily living. In a broader sense, livelihood can also encompass the activities, skills, and assets that an individual or community relies on to make a living, whether through formal employment, self-employment, or subsistence practices.”
So key points to remember – livelihood is fundamentally about securing the basic necessities of life. It can involve various forms of income generation and resource acquisition, and livelihoods can be diverse and vary across individuals, communities, and cultures. So I think that sets a great overall tone for what we’re gonna be talking about here when it comes to the 2nd house and that we’re gonna see demonstrated in such a wide variety of different ways.
LS: For sure.
CB: All right, cool. So let’s transition; we’re gonna talk about chart examples at this point, and we’re just gonna go through as many chart examples as we can. I have actually way too many chart examples to go through in this episode, but we’re gonna see how many we can get through. My notes are actually about like, 76 pages long at this point, the Google document that has all my research from the past month that I’ve been doing on this. So we’re gonna see what we can get through and in terms of structuring things, there were a few preface notes that I wanted to put before we get into chart examples. One, I wanted to give a shoutout to three people for their research assistance as I was working on this. One of them is an astrologer named Orla, who gave me some help looking at planets in the houses. Another is Nick Dagan Best, and the other is, of course, Leisa Schaim, who not just contributed some charts that you found but also helped me talk through each of these examples as I was like, excitedly finding new ones each day and then needed to tell somebody like, how amazing they were.
LS: Right. Yes. We’ve been talking about this for the past week or so.
CB: At least, yeah, two weeks or so. So the other thing – I used to be able to talk for hours on my own, and because this is mainly research that I did over the past few weeks of doing like, maybe 50 chart examples, maybe 70 chart examples – I don’t even know how many it is at this point – it’s something that I would used to before maybe present in a lecture and as a solo just lecture or presentation, and in some ways, ideally that might have been the better format since most of this is just presenting my research. But because of my health issues with chronic fatigue and long covid over the past few years, I’ve lost the ability to do that because I both don’t have the energy and my voice goes out if I talk too long on my own. So as a result of that, on the podcast, I often have people on to talk with me so that it’s more of a conversation, and that allows me to not wear out my voice and to be able to keep talking. So Leisa’s joining me for this today both because she’s a great astrologer and has researched some great examples that she’s gonna share, but also in order to help me talk through this. So I wanted to mention that, because sometimes people complain if they hear me talking too much, not realizing that part of the reason for that is that people are actually joining me to help me out while I’m presenting my research.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah. So all right. Other preface note – I’m gonna use example charts from a wide variety of people from different walks of life. I’m gonna avoid, for the most part, passing value judgments on the different charts, though, because there’s so many different people. I have so many different charts to get through that I feel like it would be like, a whole separate thing, and I wouldn’t be able to include as many charts if I spent a lot of time talking about certain things. And I think it’s a given in some instances – like, for example, in other lectures, you might talk about Hitler’s chart, but it’s sort of like, a given that Hitler was a bad guy and did terrible, terrible things, and sometimes doesn’t always bear focusing on that or repeating just for the sake of giving an example of some certain part of a chart. So I wanted to state that from the outset as well.
LS: Right. Sometimes it’s interesting to find charts that you, you know, of people that you personally find interesting or valuable in terms of their work. But obviously for the sake of astrological presentation, you’re really just looking for different astrological placements and expressions, and that’s by necessity going to be kind of a range of humanity and a range of like, people doing great things and not-so-great things, and you know, that’s the nature of looking at astrological charts.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And you know, in order to be able to see different ways that astrology works out, you’re gonna have to be able to look at charts of people you don’t agree with or people that have done terrible things or that you find distasteful or what have you. But that’s just part of the territory in order to do this research, and also, even sometimes in terms of doing consultations and stuff, and you know, what your role is as an astrologer in terms of that. So yeah, so I wanted to put that as a preface.
We already did the preface about focusing on the traditional meanings of the 2nd house, so I think that’s good. Yeah. Shall we jump into it?
LS: Yes, let’s!
CB: All right. So I was trying to figure out how to structure this because I have so many chart examples, and I wanna start first – I wanna break it up into three or four sections. The first section, I wanna talk a little bit about some just basic examples of what it looks like when a person has a planet in the 2nd house and sometimes just the quality or the significations of that planet become manifest in the context of the livelihood or the income of the native, that it’s just really obvious that the signification of the planet manifests in terms of the person’s finances in some way. So the first section will be planets in the 2nd house.
The next section I wanna do also is the ruler of the Ascendant in the 2nd house, because the ruler of the Ascendant – as we saw in the last episode – can tell you something about the native’s overall life direction and focus in some particular area of the life or area of the chart that the native is more focused on or that their life is more directed towards than others. So we’re gonna look at some examples of the ruler of the Ascendant in the 2nd house and what that looks like to see the 2nd house as something that’s more important in terms of the totality of the native’s life direction.
And then after that, we’re also gonna look at in the next section we’ll look at the ruler of the 2nd house when it’s placed in different houses in the chart and how that can tie together different parts of the person’s life and the topics of two houses where the native’s finances become enmeshed in or tied together with different parts of the person’s life. So we’ll look at that both in terms of the ruler of the 2nd house as well as the ruler of other houses in the 2nd house that then import significations into the 2nd house.
LS: And these are rough categories; there will be many of them that of course cross those boundaries. But we’re gonna try to organize it that way.
CB: Yeah. I think, you know, because when we get to some of these examples, we’ll probably mention some of those things when they come up, but in terms of rough things, we’ll start here. So let me look at my planet in house examples and see where I wanna start with.
One of them that was my favorite that I’ve always used many different times, like it’s one of my core examples because it’s such a good one, is Lisa Marie Presley, who was the daughter of Elvis Presley, the famous singer. And Lisa Marie Preseley was born with Leo rising and Jupiter in Virgo in the 2nd whole sign house in a day chart. So that means that Lisa Marie Presley was born with Jupiter in a day chart in the 2nd house; Jupiter is the most positive planet in the chart then. And what happened is when her father passed away when she was relatively young, he left his entire estate to her, which was valued at millions of dollars. But what was interesting is that he actually stipulated that she couldn’t inherit the full estate and take full control of it until she turned 25 years old. So the day that she turned 25 years old, she inherited Elvis’s entire estate worth millions and millions of dollars, and if you use the technique annual profections where you count one sign per year from the Ascendant, 25 years old is actually a 2nd house profection year and it activates the 2nd house. So for people with 2nd house placements, it can often be a very important year that in some ways activates the potential of the native’s finances. So for her, it was inheriting her father’s estate, which made her very rich with Jupiter in the 2nd house. And interestingly, it was an inheritance, and the ruler of her 2nd house is Mercury, which is in Pisces in the 8th house of death and inheritance and other people’s money. So the source of the wealth was from an inheritance from her father.
LS: Right. So she’s got both; she’s got Mercury and Jupiter making a mutual reception between the 2nd and 8th houses. And I know that something you found in your research is how much the 8th house was showing up in people who were very wealthy because of the nature of either inheritance or investments – like, something dealing with other people’s money connecting with their own personal income and finances. And this is certainly one of those right off the bat. But Jupiter, of course, being the prime thing going on in a day chart in the 2nd house – so just like, abundance of, you know, personal finances.
CB: Yeah, exactly. And also, the ruler of the 8th house itself is Jupiter, which is in the 2nd house, so she has a mutual reception between the 2nd house and the 8th house. Any time you have a mutual reception, it really ties together the topics of those two houses very closely, as we’ll see in other chart examples and as I showed in the previous episode on the rulers of the houses. The last point about hers is it’s interesting because she also has Mars in the 8th house in a day chart, opposing some of the 2nd house planets, and there were some issues where some of the funds were not invested wisely and some of the inheritance money ended up being squandered or ended up being misappropriated by different advisors and stuff like that so that she lost a lot of it and had to have some like, legal battles surrounding that I believe. So it’s also a good example not just of great windfall and great good fortune in terms of finances but also in terms of some challenges as well.
LS: Right. Yeah. And people often wonder what happens when there’s like, a mix of those planets going on in certain areas of life, and it’s usually that. That there’s a mix of qualities that come out, you know, over time.
CB: For sure. Okay. So let me see. Other ones – oh yeah, like, this is one that’s like, very frequently cited, but another Jupiter in the 2nd house chart is Bill Gates, who was born with Cancer rising and Jupiter conjunct Pluto in the 2nd house. And Bill Gates, of course, at different points has been the richest person in the world or the richest man in the world at different points over the past two decades. So it’s not just Jupiter, but it’s also conjunct Pluto, and Pluto tends to take things to the utmost extreme, or it takes things to extremes. So it’s interesting in that case that he became not just a rich person, but like, a mega-rich person, like, the most rich person.
LS: Right. Jupiter-Pluto together, especially when they’re tightly together like that, can often be like, big, big money.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So those are some Jupiter placements. Let’s alternate to some Saturn placements.
LS: Okay.
CB: So we should do one that was more challenging, but it had a good example with Octavia E. Butler.
LS: Okay.
CB: All right. So here’s her chart. It’s Cancer rising with Mercury conjunct the degree of the Ascendant, and the ruler of the Ascendant is the Moon, which is placed in Leo in the 2nd house. And in the 2nd house, we also find Saturn and Pluto in a day chart. So Octavia Butler was a science fiction writer, so she was a writer with Mercury conjunct the Ascendant. But she was a writer who struggled with financial issues very early in her life with Saturn there conjunct Pluto in the 2nd house, right?
LS: Right. Yeah, she grew up with her mother being a house cleaner. They didn’t have much money. And then she herself ended up taking lots of temporary jobs, factory jobs, things like this in order to make a living until she could make a living from her writing itself. And you can see finance is like, a big theme here because she’s got the Ascendant ruler in the 2nd, the Moon ruling the first in the 2nd, and also transposed the Sun ruling the 2nd in the first. So she’s got both of those going on, so it’s like, making finances really important. But Saturn and Pluto there making it challenging in the 2nd house, and also the Moon placed in the 2nd closely square Mars in a day chart. So that’s making things challenging as well for finances. But – I read an interview with someone who had like, looked through her journals and diaries, and there were like, lots of notes that sort of indicated – notes to herself – that indicated this like, financial struggle but like, aspiration as well. And one thing I loved about it, though, is that it said in 1978 is when she finally could stop her doing temporary jobs and fully support herself at some level with her writing. And 1978 was the year that Saturn, the last year that Saturn was in Leo; it was going back and forth between Virgo and Leo. So that was like, the end of her first Saturn return, which is amazing, right, in the 2nd house.
CB: Yeah, that’s incredible. Here, I’ll share that. So here’s – can you see the biwheel with 1978?
LS: Yes.
CB: So there’s Saturn there in her 2nd house.
LS: Right, and so the end of her Saturn return would have also been Saturn near the Ascendant ruler Moon in the 2nd, so just really emphasizing that being the Saturn return achievement of like, financial – at least some level – of financial stability through doing the work that she wanted to do for money instead of other random jobs.
CB: Right. And one of the things I was reading that was really interesting is that her novels often explored themes of power, inequality, and social structures, and money and possessions actually frequently played a significant role where her works would depict societies where wealth and resources were unevenly distributed and this led to conflict and oppression. So she would often, like, challenge readers to consider the impact of economic disparities and the ways in which material wealth could be used to exert control or create social change.
LS: And that’s something that I love in astrology that you can see with philosophers and writers and, you know, people who put their ideas out there is that it’s often like, the main themes will be reflected in the personal individual natal chart. Because it’s like, you know, it’s showing up as very vital to the person as an individual, and then that gets expressed through their writings.
CB: Right. So one other thing that’s really impressive about her is that she was the first science fiction writer – she made history, actually, as becoming the first science fiction writer to receive the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. And this was huge for any science fiction writer so that it was a great recognition of her work, but it also came with a big cash like, prize, basically, that was paid out over five years where she was paid 300,000 dollars each year for the next five years. And so there was actually at one point a significant financial shift for her. Obviously her life was like, a progression of financial shifts like the one you mentioned earlier when she was in her Saturn return. This one I thought was interesting because I looked at the transits for when it was announced, which I believe was around June 20th, 1995. And transiting Jupiter was at eight degrees of Sagittarius, and it was retrograding back to seven degrees where it was trining her natal Saturn at seven degrees of Leo. So that’s another aspect of things that I wanna emphasize today; in some instances, sometimes we’ll just be looking at the natal placement and seeing how that worked out sort of universally at different points in the life with specific instances or events that were characteristic of the life. In some instances, I actually wanna look at the transits and show how those 2nd house placements were actually being activated when they were either good or bad or let’s say challenging things that occurred in the person’s life. In this instance, she had a really positive thing happen, and she was having a very positive transit at that time to her 2nd house Saturn.
LS: Right. And interestingly as well, Saturn rules the 8th house, and there was a different conversation or a recounting of a conversation published online where someone asked her, “What did winning that prize do for you?” And she said, “I was able to finally buy a home in a safe neighborhood.” And Saturn is like, ruling the 8th house, which would be like, the mortgage, right, to buy a home. The 8th house often shows up even though the home is the 4th house because it’s like, the financing of the home. And it was a little sobering to me because, you know, they were noting she would have been wealthy now had she lived longer. But at that time, it allowed her to get that mortgage and the home, but she was like, still paying off the mortgage, you know. So just kind of an example of how like, you know, notability, like professional notability and the income area are not always the same thing in the chart at all.
CB: Yeah, for sure. But it’s interesting that, you know, the ruler of the Ascendant was there in the 2nd house so that that 2nd house is obviously a major topic throughout her life. She integrated 2nd house themes into her writings and into her works. And then but our primary – we’re also using it as an example that Saturn in the 2nd house can sometimes be difficult, especially earlier in the life, especially for her because she had a day chart, Saturn tends to be something that gets better with age. And while she had great struggles and hardships in that area with Saturn in the 2nd house, eventually it became an area where things worked out better as she got older.
LS: Yeah, definitely.
CB: All right. So that’s a good example of just it’s not always terrible or like, the worst case scenario if you have difficult planets like Saturn in the 2nd house. And actually, I have another example of that, which is my next example which is the birth chart of Warren Buffet, who was a famous investor who has Sagittarius rising and Saturn in Capricorn in the 2nd house in a day chart.
So with his, I wanted to use this as an example of how, you know, malefics in the 2nd house – especially if they’re well-placed – are not always the worst case scenario. He’s somebody that became one of the richest people in the world. But I wanted to use him as an example also because sometimes the planets in the 2nd house can describe one’s orientation towards money but also how they go about spending money and acquiring money.
So another astrologer, Beth Watson, who’s the wife of our friend and frequent show collaborator Patrick Watson, I was talking to her about this, and she said, “What a good example that Warren Buffet is,” and she sent me a paragraph which she said I could read. So she said,
“I think it’s cool about his 2nd house, how Saturn is there and how well that represents his trading strategy. Heavy Capricorn energy. He’s a no fuss, no frills, fundamentals trader and was one of the first to popularize value investing or finding stocks that he believed through his analysis were worth far more than their intrinsic value. Some of those stocks were a slow burn but netted him brilliant returns in the long run.”
And so I thought that was really important because I was looking at more about him and just his approach, and he’s known for value investing, which is seeking companies that he believes are undervalued by the market. And then he focuses on long term things, so he’s famous for his approach of buying and holding and emphasizing long term gains over short term speculation. And then finally, he’s also very fundamentals driven where he focuses on a company’s underlying fundamentals and intrinsic value, not market hype. So one last thing that Beth mentioned is he was born, actually, just before Saturn was about to station direct. Let me see how far you can see it… Yeah, you can see it in the bottom right corner of the page. It says he was born about 10 days before Saturn would station direct in Capricorn, which always puts a major emphasis or like, an exclamation mark next to a planet in a person’s chart. And Beth was saying that she looked up Buffet’s secondary progressions and because it was, you know, Saturn stationed 10 days after his birth, that would be associated then in secondary progressions it means by secondary progression his Saturn stationed direct when he was 10 or 11 years old. And she looked it up, and he actually bought his first stock at age 11, so that’s when he started investing.
LS: That’s so funny and like, concrete and literal. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, isn’t that incredible?
LS: Yeah —
CB: So that’s just —
LS: — because oftentimes when like, a secondary progressed planet stations to go direct, it’ll like, bring out the expression of like, whatever that’s about and make it more important and show up more obviously in your life.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So obviously there’s other things going on in his chart. His chart is actually very 8th house focused, and that’s something that comes up majorly with investors and people that are very wealthy, like billionaires. I’ll save the rest of that for like, the 8th house episode, but I just wanted to show how sometimes Saturn in the 2nd not only can – if it’s very well-placed – like, for example, this is probably the most well-placed Saturn you could get in the 2nd house because it’s, you know, in its own domicile, it’s in a day chart, it’s stationing direct. But how that can actually be good, especially in the long term, that Saturn in the 2nd is not necessarily a terrible dealbreaker, per se.
LS: Right. And how that’s expressed well is if you do Saturn around that area of life, which he has.
CB: Yeah, exactly. All right. So moving on. Oh yeah, one of them that I found that was really funny was the Moon in the 2nd house. I found a couple of distinctive things with the Moon in the 2nd house. But one of them that was very funny and literal was that Martha Stewart has the Moon in the 2nd house. So here is her chart.
She has Scorpio rising with the Moon in Sagittarius in the 2nd whole sign house. The ruler of the 2nd house is Jupiter, which is in Gemini in the 8th house in a day chart. And you know, Martha Stewart – the primary thing is just with the Moon there in the 2nd house that I found so fascinating is that she’s known for, you know, cooking, for a series of cookware, and cooking shows and books, and also like, home decorating and things like that. So all these things related to the Moon manifesting in the 2nd house as how she made her living and became like, a millionaire.
LS: Right. And sometimes it’s just as simple as that, at least in terms of one of the big themes of livelihood. Like, what is the nature of that planet? What are its significations?
CB: Yeah. Sometimes it can be as simple as that. So cookbooks and magazines, home decor and kitchenware products and different things like that. Interestingly, with the ruler of the 2nd in the 8th house, she also became very wealthy as a result of making a lot of very shrewd investments in various businesses. Let me go back to her chart. There’s that Jupiter in the 8th house. So she was also like, an investor, and that added to her wealth, however, she also got caught up and got in trouble for that at one point as well where she got in trouble for trading, basically, and she went to jail for five months, plus got two years probation due to a sort of insider trading scandal, essentially.
LS: Right. So that Jupiter was generally doing, you know, good, abundant things for her, but there’s still the shadow side that can come out, you know, if you take that too far.
CB: Yeah. Where sometimes things can get tricky. And what was interesting about that is that I found was that Saturn was transiting her Jupiter in Gemini when she first made the trade in late 2001, and then she started being investigated in early 2002. And at the same time, Pluto was going through Sagittarius – her 2nd house – and was opposing her Jupiter. And there was also an eclipse in her 2nd house around that time as well.
LS: Wow. That’s a lot.
CB: So it’s like, even if a person has like, really good placements in the 2nd house or the 8th house, sometimes if you have a really tough transit, you know – in 2001, like, a lot of the astrologers associated 9/11 with the Saturn-Pluto opposition. And for her, what was interesting is that Saturn-Pluto opposition was hitting her financial sector of her chart and hitting her Jupiter. So the point is just sometimes even if you have really good placements, even the most fortunate or lucky people at some point in their life, you know, have some difficulties or run into some challenges related to different parts of their chart. And that’s gonna happen when you have the more challenging transits.
LS: For sure. Do we know if she like, knowingly did anything improper there, or if it was like, something that she was advised to do? I was just curious.
CB: I don’t know. It’s like —
LS: Okay.
CB: — really complicated. Like, I have a whole thing. Because part of it had to do with her questioning and like, what she said to the prosecutors, because they accused her of acting on nonpublic knowledge when they made the trade. But then the big thing, I think, was that they accused her of lying to the feds when they came asking questions, and that may have been part of the major issues.
LS: I see. Okay.
CB: Obstruction of justice. So I don’t know. We don’t have to like —
LS: Okay.
CB: — get into —
LS: I was just curious.
CB: — the details again with our “not pass judgment” —
LS: Not passing judgment.
CB: — thing; we can’t say. There’s actually a few examples like there where I’m gonna raise, you know, speculations or different people like, have speculated different way but that we don’t truly know, but that it is just interesting to look at the astrology and see how it’s activated.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah. Alright. So let me go back to my list. So we’ve – oh yeah, another one that kept coming up with the Moon that I found really fascinating is collectors and people that liked to collect things.
LS: Right.
CB: And I thought that was so hilarious because the Moon itself, that’s one of its basic significations in Hellenistic astrology is that it collects —
LS: Collects, yeah.
CB: — things and that it receives the light of the Sun, and so that it’s about receiving or collecting or being receptive to things as just a basic principle.
LS: Right, yeah. Totally. And it’s really funny when that comes out literally like in a couple of these examples.
CB: Yeah. So that’s one – collection – and I’ll show a couple examples of that. Another one that I need to introduce also that comes up is sometimes when Mars is in the 2nd house, it can have to do with taking things or, you know, Mars – it severs and separates as a basic principle, but it also can take things and is associated with like, theft, for example, in ancient astrology. And sometimes if it’s poorly placed and you get a bad transit, it can indicate like, a person has an incidence of like, theft, where somebody steals from them. But interestingly I found an example of somebody who liked to steal things from other people who had Mars in the 2nd house. So this is kind of an elaborate example, but it was a really good one. So this is the birth chart of King Farouk of Egypt, who was the king of Egypt in the 1930s and ‘40s, but he ended up effectively becoming the last king of Egypt because he was overthrown and exiled from Egypt, and then ended up dying in exile like, years later living in Italy, I believe.
So for those listening to the audio version, we have a chart with Libra rising, Mars and Jupiter in Scorpio in the 2nd house along with the North Node.
LS: Mars and the Moon?
CB: Sorry, yeah. Mars and the Moon and the North Node in Scorpio in the 2nd house. And Jupiter is in Leo in the 11th house overcoming through a superior square those Moon and Mars placements in Scorpio. And then what else is going on here – we have a nice sextile from Venus in the 4th house to some of the Scorpio planets. But the big thing about him that came up without going into his entire biography is one, he was kind of like a prankster. He grew up in extreme wealth, but he was kind of like, he sounded almost like, a little mischievous. But he apparently, with Mars in the 2nd house, he was taught at one point they caught in Egypt like, somebody who was a pickpocket, and he made a deal with the pickpocket to not, you know, charge him and to let him go if the pickpocket would teach him how to pickpocket people. And so the king learned how to do this, but then he decided to do it on like, really famous people where he would like, pickpocket them, including he used this skill on Winston Churchill at one point to like, steal one of his watches. And another person he stole a ceremonial sword from the Shah of Iran. So it’s basically in his biographies, it says, “Despite his great wealth, Farouk was a kleptomaniac who always took something valuable such as a painting or a piano from whatever members of the Egyptian elite that he stayed with, as nobody could say no to the king. And if he indicated he wanted something, his subjects had to give it to him.” So it was true for his subjects, but it was also true for like, you know, other high officials in other countries; like, Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister of the UK.
So his 2nd house is actually extremely well placed in terms of at least this being a night chart with Mars in its own domicile, yeah, relatively well situated. But then also we find the Moon there in the 2nd house, and it turned out that he was a huge collector, that he had – it said that he had something of a mania for collecting things is what one of the biographies said, ranging from Coca Cola bottles to European art to ancient Egyptian antiques. I’m looking at my notes here for just some of the stuff, because what happened is after he was overthrown in essentially like, a military coup and he was forced to abdicate, the Egyptian government moved to auction off his vast collection of trinkets and treasures, and then they just started finding that he had all of this stuff and that he had the hugest collection of a bunch of different things in the world at that time. So one of the things that he had, for example, is he had the biggest coin collection in the world at that point. He also possessed a vast collection numbering into the hundreds of thousands of – it turned out he had the largest collection of pornography in the world, for example, and this is in like, the 1940s or 1950s. And it’s, you know, it’s funny that it’s in Scorpio, and it’s also funny that it’s like, the Moon is ruling the 10th house. So just imagine that that becomes one of your reputations.
LS: Right. Totally. Right. Go ahead.
CB: Go ahead.
LS: Well, it’s just such an interesting 2nd house, right, because the Moon with the collecting, and Mars is well-placed in a night chart in its own sign, so it shows that he had, you know, the means there. He had 2nd house, you know, abundance going on, but it’s also Mars, you know, and malefics, even if they’re in sect, it doesn’t mean they turn into like, the benefic necessarily. So it’s like —
CB: Right.
LS: — that was some of his struggle still, the desire, right? And —
CB: Yeah, they liked to take things, and also, like Austin talks about in his book on the decans – which evidently nobody has. Like, we’re very lucky people that have the —
LS: Right? Yeah.
CB: — first edition, because it’s been out of print forever. He talks about the first decan of Scorpio and one of the keywords he uses for it is “hunger,” and that actually came up very strongly in this guy’s biography because they said that he had a hunger for collecting things, for like, possessions and goods, but also even for like, eating and stuff and having these like, wildly opulent meals, so much so that eventually, you know, he did that for many, many years and became very overweight relative to the time. He had this hunger or like, this desire for women and for sex, and had lots of different like, lovers during the course of his life. And that seems like it became tied in with his 2nd house to some extent as well.
LS: Right. Really interesting with the first decan, because yeah, I remember that signification as well. But it’s like, he has a few different things kind of showing up to me anyway as, you know, sort of the insatiable desire factor, which is that one and, you know, with that Jupiter overcoming Mars but it’s in a night chart. So like, Mars-Jupiter can like, expand the desire, and especially if it’s in a night chart, it’s not necessarily in like, useful ways, you know?
CB: Right.
LS: You know, just sort of greed. And then I know it doesn’t always show up this way, but it’s really interesting that he has such a close conjunction between the Moon and the North Node in the 2nd house in Scorpio, because I’ve seen that, you know, the North Node particularly of course in Indian astrology is like, known as the insatiable want – the head that keeps wanting more, right?
CB: Oh yeah, for sure.
LS: Head of the serpent. And the Moon right there – yeah, I can see that just being like, an instinct of like, wanting more and wanting more with a few different, you know, things around his 2nd house there.
CB: Right, for sure. So some of the summaries I was like, reading and writing were that Farouk the I of Egypt’s finances were characterized by extreme wealth and extravagance, ultimately contributing to his downfall in the 1952 revolution that overthrew the monarchy, and that his finances were a stark contrast between immense wealth and irresponsible spending. That’s actually something I see come up regularly with Mars in the 2nd house; Johnny Depp, for example, has that, and there’s speculations that he may have spent like, a lot of the 600 million dollars that he made through his Hollywood career over the past few decades on like, wild, extravagant spending.
LS: Yeah, I saw that on several different celebrities who were like, known to like, squander their wealth. They had Mars as well as like, Jupiter going on with the 2nd house.
CB: Right. Yeah. So it continues; it says, “Farouk’s extravagance and disregard for the economic realities of his people alienated him from the public and contributed to the revolution that ultimately ended his reign and the Egyptian monarchy, so that his story serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked power and wealth.” And in terms of some of the stuff that he had when they found his palace and they started discovering stuff, they found that he had collected 2,000 silk shirts, 10,000 silk ties, 50 diamond-studded golden walking sticks, and one autographed portrait of Adolf Hitler, which is kind of weird. Elsewhere it says, “His obsession with collection also ranged into diamonds, dogs, stamps, rubies, faberge eggs, ancient Tibetan coins, medieval suits of armor, aspirin bottles, razor blades, paperclips, and Geiger counters.”
LS: That’s so random.
CB: So – right, it’s so crazy. So it’s like, I’m just trying to give some… Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
CB: You know, a sense of —
LS: Show the picture, right?
CB: Exactly. But it’s like, having – so it’s like, even though Mars is well-placed, that Moon is not well-placed, and obviously that’s potentially also part of the hunger part and part of the insatiable conjunct the North Node as you were saying. But then also to just become known for that in terms of your reputation and the mark that you leave on the world with the Moon ruling the 10th house of career I think is really notable.
LS: Yeah, that’s very striking. Yeah, really tying together, yeah, your public reputation – at least eventually – and the 2nd house of possessions and wealth.
CB: Yeah. It says the 1954 auction of his coin collection was the biggest auction of the 20th century. So, you know, having the biggest of something – so this is obviously somebody who has major 2nd house placement and whose money and finances came up in a very, very significant way. One last point to mention is just he was forced to – let me do animate biwheel to show you the transits.
I know I’m spending a lot of time on this one, but I found some of these ones that just, I hadn’t known about. I think Orla was the one that pointed this chart out to me, and I’m just shocked at how good it is and how fascinating like, the lives of some of these people are.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So —
LS: Go ahead.
CB: What were you gonna say?
LS: I was just gonna say it was a little bit of a rabbit hole, I know, on the biography on this person. But you know, sometimes, yeah, you’re just like, so excited about how well the astrology fits and what a good example this is.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So this is the last point I wanted to share just that I was fascinated by because I thought it was a great example of a transit. This is the chart – so you can see the biwheel, right?
LS: Yes.
CB: So on July 26th, 1952, he was forced to abdicate his throne and he was exiled in a military coup. Look at where Mars is. Mars is in Scorpio; it’s transiting his 2nd house. And he has a day chart, so – or no, he has a night chart.
LS: Yeah, it’s a night chart.
CB: Nonetheless, Mars is transiting his 2nd house, and it’s like, that was the big thing is he then lost all of his wealth for the most part. He lost all of his possessions that then get auctioned off, and it all starts under this transit of Mars through the 2nd house.
LS: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And it’s of course backed up by Saturn and Neptune transiting the first in a night chart.
CB: Yeah, which was really hard for him personally, but then, you know, I had just mentioned how the biggest auction of his coin collection happened in 1954. Look where Saturn is in 1954; Saturn goes into his 2nd house, and basically, they start selling off all of his stuff over the —
LS: Wow.
CB: — two or three year period.
LS: Wow. Wait, was that when he was still alive or not alive?
CB: Yeah, he stayed alive for like —
LS: Okay.
CB: — a while after that. I mean, one of the things that was weird is that he had just had a son in 1952 right before the revolution, and they actually initially made his son king. So technically, his like, infant son became the last king of Egypt. But then after like, a year, they got rid of that and just made it a republic, basically, and the end of a long reign of monarchs ruling Egypt.
LS: Yeah, okay.
CB: Yeah. So anyway, that’s one of the most extravagant examples. Actually, I have many other extravagant examples because I started getting into the charts of like, billionaires and like, the richest people in the world. But that was one of the more interesting ones in terms of how, as we were saying, sometimes planets in the 2nd house can describe your orientation towards material things.
LS: For sure.
CB: Yeah. All right. Let’s see if there’s other…
LS: I like the – oh, go ahead.
CB: What were you gonna say?
LS: I like the Danny DeVito one as a Venus.
CB: Okay.
LS: We don’t really have Venus ones. Do you have the data for that one?
CB: Yeah. I have it up right here.
LS: Okay. So it’s not on the screen yet. Okay, there we go. So Danny DeVito – so I know it’s really interesting. So natal charts have to reflect your entire life, and then the timing sort of shows its unfoldment, right? So people often wonder what celebrities did, like, before they became super famous, and so Danny DeVito is, of course, a famous actor. But before he was a famous actor, one of the things he did for income was he worked in his sister’s beauty salon; she sent him to beauty school to cut clients’ hair in her salon. And so I just like that as a Venus in the 2nd house, you know, example of just like, beauty as a general signification. But one of the funnier things about it and more unique things about it was so her salon kind of catered – the clientele just ended up being elderly women for the most part. And he found himself in the circumstance where he would cut these very old ladies’ hair, and then some of them would pass away, and their families would know that he was like, their hairdresser, and so they would ask him to do the person’s hair like, for their funeral. And so Danny DeVito has Venus in the 2nd house, ruled by – it’s in Capricorn – ruled by Saturn in the 8th house. And it’s just like, again, another funny like, literal example where it’s tying together the signification of beauty as like, the form of income, but it’s connected with the topic of mortality, literally, with Saturn in the 8th house – both the 8th house governing the topic of mortality and Saturn as a general significator of old age and death. And I thought that was like, a fascinating one.
CB: Yeah, that’s incredible.
LS: Yeah. Oh, Saturn also rules the 2nd and 3rd, so you often see topics tied together of houses that are ruled by the same planet. And so it was literally his sister’s salon, and she was the one who pushed him to go to beauty school and I think maybe paid for it. And so Saturn is tying together the topics of the 2nd house of income and the 3rd house of siblings.
CB: Nice. Yeah, that’s something that we’re gonna see a lot of that you have to pay attention to both of the houses the planet rules and then it will often import those significations into the 2nd house or alternatively that you have to pay attention to both houses that the ruler of the 2nd rules as well as the house that it’s located in, and it will tie those together.
LS: Exactly.
CB: The astrology software that we use on The Astrology Podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, and you can get a 15% discount on the software by using the promo code ‘AP15’ when you purchase it through Alabe.com. For Mac users, we recommend the program Astro Gold for Mac OS, and you can also get a 15% discount when you use the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ at the website AstroGold.io.
All right, we’re back from break. So I wanna quickly go through a few more planet examples in order to round this out. So one of them I wanna talk about quickly is Bernie Madoff, who had Leo rising and Neptune in the 2nd house of money and possessions. And he was actually known for committing the largest Ponzi scheme in history, which is a form of financial fraud essentially, right?
LS: Exactly. It’s when you get new investors or new victims, as the case may be, to pay off what you owe to the older people.
CB: Right. So it’s like, you get people to invest in something, you take their money, and then you spend it. And then in order to pay back the person you just took the money from, you get somebody else to invest money and then you take their money and give it to the first person.
LS: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: So I thought that was interesting just in terms of the deceptive quality of Neptune. And for him, he used it obviously negatively there in his 2nd house. There’s other stuff going on in his chart as well, like he has retrograde Mercury ruling it square Pluto. But interestingly, you actually found another relevant chart for that, because you found another one, right?
LS: Yeah, the chart of Charles Ponzi himself – surprisingly there was a birth time for – who was, of course, who the Ponzi scheme, you know, famously was named after. He was like, the first guy – probably not the first guy in history to do this, but you know, he was the first guy who like, notably was really famous for doing this, and then you know, had this phenomenon named after him. Sort of infamous legacy.
CB: There it is. It was taking me a minute to find it, but here’s —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — the chart.
LS: So this one, it’s more about the ruler of the 2nd. So this one is a night chart. North Node in the 2nd, Jupiter’s ruling it in a night chart placed in the 7th house of like, the other party, the other person. It’s somewhat closely conjunct Pluto. It’s a Jupiter-Pluto conjunction, which we’ve talked about big money, but it’s night chart Jupiter, so that can be a little bit of an overabundance without foundation.
CB: Yeah, that’s interesting in terms of just that the Madoff had like, the ruler of the 2nd square Pluto, and here we find Charles Ponzi with the ruler of the 2nd conjunct Pluto, and just the manipulative component of Pluto sometimes.
LS: Yeah, and also just making things even bigger, which is a, you know, Jupiter-Pluto thing. So he’s also got Neptune and Saturn in the 7th as well, so he’s got a big 7th house stellium, you know, with the ruler of the 2nd house. And I just thought that was really funny and evocative in terms of the nature of the Ponzi scheme. You know, the phenomenon is just getting more and more people involved, and like, you just always need new clients, new clients/victims. And that’s just like, what is Jupiter-Pluto in the 7th but like, you know, lots and lots of people? So and of course Saturn there is not great, because it is a night chart. Neptune is there for the illusory aspect, and so forth. And interestingly, Pluto is squaring the Midheaven as well exactly.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So just Jupiter – ruler of the 2nd in the 7th – and like, in his instance taking money from other people.
LS: Right. And it became big money, but then of course, you know, it was illusory, and then he lost the entire thing.
CB: Right. For sure. All right, that’s pretty good. Other ones that —
LS: Oh, there was something about that one. It was actually in a second – surprisingly for how famous this is, it all happened within less than a year in 1919 and 1920. And when this all went down, when he started it he was 37, which is a 2nd house profection year, which I thought was perfect. So it was really highlighting that stellium that year.
CB: Nice. So yeah, it activated that Jupiter, which is in the 7th house. That sometimes, in terms of just doing research to take a step back as a meta thing, like, a good way to confirm sometimes when you think, you know, you’re looking at a natal chart signature or placement that means something to then look at the transits and the profections to see if that was activated at the time of the event that it occurred. And that can often act as a good confirmation that you are looking at the right signature in the chart.
LS: Exactly.
CB: Nice. All right. That’s good. Other examples… One of the ones that was interesting – this is one I just found that we had a birth time for recently because she died recently, but Dr. Ruth, who was like, a famous just like, a writer, basically, as well as like, talk show host and radio show host. She was born with Gemini rising with Mercury ruling the Ascendant placed in Cancer in the 2nd whole sign house conjunct Pluto and squaring Mars and Uranus. And the biggest point for this just in terms of a planet example is just that she was primarily like, a writer and a speaker, and that’s how she made her money. She also was known for being very frank or blunt and not shying away from saying things or getting into topics that were taboo, especially for the time, and I think that’s where those other planetary connections with Mercury are coming out with like, Pluto and willing to talk about taboo things. Mars square Mercury can be very blunt, sometimes too much at times, and squaring Uranus can bring a like, rebel sort of quality to the person’s communication style.
LS: Right. And it’s funny because of course now that’s not as taboo, but you know, this chart is showing the context of her life, and earlier on, it certainly was. And you’ll find that, you know, with any planets copresent, even if they’re not super close by conjunction.
CB: Yeah. It absolutely was taboo at the time, like especially in like, the 1980s or even ‘90s when she was talking about some of that stuff. It was seen as very like, risque.
LS: Exactly.
CB: Yeah. So that’s good. All right. Looking at my other examples. I wanted to mention – yeah, Liliane Bettencourt, who was the richest person – richest woman – in the world for a period of time, and she was born with Scorpio rising and Venus in the 2nd house. And she was the heir to the L’Oreal makeup and cosmetics empire, basically. And I thought that was a brilliant – that her income and stuff came through makeup and cosmetics, and she became the richest woman in the world at one point through that with Venus in the 2nd house.
LS: Right. And of course, you know, she also has both benefics connected since Jupiter is ruling, which reinforces like, the positivity of her 2nd house. But yeah, just the nature of Venus as a general significator for beauty.
CB: Yeah. So she was a French heiress, socialite, and businesswoman. She does have that mutual reception with the 12th house, and that at one point, you know, I just learned about her as I was doing this research, and so I had to research her biography, and I was really curious because she has that strong connection between Venus is in the 2nd house but it’s ruling the 7th house of relationships as well as the 12th house of loss, enemies, and self-undoing. And I was wondering how that 12th house played in, because there’s such a strong connection there. And what came up is in the last few decades of her life, she got in some kind of connection or relationship with this guy who was like, a photographer, and her daughter eventually had to contact the police and basically press police charges because she thought her mother was being taken advantage of by this man who ended up – she ended up gifting him millions and millions of dollars worth of gifts and stuff. I think it totaled to end up being like, a billion dollars or like, something crazy like that. And the courts eventually did decide that, yeah, it was estimated – so it says, she gave him huge amounts of money and gifts over the years, estimated to be worth one point three billion dollars. And these gifts included, among other things, a life insurance policy worth 253 million in 2003, another life insurance policy worth 262 million in 2006, 11 works of art in 2001 valued at 20 million dollars, including paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, and a bunch of others, a photograph by surrealist May Ray, and cash. So her daughter eventually filed a criminal complaint saying her mother was being exploited as a result of a psychological weakness by this guy, and her butler feared that Bettencourt was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and was being duped. At one point, she even attempted to make the guy her sole heir.
LS: Wow.
CB: But then eventually she separated with him and wrote him out of her will, and not long after that, she was put under a guardianship due to her declining mental health. So I thought that was incredible, because you know, some of those 12th house things really came alive there, including mental health, including potentially like, people that are working against you or sometimes self-undoing, like when you’re doing something yourself that’s undermining you but you don’t realize it, as well as Venus ruling the 7th house of relationships.
LS: For sure. Pulling together the topics of the 2nd house and the 7th into like, the self-undoing or loss. It’s interesting, also, that stellium in Libra and that, you know, a lot of that was really valuable artwork that was being given away, as well as like, the life insurance policy – Mercury ruling the 8th placed in that stellium in the 12th.
CB: Exactly. And I actually I’ve come across that a few times, and I’ll do that as the next example, but where sometimes the quality of the sign can describe like, what the person spends money on or what the expense is. And Libra keeps coming up as like, art and paintings especially. Madonna is a really great example of that that I’ll share next who has Jupiter in Libra in the 2nd house, and she spent more than – she has over a hundred million dollars worth of art and especially paintings that she says is like an indulgence of hers, spending money on art.
LS: Nice.
CB: Yeah. So I want to talk about that. We actually have the chart of the daughter that I was just talking about, which is really fascinating. Her name is Francoise Bettencourt Meyers; she’s actually currently the richest woman in the world. What was interesting, though, about this is she’s more kind of like, academic and kind of nerdy, and she’s written a few books. And it’s interesting because you see both of her benefics in the 3rd house, including the ruler of her 2nd. And she’s written a book on like, the genealogy of the Greek gods, which is really fascinating, as well as some bible commentaries because she’s interested in religion, with the ruler of the 9th in the 3rd house. But then we see the ruler of her Ascendant with Aries rising is that Mars in Cancer in the 4th house conjunct the Sun and the Moon and Uranus, and a lot of that is just descriptive of the fight she had, basically, with her mother in the later part of her life and especially in terms of getting her mother to relinquish control and who was struggling with these mental issues and being taken advantage of this guy. But they had very public disputes as a result of the attempts, I think, to fix that. She was born actually the day before a solar eclipse in Cancer, and it shows up very prominently in her chart.
LS: Yeah, wow. That’s really striking, especially with the Mars cazimi that’s like, you know, it’s a Mars-Sun tight conjunction ruler her Ascendant and then placed in the 4th. So that’s like, a huge piece of her life’s journey and life’s focus, and that those are like, fairly closely square Saturn. It’s a night chart. Even though, you know, it’s Saturn exalted so there’s mitigation there of course, but it’s still Saturn in a night chart, so yeah, that looks actually kind of rough.
CB: Yeah.
LS: It’s interesting sometimes how like, the chart can show something being rough that’s like, a focus of the person’s life even if you think outwardly like, oh, they look like they have it made, right? They have lots of money and so forth. But this is like, no, but the focus has been like, you know, a real challenge around family.
CB: Yeah. They had some very public disputes and spats and like, some very negative things were said in the public, especially of the mom towards her daughter and stuff.
LS: Interesting.
CB: Yeah. So I thought those were interesting, just in terms of as I was going through I was trying to find not just some of the richest men in the world, like, you know, Bill Gates or the other investor that we did, but also some of the richest women in the world, and finding that we actually had birth charts for some of them, which was fascinating.
LS: Yeah, for sure. We have MacKenzie Scott coming up; I don’t know where you put that, but.
CB: Yeah. That is an amazing one. Let’s talk about Madonna since I just mentioned her, and —
LS: Okay.
CB: — then let’s do MacKenzie Scott because that’s an amazing one.
LS: Yeah. Okay.
CB: You know, it’s hard – I meant to say just birth data collections for some reason tend to be skewed towards men, and we have more timed birth charts for men. This is starting to be rectified, but part of that is also part of due to the historical thing of women not being able to, you know, pursue careers or receive the same education as men or other things. And for whatever reason, a lot of our birth data is skewed towards men due to those historical realities; that’s finally starting to be rectified. But sometimes, you know, it can create aberrations when you’re doing studies and doing searches in databases and most of the charts that are coming up are men. But I’m trying to do my best to offset that here in this episode going forward.
LS: Right. It’s really tricky when you like, just think of people you find interesting personally and you really wanna use their charts and they’re women, but they don’t always have, you know, exact birth times. And so you just can’t do as much astrologically with the example.
CB: Yeah, exactly, because if I don’t have a birth time, I can’t do this sort of study in terms of looking at the rulers of the houses and then sometimes it’s like, what do you do? Do you use the chart of the best example that you have? And then sometimes you end up with more men than women. Or yeah, it’s tricky.
All right. So Madonna – we were gonna talk about Madonna. I —
LS: Yes.
CB: — became obsessed with Madonna; I spent like, a whole, I spent at least a day researching Madonna’s life, because the more and more I looked into her chart, the more blown away I was at how well the astrology works.
LS: Yes. This was another whole rabbit hole, and you can now do an entire separate episode on Madonna astrology.
CB: I very well could. I know there’s many astrologers that are always Madonna fans and would join me for that. But yeah, I became fascinated because I didn’t know a lot about her biography. I knew like, a little bit. I had avoided using her chart in the past because I thought there was more birth time issues, and I know she has public statements out there saying that her birth time is unknown, but it actually seems like there’s actually a pretty good source for this time for Virgo rising. So this is somewhat tentative, and most of these I’ve tried really hard to stick with AA birth times, which are birth times where we know it’s from a birth certificate or birth record, which additionally restricts, you know, which charts you can use. Because I try to stick to reliable ones. So this one’s a little bit more speculative than usual, but I think it works really well.
So here’s her chart. Madonna was born with Virgo rising, Mercury conjunct the Ascendant in Virgo – retrograde – and her 2nd house is Libra, and we find Jupiter conjunct the North Node in Libra in her 2nd house in a day chart. So just off the bat, we would expect financial things to do well and indeed she achieved phenomenal success throughout her career being referred to at different points as the “Queen of Pop,” and she’s the best selling female recording artist of all time and has sold over 300 million records worldwide. So there’s a little bit of a discrepancy here, because now we’ve moved over the past 10 years into the age of like, streaming. And I think, I don’t know – I think that affects, then, those records in terms of who’s the highest selling person of all time, because people stream stuff now. They don’t necessarily buy stuff. So I don’t exactly know how that worked out. But at least in terms of the lists, like if you go to Wikipedia or elsewhere for highest selling artists of all time, she is the number one woman at this point.
Additionally, she’s had many other financial successes and like, holds many records, including the first woman to accumulate one billion dollars in concert revenue, because she was doing just these amazing concert runs in especially the 1980s and ‘90s and 2000s so that she was essentially like, you know, nowadays we have Beyonce and Taylor Swift doing that and doing these amazing concert runs and making tons and tons of money. But it’s like, Madonna was Beyonce or Taylor Swift before all of that, like, in the 1980s and ‘90s.
LS: Right. Yeah, definitely.
CB: Yeah. So her net worth is actually estimated to be around 850 million dollars, making her one of the wealthiest musicians in the world, like, period. Not just because of her success in terms of music and concerts, but also in terms of being a very smart and savvy businesswoman in terms of her investments, in terms of other merchandising things that she’s gotten into and things like that.
So the thing that I thought was interesting for my purposes is that she owns, she’s said to own over a hundred million dollars worth of art, that she’s actually an art collector. And that’s actually I think that’s the estimate. She may actually own way more than that, but I think that’s the baseline, that she owns at least a hundred million dollars worth of art. It may actually be significantly higher than that. So she collects art. And I saw her say in an interview that paintings are a very big indulgences of hers. So Jupiter is in Libra, ruled by Venus, which is in Leo. And she said that early on, before she was super successful, that she kind of promised to herself or she said that once she made her first million dollars that she would buy art and paintings. So this was like, one of her life goals that she then manifested. And just to give you like, an idea of what that means,s he actually owns a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, which is one of the five paintings that Kahlo painted while she lived in Detroit, titled Self Portrait with a Monkey. She also owns Frida Kahlo’s painting My Birth. And I was blown away when I saw that, because those are actually two really famous paintings at this point that like, everyone’s seen, and she actually owns the originals.
LS: Yeah.
CB: She also owns a painting from Salvador Dali. She owns his The Veiled Heart, and just tons and tons of other stuff, so in terms of like, planet examples, I thought that was really interesting just in terms of Jupiter being there, being super successful financially, and then what one decides to spend their money on in some instances coming through the nature of the sign and its ruler.
LS: And for her, it’s both, you know, how she makes a living is through music, which is another Venus thing. You know, Venus ruling that Libra placement. And then also what she spends her money on as well. And it’s interesting, you know, Venus is the ruler of that Jupiter in the 2nd in a day chart, and it’s in the 12th, which you would expect to be a little more challenging, at least at certain times in life, but it’s nicely mitigated at least if this exact time is, you know, pretty correct because it’s almost within three degrees. Yeah, just a hair outside the sextile to the Midheaven, so it’s helping things out.
CB: Oh yeah, no, it’s mitigated by the Midheaven; I think that’s why it works so well. That’s what I wanted to get into next was Venus, because once I saw that and I first discovered, you know, how successful she was financially. She was the first woman – in 1990, she became the first woman entrepreneur to appear on a Forbes magazine cover on October 1st, 1990. Get this – transiting Venus moved into her 2nd house that day and sextiled her natal Venus.
LS: That’s funny.
CB: Yeah.
LS: That’s good.
CB: I thought that was pretty on the nose. So I was excited by that, but then I started asking the question, you know, like with Liliane Bettencourt with the previous example, the richest woman in the world, owned L’Oreal, but she had issues because the ruler of the 2nd was in the 12th house of enemies and self-undoing. I was like, well, you know, how has that come up for Madonna? Because the initial delineation I had in my head, just doing the basic analysis of the chart is that the ruler of the 2nd house of finances is in the 12th house of enemies or self-undoing, and that Venus also rules the 9th house of religion, philosophy, and foreign travel. And we find Mars there in a day chart as her most difficult planet is in the 9th house of religion, philosophy, and foreign travel, and it’s overcoming Venus through a superior sign-based square. So I was like, I didn’t really know how that worked. And so I started looking through her biography, and then I found this amazing instance of that, which is the Pepsi commercial fiasco of 1989. So are you familiar with this?
LS: Well, I am from talking with you, but —
CB: From me.
LS: — I remember the videos. I definitely remember the videos firsthand.
CB: Okay. Well, the key point is that she struck up a deal with Pepsi in 1989 in order to do some commercials. And they were gonna pay her five million dollars for just this two-minute commercial featuring her song that hadn’t been released yet, “Like a Prayer.” And they were also going to like, sponsor her tour. So it was like, this huge deal, and five million dollars in 1989 is equivalent to almost like, 12 million dollars at least in 2024. So this was super big money for the time. It was setting all sorts of records and stuff. And Pepsi put a lot into it. But what’s really funny is they didn’t watch the music video for the song before it was released, and so Pepsi in 1989 at the Grammy Awards on February 22nd, 1989, they aired like, a preview of their commercial – so not even the full commercial, just like a preview of the commercial to like, build hype up to this commercial with her that they were about the release. And then early the following month, they released the commercial, which is this cute little two-minute commercial where it’s like, going back and forth between like, a younger and older version of herself, and it’s like, a younger version of herself who’s like, kicking back and enjoying a Pepsi, and she’s watching an adult version of herself like, being all successful and being this huge rock star, basically. So it was a cute, like, uncontroversial commercial, and it has snippets of her song “Like a Prayer” in it before the single had actually come out. So it was actually unique, because it was the first time that music from an artist had been used like, in a commercial before the release of the actual song, right?
But then what happens is that the day after the commercial came out, she then dropped the actual music video for the song “Like a Prayer,” and the music video had like, burning crosses in it, and it had a bunch of religious imagery that a bunch of Christians thought was blasphemous, and it caused this huge like, firestorm of controversy amongst Christian groups, including going all the way up to the Pope John Paul II who said that it was blasphemous. And yeah, it was actually pretty wild, because it created a whole controversy. Chrisitan groups then announced that they were gonna boycott Pepsi, and Pepsi got so freaked out that they completely pulled the commercial, but they let her keep the five million dollars.
So I thought that was interesting because it perfectly ties together the themes here that we’re talking about where it’s like, you have Jupiter in the 2nd house – you know, five million dollars for a commercial – but then Venus is ruling the 2nd and it’s placed in the 12th of self-undoing, so it’s like, she does something that kind of like, undoes that deal in addition to Mars being in the 9th house, which ironically – like, if you read some of the ancient delineations from like, Firmicus Maternus and stuff and other ancient astrologers, they talk about Mars in the 9th house being blasphemous or people that do blasphemy since the 9th house is the place of religion and god and philosophy and things like that. But then it still works out for her because Venus is mitigated and it’s sextile the degree of the Midheaven, and she basically ends up getting to keep the five million dollars. And if anything, the controversy and the fact that she created all these enemies from these Chrisitan groups, it may have actually helped her sales during that time because the controversy in some ways helped like, promote the music video and the single and everything else. And the single ended up going on to be wildly successful.
LS: Right, the notoriety kind of fed into the positive things in her chart surrounding her livelihood, which is funny. Yeah, I remember that happening, and it was also a bigger deal back then. Like, the fact that it was like, you know, an outrage to Christian groups – this was more of a mainstream reaction back then compared to like, how it would be now. Like, her and Sinead O’Connor and some of those people who, you know, really pissed off an orthodox religion – you know, that was a bigger deal sort of widespread through society.
CB: Right.
LS: It wasn’t like, a marginal thing.
CB: Well, and some of it was, you know, bullshit, frankly, because it was like, racism tinged with it a little bit because part of it was like, in the video, she has a black possibly man who’s either a saint or is actually supposed to be Jesus. And then she’s like, vaguely, I don’t know, caressing him at one point, so it’s not clear if there’s like, sexual undertones. The song itself has some sexual innuendo in it, which is also interesting in terms of Mars being the planet of sex in the 9th house of religion and how she sometimes intertwines those themes in some of her work. So it’s like, some of the… Yeah. There were a lot of different things going on there in terms of why it was controversial and how much things have changed since then.
Actually, it’s funny that you mention that, so given – mentioning that, the last piece of this I wanted to mention is last year in 2023 at the very end of the Venus retrograde in Leo – remember her Venus is natally in Leo as the ruler of her 2nd house as well as the end of a Mercury retrograde – on September 12th, 2023, Madonna and Pepsi later aired the full commercial again at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards. And it was that Venus retrograde and Mercury retrograde, and she was literally like, revisiting the past and revisiting this past controversy. But this time, she was kind of like, coming out triumphant.
So let me show you the transits of that, because the transits are just too perfect.
LS: That’s funny. And I also wanna mention while you’re pulling that up the reception between Venus and Jupiter is also really helping, the fact that it’s doing well even though it’s in the 12th.
CB: Totally. They’re exchanging signs in a mutual reception, which creates a sort of…
LS: Oh, not a mutual reception —
CB: Or not mutual reception —
LS: Yeah, just reception.
CB: One-way reception, right?
LS: Yeah, but it’s reception with like, you know, the benefic of sect, so.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So these are the transits for September 12th, 2023 when they re-released the commercial. So Mercury is at eight degrees of Virgo, and it’s like, a day or two away from stationing direct at eight degrees of Virgo right on her Ascendant at eight degrees of Virgo.
LS: Nice.
CB: This is one of the reasons why I think this time is correct, and I don’t know why she’s saying her birth time’s unknown. This seems like an accurate birth time. I saw a couple of other instances of major events in her life lining up with that Ascendant degree. So think about it – it’s like, Mercury retrograde, you’re revisiting the past, but Mercury is stationing direct on the Ascendant.
LS: Right.
CB: Then look at Venus. This is September 12th, so this is just like, a week after Venus stationed direct at 12 degrees of Leo. So remember that last summer all the Venus retrograde stuff; this turns out to be another example of that. It’s stationing direct on her Uranus. And then finally, Jupiter is also stationing at that time or is close to stationing at that time, and it’s right at 15 degrees of Taurus, so it’s right on top of her Mars at 15 degrees of Taurus, which was the source of like, the issue to begin with, which was —
LS: Right.
CB: — you know, the perception at least that she was committing blasphemy.
LS: That’s funny. Yeah. That lines up perfectly.
CB: And listen to what she said, because it was very like, Venus retrograde stationing on her Uranus. So the new version of the ad that Pepsi released, it ends with a graphic that says, “Celebrating 40 years of disrupting the status quo.” And then on Twitter at the time when it was re-released, she said, “So began my illustrious career as an artist refusing to compromise my artistic integrity. Artists are here to disturb the peace.” Yeah, it’s that – you know, the Venus-Uranus, but also Mars like, in Taurus and like, her artistic integrity. I thought that was just brilliant.
LS: Yeah, and that Venus copresent with Uranus ruling the 2nd house of like, how she makes a living.
CB: Yeah, exactly.
LS: Yeah. Because she was even, you know, the religious controversies aside, you know, she was always like, kind of pushing the edge of what was considered acceptable back then. You know, even just through sexuality and stuff; her other videos were as well.
CB: Right. Yeah. The only other thing with her, just very briefly, is that she has that Jupiter is ruling the 7th house of marriage and relationships, and she’s been married a couple of times, but when she was divorced from the filmmaker Guy Ritchie in 2008, it was reported to be one of the most expensive celebrity divorces in history, with estimates suggesting a settlement between 76 and 92 million dollars. So that’s a signature that I kept seeing come up when the ruler of the 7th was in the 2nd or sometimes when the ruler of the 2nd was in the 7th that sometimes, especially when it was a more challenging placement, but sometimes even with not, that sometimes there would be like, a very costly divorce at some point with some of these different people. So Steven Spielberg is a really great example of that with the ruler of the 2nd with Saturn in a night chart ruling the 7th, and they had a prenuptial agreement but it was thrown out by the judge because it was written on a napkin for some bizarre reason.
LS: Okay.
CB: And then that was like, one of the most costly celebrity divorces in history. And then Johnny Carson was actually another one of those, who he had Venus – hold on, let me find it.
LS: Yeah, it comes up a lot, that connection between the 2nd and the 7th either way.
CB: Yeah, because it’s like, if they’re connected, it means that somehow the partner’s finances are tied in – or that the marriage and relationships are tied in with your finances or vice versa. And some of those times, especially when it’s poorly placed, it is a challenge that comes up, and one of the most obvious ways that that can manifest is through divorce and through splitting of the assets.
LS: Right. And sometimes it’s just like, a challenging transit coming about and then that’s like, a one time thing in the person’s life where they’re otherwise doing fine financially.
CB: Yeah. And I’ve commonly used that as an example, because somebody originally challenged me on it with Steven Spielberg, you know, because he has Cancer rising and he has Saturn conjunct Pluto in the 2nd house in a night chart, so it’s supposed to be his most difficult planet, but somebody was like, “See? The concept of sect doesn’t work because he’s a millionaire; he’s very rich. So obviously Saturn in the 2nd is not giving him problems.” But then I looked through his biography and I found this weird incident in the 1980s where he had this bizarre celebrity divorce and it ended up being the most costly celebrity divorce in history at that time. And Saturn is ruling the 7th house of relationships and the 8th house of other people’s money, or specifically like, the partner’s money.
LS: Right. Yeah. His money seems to be coming about maybe like, through the place of acquisition or something, right?
CB: Yeah.
LS: Showing more the positives.
CB: Yeah, I mean, there can be other – there’s like, multiple other things going on in his chart in terms of that, but sometimes that’s one of the important points in the research that sometimes these placements can show specific events that happen in the life at some point when they get activated. And sometimes those can be like, one time events, but they still – even though they only happen one time – they’re still really important. Other times it can be an event that happens like, two or three times in the life so that it’s not continuous, but the fact that the person has a similar experience archetypally in that area two or three times still becomes very distinctive, especially if it’s something that doesn’t happen to all people, for example.
LS: Right. That’s the tricky thing about the natal chart needing to represent your entire lifetime is that you also have to use timing on top of that to show kind of like, what’s happening at different times in your life.
CB: Yeah, exactly. Let me give the Carson example, even though it’s obviously a lot, but because it had a transit connection. So with Johnny Carson, he had Scorpio rising; he was a talk show host; he was like, very financially successful talk show host. Taurus is on the 7th house, the place of relationships. It’s in the 2nd house of finances; it also rules the 12th house. He was married four times, and his second and third divorces were very costly. So his divorce from his third wife was finalized in 1985, and it was said to be one of the most expensive celebrity divorces at the time, costing Carson an estimated 200 million dollars. So this is a nice comparison with Steven Spielberg and Liliane Bettencourt then, because it’s again the ruler of the 7th in the 2nd. So they split in 1983, but their divorce settlement wasn’t completed until 1985. And later that year, Saturn went into Sagittarius, which is his 2nd house. So I can’t find the date for the settlement, but I think that’s really, you know, notable that Saturn went into the 2nd house sort of timing that placement to some extent.
LS: For sure. Yeah. That makes sense.
CB: Yeah. Alright. I think that’s good for planet in houses examples, even though obviously we’ve gotten into rulers at this point. We’ve covered all the planet in house ones.
LS: Sounds good.
CB: All right. Unfortunately, I know it’s almost two hours. We have been going for an hour, but I think we should take another short break.
LS: Okay.
CB: If you’re really looking to deepen your studies of astrology, then check out my Hellenistic Astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology. It’s perfect for beginner and intermediate students because I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, including monthly webinars and Q&A sessions, and at the end of the course, if you complete the final test, you’ll receive a certificate of completion saying that you studied with me. You can find out more information at TheAstrologySchool.com.
All right, we’re back from break. So I wanna transition at this point. We’ve finished talking about planets in the 2nd house for the most part. Even though that wasn’t comprehensive, it gives you a taste of some of the different ways that can manifest. I wanna talk about now the ruler of the Ascendant in the 2nd house. So in some previous episodes, I’ve talked about how the ruler of the Ascendant can tell you something about the native’s overall life direction because the first house was called the helm in ancient astrology, like the steering wheel of a ship. And then the ruler of the Ascendant was kind of like the captain of the ship that would direct you to a specific destination. So sometimes when the ruler of the Ascendant is located in a specific house in the chart, the topics associated with that house can have some broader impact on the overall direction of the native’s life. And that comes up in this instance when the ruler of the Ascendant is in the 2nd house, there’s something about money and finances that can become more important in terms of the overall life direction than it is for other people.
LS: Right.
CB: So we’ve already seen that a little bit with Octavia Butler, right?
LS: Right. Yeah. She had the ruler of the Ascendant in the 2nd and the ruler of her 2nd in the first, and it really reinforced that finances were like, a primary thing she needed to focus on for better or worse.
CB: Right. And there was like, challenges that came with that with Saturn and Pluto there in the 2nd house. But ultimately, it was like, also something that then informed some of the themes in her books and her writings and stuff.
LS: Right. Yeah. And people can have that focus come about through a variety of means. You know, some people really just like, wanna make money, for instance, if the Ascendant ruler is in the 2nd. That’s not how it works for everything. You know, for other people, the Ascendant ruler in the 2nd will show that finances are like, a primary challenge in life and that’s like, a big piece of their sort of ongoing biography. Yeah. For other people, it shows that they’re actually focused on the topic of finances or money, like in whatever they do in the world. So there’s different ways that that can play out.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So okay. So this is like, the all-time example of this, like the best example. People have been using it for over a century now, but I rediscovered it recently because I had forgotten about it, but it’s still like, the most amazing example of that. So it turns out that Karl Marx, that we have a birth time for him, and that he was born with Aquarius rising and Saturn in Pisces in the 2nd whole sign house in a night chart. And basically, Karl Marx has the ruler of the Ascendant in the 2nd house. How freaking perfect is that?
LS: No, I love it! I refound that as well a couple years ago when we were getting ready to do the year ahead when Saturn was gonna go into Pisces, so I was looking for Saturn in Pisces people. And that was just, yeah, perfect, because like, his entire life’s work was about the, you know, finance and labor, basically.
CB: Yeah. That he analyzed the role of money and capital in society, and his primary concerns were social and economic equalities that he observed under capitalism. Preface – I’m not super familiar with the work of Karl Marx. Like, I know there’s many people that are and are much more well read in this area of philosophy and economics and everything else. So I’m gonna preface that, because like, I’m not gonna pretend that I’m an expert in this area, and I don’t have any strong opinions. But I just think it’s an amazing example because we know… His is a rare case where we have an example of somebody where we know that the topic of money and finances and possessions, that his life actually had a huge impact on the world, not just in his personal life where he was focused on that topic in his writings, but also that it ended up having an impact for many millions of people in different countries and on world history in terms of that topic as well.
LS: Right. For sure. And that was a night chart, right?
CB: Yeah, it’s a night chart, so that’s one of the things that’s interesting is he actually struggled financially throughout his life, and that was part of his motivation and sort of insight into what he ended up creating.
LS: Right. For sure. Yeah. And it’s kind of like, then the focus was like, on not just his own problems financially but like, the problems that can go wrong in society with financial arrangements.
CB: Yeah. So here, let me put the chart back up again. So first let’s look at the chart, because there’s other things going on with that Saturn. So it’s in the 2nd house, it’s copresent with Pluto, so we’re talking about a Saturn-Pluto conjunction in the 2nd house.
LS: Similar to Octavia Butler.
CB: Okay, that’s interesting. And also just it reminds me of like, you know, when covid hit, the Saturn-Pluto conjunction is like, a large part of what astrologers associate with that conjunction in 2020 and some of the wild economic things that it did at the time. So his Saturn’s at 15 degrees of Pisces; it’s squaring the Midheaven at 13 degrees of Sagittarius, which I think is interesting, in the 11th house. And the ruler then is Jupiter ruling both the 2nd house of finances and the 11th house of friends, alliances, and groups, and of course he famously – it was when he got together and had the support of Friedrich Engels he did some of his most important work together was with that as a sort of like, alliance.
LS: Right.
CB: So Saturn squaring the Midheaven, it’s also squaring Uranus at 19 degrees of Sagittarius, and it’s kind of widely squaring Neptune at 26 degrees of Sagittarius.
LS: Right. So speaking to like, you know, the desired change in structures of society around finances as well as kind of a collectiveness of Neptune being tied into Saturn in the 2nd.
CB: Yeah. And then one thing that I thought was interesting is the ruler of his 10th whole sign house, he has Scorpio on the 10th whole sign house, so it’s ruled by Mars – the 10th house of career and reputation. And Mars is in the 6th house, which is like, traditionally the place of work, those who are subservient to you or subordinate to you, but also more broadly you could say the 6th house is the place of labor.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So it’s like, the two most important planets in his chart are like, the ruler of the Ascendant, which is in the place of money and finances and possessions, and the ruler of the 10th, which is in the place of labor.
LS: Yeah, it’s perfect. And then those are trine each other, so it’s just like, this was the focus on his life’s work. Something that I really loved in addition to that in terms of literal astrology – I love literal astrology – is a big piece of his work was about the alienation of labor. And again, I am also not a Karl Marx expert, but I know that this was like, a big piece was the alienation of labor and the alienation from the means of production and things like that. And I just thought that was so good with he has, you know, the ruler of the 2nd in the 12th house, right? And so, you know, which certainly sounds like that. And then Mars is in Cancer, so it’s like, opposite the sign that it’s exalted in, right, so it’s in its fall. And just yeah, sometimes like, just the alienation being like in the farthest place it could be from the place it’s happiest in.
CB: Right.
LS: And then that’s in the 6th house of labor, which is like, perfect.
CB: Yeah, definitely. He was also born the day of a solar eclipse in Taurus, which is also relevant. Let me read you some of the notes I wrote that are relevant. So it says, “Marx lived much of his life in poverty,” so Saturn in the 2nd house in a night chart, “often relying on financial support from friends and family, most notably Friedrich Engels.” So Jupiter ruling both the 2nd house and the 11th house. “His focus was on his intellectual work, writing extensively on philosophy, economics, and politics. He dedicated his life to understanding and critiquing the capitalist system with the ultimate goal of advocating for a more equitable society. Therefore, while Marx’s work explored the complexities of money and its impact on society, his personal life was not driven by a desire for material wealth. He spent most of his adult life in London living in poverty and struggling to support his family,” and… Yeah, he wrote very widely, but his primary focus was on understanding and critiquing the capitalist economic system.
LS: Right. That’s a great chart.
CB: Yeah. So there’s a lot more we could go into and say about that, but in terms of that general point of like, when we say sometimes like, the ruler of the Ascendant can tell you that a person’s life in some instances can be more directed towards a specific topic compared to other people, you know, that is probably the most extreme example that we could come up with.
LS: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: All right. So let’s look at some other examples of ruler of the Ascendant in the 2nd house. Okay, so another —
LS: Yeah, that one. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, that would be a good one. Okay. So another one that I found when I was doing this research is MacKenzie Scott, who was the former wife of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. And what happened is like, a few years ago, MacKenzie Scott was in the news because when she divorced Jeff Bezos, when they got a divorce, she walked away with like, billions of dollars, which she then started donating, like, extremely rapidly. And her chart is fascinating because she was born with Aries rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Mars, which is located in Taurus in the 2nd whole sign house along with a whole stellium of other planets in Taurus, which includes Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Saturn, and then of course Mars, all in the 2nd house.
LS: Right. So this is someone who has just like, a huge, huge focus on finances.
CB: Yeah. So to put it in context, so they divorced in 2019. It was not like, one of the most costly celebrity divorces – literally the most costly celebrity divorce in history. And the settlement was estimated to be 38 billion dollars. So it’s like, remember what we were talking about some of those other like, movie stars, and it was like, you know, 20 million dollars was high for Carson at the time, or Madonna it was like, 50 to 75 or something like that – like, a hundred million maybe even tops. This is 38 billion dollars. So as a result of that, MacKenzie Scott came out of her divorce as the third wealthiest woman in the United States and the 47th wealthiest individual in the entire world.
So later in 2020, the stock price of Amazon went up, and for a period in 2020, she actually became the wealthiest woman in the world. But what’s interesting about it is that after the divorce, she became a major philanthropist, and she just started giving away tons and tons of money – like, billions and billions of dollars. She gave away so much money that she stopped being the richest woman in the world, and she pledged to give away at least half of her wealth.
LS: Yeah. It’s really impressive. And one of the things that I found interesting about the transits is that Uranus was like, at the end of Aries/beginning of Taurus, like, around the begining of all this happening. And so —
CB: Oh my god, that’s a great point.
LS: What we’ve seen is like, Uranus going over all of those many Taurus placements and that rapidly changing what she’s doing with her finances.
CB: That’s a great point.
LS: Yeah. And in some ways doing something that’s considered very, very unusual, right? Because even like, most very wealthy people don’t give away as much as like, she’s been giving away. Yeah, so it’s really activating all of that. Something else I love about this stellium is, you know, you see that this is a day chart, and she does have Mars ruling the Ascendant in the 2nd along with all those other placements. And normally when you see Mars in the 2nd, like in a lot of these other examples —
CB: Oh yeah.
LS: — like, spending a lot, right?
CB: That’s so funny. Yeah, because with like, Johnny Depp who I mentioned – I didn’t show his chart – earlier, he just spent so much so extravagantly that he’s depleted most of his wealth. But you’re right; she’s done the same thing, except like, she’s doing it mostly to like, charities.
LS: Right. And it’s like, Mars is like, spending a lot, but that Mars actually – I was looking at like, what it’s applying to, and you know, once it hits the sign boundary, it is kind of opposite Neptune. Right? It’s like, what, eight degrees applying. And Mars-Neptune is like, you know, efforts that are selfless sometimes. Like, sometimes people will do like, humanitarian stuff —
CB: Right.
LS: — with Mars-Neptune. Certainly there’s other manifestations as well, but that’s like, one primary one. So anyway, yeah, like, funny – she’s spending a lot, but in laudable ways.
CB: Yeah. Well, she – so I’m looking at some of the stuff. Just to give you an idea, in a July 2020 Medium post, Scott announced that she had donated one point seven billion dollars to 116 nonprofit organizations with a focus on racial equality, LGBTQ+ equality, democracy, and climate change. Then in December 2020, less than six months later, Scott stated that she had donated a further four point fifteen billion in the previous four month to 384 organizations with a focus on providing support to people affected by the economic impact of the covid-19 pandemic and addressing long term, systemic inequities. In 2020, her charitable giving totalled five point eight billion, one of the largest annual distributions by a private individual to working charities. There’s just so much stuff, like, it goes on and on and on. I mean, it’s funny because you mentioned Mars, but it’s like, Mars is also ruling the 8th house, which is like, the partner’s money. It’s like, she’s spending —
LS: Or joint finances.
CB: Yeah, joint finances. And that’s kind of an argument, because it’s like —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — she was there from the very beginning. She helped him to found the company of Amazon. She worked there very early on. So it’s, you know, there’s other instances where somebody comes in, like, later in a person’s life after they’ve made all their money and then there’s a divorce and then it gets murky, but this is really like, she was there from the very beginning.
LS: Right. Like, even the ruler of her 4th is in the 2nd, and applying to conjoin Saturn, the ruler of the 10th house of career. And like, they literally founded the company in their garage, like, in their new home’s garage. So yeah, it was definitely joint finances, yeah.
CB: Jupiter is also in the 8th house in her chart.
LS: Right, in a day chart. So that’s like, the best placement, but she also has like, Venus in its own sign in the 2nd and the Moon exalted in Taurus in the 2nd. So there’s really positive placements in both of the financial houses, and I found this quote from an announcement about her commitment to giving away lots of her money. She wrote, “We each come by the gifts we have to offer by an infinite series of influences and lucky breaks we can never fully understand.” And then she went on to say that one of hers was financial, and that’s why she was, you know, giving it away to other people.
CB: You know, that’s really funny because it’s, I wasn’t – I don’t have it in the chart. Maybe I should put it in the charts. But her Lot of Fortune’s in Taurus.
LS: I know! I know. And so it’s not only like, yet another marker for the 2nd house being really important to her life, but her Lot of Fortune then is literally in hard aspect to both benefics. So that’s what was actually really speaking to me about that quote.
CB: Right.
LS: She has both the benefics in the two financial houses, and they’re both aligned with the Lot of Fortune, denoting something about your circumstance additionally.
CB: Yeah. And I did a whole episode about the Lot of Fortune and how important that is, especially in terms of circumstances that are like, outside of your control or the element of fortune or chance or luck that plays in terms of where it falls in the birth chart.
LS: Right. Right. All of that is really just fascinating about her chart, and just one last note that I had about her Ascendant ruler, you know, saying that it’s applying to Neptune, which it is within eight degrees. And I think that is part of the selfless thing, but it’s also applying – oh no, that’s… Okay. No, nevermind. That’s all I wanted to say about that.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So that’s a really stunning example, and there’s also a whole element about transparency and stuff that came up. But I think that’s good for her. I think we can move on.
LS: Okay.
CB: So yeah – ruler of the Ascendant in the 2nd house, and then literally obviously giving away and donating so much through charities and philanthropy, that’s like, you can see why a major part of this person’s life then is surrounding financial issues. And obviously, maybe you could already say that since there’s like, a 2nd house stellium, so it’s less impressive because it’s like, also the ruler of the Ascendant is there. But nonetheless, still interesting.
LS: Well, it shows – because she’s obviously such an extreme example right now of, you know, financial things being a major focus of her life – and so I think it is actually like, a great example or illustration of both having a major stellium in the 2nd and her Ascendant ruler being there, and that’s why she’s such an extreme example of this.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Okay, so that was a good example. Let’s switch to like, because then once I do like, a good example of somebody doing good stuff with theirs, then I can switch to like, a not great example.
LS: Okay.
CB: So this is one I found where it turned out we had a birth time for this guy named Dan Bilzerian. And he was born with Libra rising and Venus in Scorpio conjunct Uranus in the 2nd whole sign house, and this is a guy that he became popular like, a decade ago where he was claiming that he had made millions and millions of dollars playing poker. Like, he was claiming that he had made I think 50 million dollars playing private poker games or something like that. And then he became famous on Instagram for having just like, millions and millions of followers because he would have these just ostentatious displays of his wealth as well as his lifestyle. And it was very, like, Venus conjunct Uranus in Scorpio where it was like, he was non-monogamous and he would have like, dozens of women around him all the time, and he claimed to be like, sleeping with like, 10 different women at the same time over multiple year periods while also living in these huge mansions and doing all of this like, crazy, extravagant stuff. And he’s one of the instances where I felt like lifestyle really did become relevant, and it reminded me a lot of the chart of the Egyptian king who – it wasn’t the ruler of the Ascendant in his instance, but it was like, Libra rising, Scorpio placements in the 2nd house, and just you could tell there was this similar orientation towards like, material things as like, a major focus of the life.
LS: Right. Yeah. Definitely Ascendant ruler in the 2nd as a major focus, and then also funny that Jupiter in a night chart is on the Ascendant, because that’s sometimes the sort of shadow side of Jupiter then, which is just like, you know, greed, or just like, taking things too far.
CB: Yeah. With Jupiter on the Ascendant and also like, Saturn’s there in a night chart. Well, what’s interesting about that is like, there’s a further… So gambling is a major thing with the 4th house. So he —
LS: You mean the 5th?
CB: Sorry, the 2nd house. At least for him. Like, the focus on poker, basically, was his main thing, and he continues to play poker. But what’s interesting as a complication about his example is a lot of people speculate, because he just shows up with like, 50 million dollars out of nowhere and he claims that he made it playing poker privately against like, really rich people, but a lot of people have looked at his games and asked, like, whether he’s good enough to have actually won that much. And when people have looked into his background, like, some of the speculation if you go to his Wikipedia page is his father actually it turns out was like, a corporate – what do they call it? – like, raider in the 1980s who would go in and do like, hostile takeovers of companies and make just like, millions and millions of dollars through that. But then he got in trouble, basically, and the FBI raided his home, and he was arrested and went to prison for more than a year and then also received some really harsh financial penalties where the government tried to get a bunch of the money back that he had made, because he had made something like, at least 60 millions dollars supposedly. But then the government was never able to recoup all of the money. And then all of a sudden a few decades later, his son comes out of nowhere with like, millions of dollars that he says that he got from playing poker. And so it’s been this like, open question that people have wondered if a lot of his initial wealth at least came from his father. And I thought that was really fascinating in this instance, because if you look at Venus, we have the ruler of the Ascendant as Venus in the 2nd house in a night chart, so the most positive planet in the chart’s the 2nd house, so financial success. But it’s in Scorpio and it’s ruled by Mars, which is over in Capricorn conjunct the IC in the 4th house of the family, the parents, and the father. So it’s like —
LS: Right, and then there’s reception between Venus and Mars, so.
CB: Right. They’re sextile each other closely while Venus is in… So it’s like, there’s this really interesting connection between finances and the father in the chart itself. And it’s interesting that at the very least that people speculate about whether some of his initial wealth came from his father.
LS: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it’s funny when you can see those things show up astrologically and like, well, there’s some potential credence here.
CB: Yeah. At the very least, you can see why the rumor would start there. But, you know, who knows? So that was interesting and also just the focus on the material realm, and it’s in Scorpio, so it’s possible that some of the things with like, sex and other things come up there. But there’s also some other elements there between him and the Egyptian king in terms of like, ensconcing one in the material realm or going to the fullest extent in terms of material pleasures that I think is relevant somehow. And I’m not fully there in terms of articulating there, but I think if one was to try to, these would be two examples up there to give you like, a pointer towards, you know, what that’s about.
LS: Right. And it’s interesting that both of them have a planet that’s not happy in Scorpio in the 2nd house. Like, maybe that’s a part of that commonality.
CB: Yeah. Well, and one of the things that was actually interesting about him is I saw some interviews with him when I was trying to research this and understand the placement where he said that he’d gone to the utmost extreme and height of essentially like, physical pleasures and stuff. But then he ultimately found that it wasn’t fulfilling and that it didn’t actually like, fulfill him in the way that he thought he would, even if he had fun or enjoyed it or what have you but that it wasn’t something that he could maintain or wasn’t as worth it in terms of staying there.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So I don’t know where he’s at with that now, but I just thought it was really interesting because the keyword for him seemed to be “hedonism,” you know, which centered on like, glorifying pleasure-seeking and indulgence and the pursuit of gratification, essentially.
LS: Totally. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that is that example. There’s more there, but we will skip it so we can move on for now.
LS: Can I talk about Jim Bakker?
CB: Yeah, that would be a good one.
LS: Great. This is one I found. Jim Bakker was a televangelist – him and Tammy Faye Bakker – back in the ‘80s, ‘90s-ish. Yeah. Most famous back then. So Jim Bakker had Pisces rising, Jupiter ruling the Ascendant placed in the 2nd in Aries in a day chart. So that alone would say there’s a particular focus on making a living, raising money, and especially through self-initiating actions with a placement in Aries, and Jupiter in a day chart saying that’s probably gonna be relatively successful for him, right? And indeed it was. They were famous televangelists and raised tons of money for a while. But you can see this Mars. So Mars is ruling that Jupiter. Mars is ruling both the 2nd house of income and the 9th house of religion, and it’s placed in the first house of self. And so that – right? – those two topics become very primary to him. He’s got the ruler of the first in the second and the second in first, but Mars is also ruling the 9th, tying in the topic of religion. And that Mars in a day chart is the more problematic Mars, right? And it’s applying very closely to conjoin that Jupiter. So there’s both like, positive abundance indicated as well as like, some major problem at some point. And so his story was basically that they did raise lots of money for a while and live well on it, and then he was convicted of financial fraud at some point. And so there’s the Mars coming in, and so it’s another one of those examples where – excuse me – you see, you know, both of those planets coming into play at some point in life, even though it’s like, extremes of positive and extremes of negative.
CB: Right.
LS: And kind of like, that Mars again of like, acquisitiveness, right? I mean, Mars and Jupiter can do that in different ways, but if it were just the Jupiter in a day chart, I might expect this to play out differently in terms of just more of the positive. But it was like, the Mars problems coming into play as well. And if I can find that in our outline, there was some timing thing. Here we go. So he was indicted October 4th, 1988, on mail and wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud the public. And Mars was retrograde and it was about to conjoin his Ascendant ruler, Jupiter, in the 2nd house during a first house profection year in which that Jupiter would have been the lord of the year. And so things happening with, to, or from Jupiter would have been more important that year, and that retrograde Mars by transit was about to conjoin that when he was indicted. It’s really perfect.
CB: Wow.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Those retrogrades are super, super important. I’ll give another example of that in a minute, but especially, you know, if it’s a negative one it can be a negative event, like taking money away or having a financial challenge.
LS: Right. And only one other side note I wanted to mention just because it was funny, and I like astrology that amuses me – so he was originally a prosperity theology preacher, which you can imagine, right, with Jupiter ruling the Ascendant placed in the 2nd house. It’s like, you know, if you’re faithful and believe, you know, financial prosperity will come to you. But then at some point later, like after these things happened, he turned into like, sort of an armageddon like, apocalyptic theology and became sort of like, a prepper, and was like, selling prepper type things. And that’s really funny to me, because the Jupiter is obviously like, the prosperity theology piece, but then Mars is ruling the 9th house in a day chart, and so at some point that kicked in and it was like, the fire and brimstone religious orientation took over, which is just —
CB: Right.
LS: — literal.
CB: Yeah. That’s very literal.
LS: Yeah.
CB: I mean, that’s the thing we found with a lot of these is a lot of them are just like, surprisingly literal.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right —
LS: So I like that one.
CB: That’s good. That’s a good one. All right. Where are we? Let me switch back. Maybe I should do a positive – I need a positive one first to set up some of the other ones. Oh yeah, no, you just mentioned a retrograde in the 2nd house and a bad one; I have a positive one that’ll actually be a positive counterexample, which I used last summer and I was really impressed by, which is Margot Robbie when Barbie came out. You know, Barbie came out as this huge sensation last summer, the summer of 2023, and Barbie was released right as Venus was stationing retrograde in Leo, and then it just went on to do this huge run where it made like, one point five billion dollars or something like that worldwide, becoming I think the most successful movie last year. And we actually have a timed chart for Margot Robbie, and she has Cancer rising with Jupiter, the Sun, and Mercury in Cancer in the first whole sign house. And then her second house is Leo, and that was what was really curious is like, you know, she was the star of the movie and her reputation was obviously very good at that time, so there’s this question of like, well, why is it in her 2nd house? Why is the Venus retrograde there when it’s obviously – because it turned out that the Venus retrograde in Leo didn’t just coincide with the release of the movie, but when I took it back, like, Barbie’s history kept coinciding with Venus retrogrades in Leo going back to the first summer that it was released during a Venus retrograde in Leo. But it was in her 2nd house, and then I came to understand why that was, and it was because she wasn’t just the star of the movie, but she was actually the one that came up with the idea to do the movie, and she was the one that pitched it in the first place to the production studios.
She was the one that pitched it to the production studios because she had started a production company. So when she pitched it to the studios, she actually said, the flat-out said during her pitch meetings that she believed a Barbie movie could bring in one billion dollars at the worldwide box office, which turned out to be true. And it ended up being the biggest debut ever for a film directed by a woman. But what’s interesting about this is, you know, it was in her 2nd house, so the reason why that’s important is because since she was the production company that produced the movie, it meant a lot of that income then came back to her. So this was also not just her starring in it and her reputation going up, but it was also a huge financial windfall for her because of how financially successful it was. And that’s why the Venus retrograde in Leo was sort of activating her 2nd house at that time.
LS: Yeah, that’s a great example of that.
CB: Yeah. So that’s a positive just sort of counterbalance thing, a positive example of that. Jupiter was also transiting her Midheaven at the time, so that was the other positive like, reputation piece. But yeah, Venus retrograde in Leo in the 2nd house, and the 2nd house transits positive ones sometimes indicating huge windfalls or indicating things being hugely financially successful that you’ve worked on or set out to do.
LS: Right. For sure.
CB: Yeah. All right. So let me get back to my ruler of the Ascendant ones. Switch back to other guys. So this one was funny to me. So this is the birth chart of Dana White, who is like, one of the people basically that created the UFC, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or he’s the one that led it to what it is today where like, mixed martial arts and all of that is so popular. Basically part of his story – he has Scorpio rising and Mars ruling the Ascendant and it’s placed in Sagittarius in the 2nd house. It has some interesting configurations to a bunch of different planets in his chart, but the main thing is just Mars in the 2nd house, and he’s made millions and millions of dollars off of being like, the president of this fighting company, literally.
LS: Yeah, that’s really funny. Again, literal astrology is fun. And you know, it’s funny too – obviously he has mitigations too to that Mars, because this is a day chart, so we would expect it to be, you know, sometimes problematic, and maybe it has been at certain points or something in his life. But, you know, he has that nice Jupiter sextile overcoming Mars and such. But it’s also funny in that, you know, I don’t think this always works, but sometimes in a kind of remediation sense, like, when someone does something very appropriate to the nature of that placement, I think it kind of takes that energy a bit instead of it being like, solely problematic for his finances. It’s like, no, he’s profiting, you know, through the topic of fighting, which is like, more of a day chart Mars.
CB: Right. Exactly. Well, and it’s like, he’s famously gotten in like, fights with different people. You know, the ruler of the 2nd is Jupiter, which is in the 12th, which is kind of interesting because he’s had a lot of very public fights with sometimes like, fighters who are, you know, connected with him, sometimes due to issues over pay or them complaining about not being paid enough, like adequate wages or different things like that. So it’s interesting how that comes into play. And yeah, but there’s actually a lot of things we could go into, but he’s worth 500 million dollars, supposedly, in 2019. So it’s probably more now, although he denies being a billionaire. But his life has been significantly directed towards making money through fighting and through being a fighting promoter and promoting and managing the business side of combat sports.
LS: Right. Yeah. Make sense.
CB: Pretty literal. Pretty straightforward.
LS: Pretty literal.
CB: Okay. I wanna do just two more examples of the ruler of the Ascendant, and then we’ll move on to the ruler of the houses.
All right. First example – Arnold Palmer, who was a famous golfer starting I think in like, the 1950s in the middle of the 20th century. And he had Virgo rising with Mercury in Libra in the 2nd whole sign house conjunct Mars. It’s probably a night chart, because the Sun is just a little bit below the horizon. Usually if it’s like, six degrees, that sometimes can be like, a day chart like in the case of George Lucas, but this guy’s on the border. I actually don’t have a strong opinion about whether it’s day or night; it doesn’t necessarily matter. But he was a famous golfer, and he was the first golfer to reach one million dollars in career earnings. So I thought that was amazing. So Wikipedia says he was an American professional golfer, is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most charismatic players in the sport’s history. His influence on golf is immeasurable; he transformed the sport into a mainstream spectacle, attracting millions of fans with his thrilling play and magnetic personality. But what’s interesting – achieving that milestone of one million dollars in career earnings in 1968 was a significant event in golf history for several reasons. One, the financial impact on the sport, because it highlighted the growing financial potential of professional golf. Before Palmer, the sport was not known for generating substantial wealth for players, but his success demonstrated that golfers could achieve significant financial rewards through prize money and through endorsements, inspiring many others to pursue a professional golf career in that sport. So it’s like, this guy is the reason why people later, like Tiger Woods, could have these huge endorsements with like, you know, Nike and different companies like that is because this guy was kind of like, a trailblazer.
So he attracted a very large fan base through his popularity, which helped to boost the television ratings and the attendance at golf tournaments. And he sort of became the symbol for a new era, because by reaching the one million dollar mark, he solidified his status as one of the game’s all-time greats and marked a beginning of a new professional era for golf and inspired future generations. So I just thought that was a really striking example. I’m not like, a huge golf guy, but it’s fascinating seeing these different areas and seeing somebody, you know, where hitting that financial goal or having that as a turning point in his sport that set a new era for people and seeing his ruler of the Ascendant there was so striking. And then of course, he was also very smart with marketing, and there was that drink that was named after him – the Arnold Palmer – which is like, a mix of like, half tea and half lemonade. And he actually ended up licensing his name out to the Arizona Tea Company in like, 2001, so now they actually produce that drink and it’s sold in stores all over America with his name on it. So he was very savvy as like, a licenser as well.
LS: That’s funny too as like, a literal manifestation of like, you yourself being part of a product, right? Like, with the Ascendant ruler in the 2nd.
CB: Oh my god, I just thought of something I didn’t think of until you said that. It’s in Libra, and the drink —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — is literally half iced tea and half lemonade. It’s half and half!
LS: That’s true! That’s a good point.
CB: That’s the alternative name for it is half and half, and Libra is the scales —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — and it’s commonly joked about that sometimes heavy Libra placements have a hard time deciding between two things.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Half and half – that’s amazing.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Oh my god. And that’s the thing he’s known for. I mean, most people today —
LS: Right?
CB: — if you’re not a golfer, the reason you’ve heard his name is because of the drink, so this is the —
LS: Right.
CB: — so this is the chart for the guy, and he’s named after a drink or the drink’s named after him, and he has the ruler of the Ascendant in the 2nd house, the place of material things, and apparently —
LS: Right?
CB: — in his instance, drinks.
LS: Right. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. I don’t know if Neptune in the first house is relevant as well, but anyways.
LS: Oh yeah, I’m sure. Liquids.
CB: Good times. Liquids. All right. We’re finding stuff. See? We just find stuff like, as you – sometimes you – that’s an experience I had that was reignited with this is sometimes you pull up a celebrity chart if you don’t know anything about them. You look at the chart, you see the placements, but you’re like, how does that work out? Like, I don’t know how that combination works out. And then you start reading their biography, and it starts coming alive, and you start realizing how their placements have worked out in very literal ways. And then it just becomes this amazing thing. I kept calling you every day, or we kept talking excitedly every time I’d find a new chart about just how it’s like, a dopamine rush an astrologer gets when they find a new chart and —
LS: Right?
CB: — they see how well it matches the life.
LS: If anyone wants to come up with a new catchphrase for that, yeah, feel free to brainstorm here.
CB: Yeah, we were trying to come up with a name for that, like a hashtag like “astrologer good” was the old hashtag for something else. But there was another we were trying to come up with a name for, right? Which is like, when you revisit an old chart that you’ve used before, and you rediscover something new about it that you didn’t understand previously. I had a few charts in this collection that were like that.
LS: Totally. Yeah. So we need some good new hashtags for these phenomena.
CB: Yeah. Let us know in the comments below on YouTube.
All right, so Arnold Palmer… The other one I have, I guess I’ll end with this one, and I’ll just mention others without showing charts and passing their names. But one last one I wanted to mention is the astrologer Noel Tyl.
So he was supposed to be born with Cancer rising, and the Moon is the ruler of the Ascendant in the 2nd house in Leo. And the degree of the IC is at seven degrees of Virgo, so in like, Placidus and quadrant houses his Moon’s in the 3rd house. But in whole sign houses, it’s in the 2nd house. And I found this old interview with him where he was describing in like, the 1970s or something when he first discovered astrology, he was sitting on his couch or something – he was watching TV one day. And an astrologer come on, and they were trying to explain it, and at some point after they were done, he turned to his wife and he exclaimed – he said, “I’m gonna write a book” – he said something like, “These people aren’t explaining this very well. But I’m gonna write a book about it that explains it better, and I’m gonna make a million dollars.” And I always thought it was so funny that on the one hand, with the ruler of the Ascendant in the 2nd house, that part of his motivation was like, making a million dollars was his stated thing, which I think he probably did end up doing because he ended up writing a ton of books and selling a lot of courses, and he was a very savvy business person for an astrologer, especially at that time period in the 1990s and 2000s. But then, you know, of course from his perspective, the ruler of the Ascendant was in the 3rd house according to quadrant houses. And he did write a bunch of books, so I’ve not worked this out. But it’s just something I’m interested in exploring. And I know different astrologers are also interested in exploring in terms of what the possible reconciliation is between whole sign houses and quadrant houses and if you can use different house systems at the same time, and they either have overlapping meanings or show you different things. And I don’t have that worked out yet, and I haven’t seen anybody that fully has it worked out completely. I’m primarily – obviously, we’re using whole sign houses for this, and I think that is the foundation of the houses, and it’s the most important like, baseline to start from. But occasionally, you do see little hints like that where there could be points of reconciliation, you know, potentially, and that could be the way forward.
LS: For sure. Right. Well, and part of – also, I mean, as an aside, also how he made his living was like, he had a gigantic presence. I mean, he was not just literally physically very tall – he was like, a very tall man – he had a booming voice. He was theatrical. He used to be an opera singer before he was an astrologer, if I’m remembering that right, I think. And —
CB: Right.
LS: — you know, it’s just very like the Ascendant ruler in Leo. It’s like, part of – he did write a bunch of books, but also how he made his living was being very like, not like a performer but very out there in front of people, you know? Yeah.
CB: Right. Yeah. For sure. Yeah, and also teaching astrologers how to like, do astrology. Yeah. I don’t know; there’s something there, but anyway. That I think will be the… The other like, ruler of the Ascendant in the 2nd was like, Kris Jenner, David Beckham – who is like, a soccer example to go with Arnold Palmer, golf example – Doja Cat, and yeah, that’s it for ruler of the Ascendant in the 2nd house.
LS: Okay. Good collection.
CB: Thank you. All right. Let’s take a little break.
LS: Okay.
CB: If you’re a fan of the podcast and you’d like to support the production of future episodes, then consider becoming a patron through my page on Patreon.com. In exchange, you’ll get access to a bunch of benefits such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend live recordings, access to the monthly electional astrology podcast, access to another exclusive podcast called The Secret Astrology Podcast that’s only available to patrons, or even get your name listed in the credits at the end of each episode.. For more information, visit Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.
All right, we’re back from break. Let’s start the final section of this where we’re gonna talk about the ruler of the 2nd house in different houses, and the rulers of other houses in the 2nd house. We’re gonna go through this section more quickly because both of us are running out of energy and steam, and we’ll see if we can get through all 12 houses sequentially. I may jump around a little bit. Let’s see how it goes.
LS: Okay.
CB: So one proviso – these are not comprehensive. These are just some of the meanings associated with those houses in order to give you a sense of different ways that it can manifest, but it’s not gonna be comprehensive because there’s gonna be different positive or negative manifestations of each house that obviously due to time we’re gonna have to leave out.
LS: Yes. For sure.
CB: All right, cool. So let’s start with the first one, who is the famous writer, English author Jane Austen, who wrote Pride and Prejudice and a number of other famous works. This one’s interesting; I almost used this for just a placement in the house, because she has Virgo rising. Moon and Saturn in Libra in the 2nd house in a night chart, and then the ruler of the 2nd house is Venus in the 3rd house of communication. And she did make some money from her writings, but still struggled financially most of her life and had to live with her family, basically, with Saturn and the Moon there in the 2nd house.
LS: Right. And then the 2nd house ruler being Venus, which is the benefic of sect, in the 3rd house of writing and books and so forth.
CB: Yeah, exactly.
LS: Source of her income.
CB: So we’ll see that a lot, especially writing, coming up in communication with the 3rd house with different examples. But so she was considered one of the greatest English novelists. But it’s interesting in terms of the themes with Saturn in Libra in the 2nd by night. According to Wikipedia, her plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage, the pursuit of favorable social standing and economic security. Elsewhere it says, “her heroines navigate a world where their choices are limited and their futures often hinge on securing a suitable match. While her stories may involve romance, they also offer sharp critique of the patriarchal system that restricted women’s opportunities and forced them to rely on marriage for their livelihood.” Isn’t that amazing for like, Saturn-Moon in the 2nd house ruled by Venus?
LS: Absolutely. Right. And you know, that was surely part of many, you know, maybe most women’s experiences at the time, but this – just because she was an author – you know, became part of like, the livelihood that she made. Like, those themes went into the books. Things about social status in particular and marriage. And it’s also interesting that she has, with the Moon in the 2nd and the ruler is Venus, and those are two planets that are, you know, widely associated with women in general by signification. And you know, her protagonists are largely women, and that’s not actually a given for all female authors, right? And so that just as a basic thing as part of her, you know, means of livelihood also kind of intrigued me, as well as Venus being in Scorpio, a sign that is, you know, opposite its rulership. And one of the things about some of her characters are like, women trying to move beyond the constraints of traditional female expectations for the time. Even if it wasn’t like, wouldn’t be seen as radical now, it was moreso, you know, some of those things, those attributes then. And I feel like that’s a perfect Venus in Scorpio kind of thing of like, opposite the rulership of Venus and it being something about, you know, doing something different than the status quo in terms of expectations that were gendered at the time.
CB: Yeah, for sure. She also has a close Mars-Pluto conjunction that’s like, squaring that Saturn. You can feel some of the tensions. But she lived in the 1700s and early 1800s, like the early 19th century. She died in 1817. But she did make money through her writing, but not substantial amount by today’s standards. While it was a decent sum for a woman in her lifetime, it was not enough to live on independently, so she relied on financial support of her family for most of her life. And a lot of her fame and fortune grew after her death. So it’s an example I may have to come back to when I do that episode on posthumous astrology, which is like, how people’s charts keep working after they die.
LS: You know there are like, Jane Austen literary societies, and she has the ruler of the 11th in the 2nd?
CB: Oh wow. That’s amazing.
LS: I just came across this.
CB: Yeah. That’s amazing. All right, cool. So we could sit with that one for a while, but let’s move on for the sake of getting through everything.
All right, another one I wanted to mention really quickly is Linda Goodman. So there’s the chart. Can you see the chart?
LS: Now I can, yeah.
CB: Okay. So Linda Goodman has Mercury – I was gonna actually originally just use this as a planet example, but it was just that Linda Goodman has Mercury in the 2nd house in her chart. It’s actually stationary. It stationed only a day before, stationing retrograde. And Linda Goodman, she did writing and communication to like, earn a living for her life. She worked in radio, then writing for newspapers, then even a speechwriter. But then eventually, she got into astrology and she published a book titled Sun Signs, which became a New York Times bestseller. And her 2nd astrology book, which was titled Love Signs set an industry record with a record two point three million dollars being paid for the paperback rights of the book, and I thought that was really amazing because as an astrologer she wrote one of – in modern times – one of the most highest selling astrology books of all time, but also was paid like, way, way more than any astrologers usually get paid for her book.
LS: Oh, right. Totally.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that is that example. Moving on.
Another one – this is just in passing, but just to drive home the previous point – this is Dave Roell; he was an astrologer that passed away almost a decade ago now. But he was a bookseller. He had a very famous publishing house which I’ve often – you know, he had Gemini rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Mercury in Aquarius conjunct the Midheaven. So you get these 9th house and 10th house themes of being an astrologer and a publisher, but also with Cancer on the 2nd house and the ruler is the Moon, which is in Leo in the 3rd whole sign house, and he made money from books, basically – from selling books.
LS: Yep. Pretty literal.
CB: Selling people’s writings. Okay. So moving on.
One last one is Ronan Farrow, who has Aquarius rising, Pisces on the 2nd house, and the ruler is Jupiter in the 3rd house in Aries. And he’s a journalist, and he’s known for some of his writings, basically, especially his investigative journalist pieces.
LS: Yeah. I love that, because it’s kind of like, the intrepid writing and the investigation with Mercury ruling that in Scorpio in the 10th conjunct Pluto. Like, that’s the type of writing he has made his living from.
CB: Right. I mean, some of his investigative pieces like, kind of blew open things during the MeToo movement and just some abuses that were occurring in Hollywood.
LS: Right, exactly.
CB: Yeah.
LS: And like, he’s the one – like, it being in Aries is like, he’s just kind of going off doing this on his own, you know?
CB: Right. Yeah, exactly.
LS: It’s this very independent thing.
CB: Definitely. All right, moving onto the 4th house. Marizio Gucci – probably mispronouncing, but – I’ve used him commonly as a example because I love the mutual reception. He has Cancer rising, night chart, with Venus conjunct Pluto in the 2nd whole sign house. And then the ruler of the 2nd house is the Sun, which is in Libra in the 4th house of parents. And then the 4th house is Libra, so it’s ruled by Venus, which is in the 2nd house of finances. He was the grandson of the Gucci fashion empire, and in the 1980s when his father died, he inherited essentially most of the company, which was worth just millions and millions and millions of dollars. So I always thought that was a really great example, just showing the tight connection between the 2nd house and the 4th house and inheriting a bunch of money from a fashion empire from your family, which is very like, Libra and Leo coded.
LS: Totally. Yeah, usually when the 2nd house is tied up with either the 4th or the 8th and there’s like, inherited money. Yeah.
CB: Exactly, and not to make any explicit comments, but to come back to another chart again that we talked about earlier, here’s —
LS: Right?
CB: — Dan Bilzerian’s chart where we had that question where he had Scorpio on the 2nd house and the ruler is Mars, which is in the 4th house, and just a question – it’s like, did he inherit any money from his father? Or did it —
LS: I’m sure he did.
CB: Well, we don’t know, because we don’t wanna get sued —
LS: Okay.
CB: — and so you are joking when you say that, I think.
LS: Yes.
CB: Okay. So but just that that’s been discussed as a possibility. You know, we could also say maybe his father’s attitude towards corporate, I don’t know, focus on money and stuff could have influenced him or something like that. Sometimes it’s like, what do we inherit from our parents in terms of their attitudes towards money? And it could be that that’s what we’re seeing here. Who’s to say?
LS: Yeah, well, to be fair, like, sometimes it’s literally like, you’re going into the type of field and making a living from like, what your parents did.
CB: Sure. Yeah. Which was certainly like, with the Gucci example was definitely what happened there. Other examples. This is a good one that I love, which is – I only learned about in the past few years. This is Princess Mako of Japan, and she has this nice Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Virgo in the 2nd house, and she was literally like, a princess in the royal family line of Japan, and so therefore very well-off financially. But she has Saturn in the 7th house in a night chart in Aquarius, and then she fell in love with and then wanted to marry a commoner who was not royalty. But in order to do it, she had to essentially give up her family titles and give up the large like, monthly stipend that she would get financially that was coming from her royal family line, basically. And I thought it was interesting that she has Virgo on the 2nd house with Venus and Jupiter there, but then Mercury is the ruler and it’s placed in Scorpio in the 4th house conjunct Mars and Pluto, and sort of widely squaring that Saturn. So it’s like, you get that tension there.
LS: Right. That tension and then potentially that like, loss at some point with Pluto.
CB: Yeah. So as a member of the royal family, she received a annual allowance from the government, but upon marrying a commoner, she was entitled to a one time lump sum payment of one point three million. She also used to have access to palace resources and support staff, but after the marriage, she chose to decline the lump sum payment and she lost her royal status and all of the associated benefits. So now she and her husband rely on their own incomes, and she works as an unpaid volunteer at the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York while her husband works at a law firm. So I just thought that was a cute story and there was like, some Saturn return stuff with that as well where I think she may have officially renounced her titles finally when Saturn was in Aquarius a few years ago during the Saturn return.
LS: Makes sense.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah. Makes sense. And it’s funny, too, with that Saturn in a night chart overcoming the exalted Moon in Taurus in the 10th. Like, that literal tension of like, her exalted role in society being at odds with like, marrying who she wanted to.
CB: Yeah. Exactly. Okay. The last one I thought was kind of funny that I just found that we had a timed chart for is Joe Rogan, who has one of the biggest podcasts in the world that he developed over the past decade for better or worse, but what was interesting about him is he has Taurus rising with Gemini on the 2nd house and the ruler is Mercury, which is in Leo in the 4th house. And I thought that was fascinating basically because he found a way, essentially, to make tons and tons of money working at home, where they set up the podcast studio in his house and he literally like, has guests out to his home essentially, and then they record a conversation and it’s released to the world. But the most broad sense – like, if you were just trying to interpret the placement archetypally, the two options – you know, if you see the ruler of the 2nd in the 4th is you would either say, well, there may be something about your finances that’s connected with your family or your parents. Another delineation that’s basic that you could give is that there may be something connected between your finances and your home or living situation. And if you said that to him at some point early in his life, it would turn out to be stunningly true later on.
LS: Right. Well, in this case in particular, it’s like, you’re making a living from like, talking at home. That’s Mercury ruling the 2nd conjunct the IC in the 4th.
CB: Yeah, totally. And it’s like, you know, Pisces is his 11th house of friends and Jupiter is the ruler of the 11th house of friends, and it’s there in the 4th house conjunct Mercury. So it’s maybe something about how he has friends out to his house to have those conversations as well. So there’s more complex things going on there and other things, but as a basic delineation I just wanted to mention that because it’s impressive.
LS: Right? And sometimes when you see connections between the 2nd and 4th or 10th and 4th, it really is just that simple as like, the person works from home or lives where they work or things like that.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, exactly. All right. Let’s move on to the 5th house.
Incredible one for the 5th house – Walt Disney. Virgo rising. Libra in the 2nd house; Libra is the 2nd whole sign house, and it’s ruled by Venus, which is placed in the 5th house of children, and he literally created an animation, you know, an art company – Disney – which makes movies for children. And then, you know, became wildly, wildly wealthy as a result of that.
LS: Right. So the animation film aspect of entertainment and then children more broadly as the company expanded.
CB: Yeah. And you know, with Disney theme parks and broader things, but I think it’s just interesting that ultimately he ended up making his fortune, you know, largely from children, essentially, more or less.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Interestingly, with the Moon in the 2nd house, he liked to collect things. So his interests were varied; he collected —
LS: Another one of those.
CB: Yeah. So he collected miniature trains, which was perhaps his most well-known… Yeah. So he collected miniature trains, arts and antiques, books, and memorabilia. So I thought that was amazing as a continuing theme.
A great comparison is George Lucas. So George Lucas was born with Taurus rising, Uranus and Saturn in the 2nd house in – I believe this is a day chart. Like, I very strongly think he was born with a day chart, and this was one of my first examples that showed me that when the Sun starts getting within six degrees of the Ascendant, like, it starts acting like a day chart because it’s bright out by the time the person is born. So I think he has a day chart. Gemini on the 2nd house. And Mercury, the ruler, rules the 5th house at the same time. So it’s like, there’s a connection between money and the 5th house topic of children. He has Mercury in the first house in Taurus, and Mercury is stationing direct a day after he was born, so it’s pretty much stationary there, conjunct Venus, right on the Ascendant. And the brilliant thing about Goerge Lucas is that when he sold Star Wars to – when he made the deal for Star Wars before he made it, he somehow got them to give him the merchandising rights to the entire thing, because that hadn’t really been done before and they didn’t think it was gonna be a huge deal. But what ended up happening is he released this movie that was like, hugely popular, especially with kids, and then he started making tons and tons of toys from it. And like, sold tons of action figures and other things like that to children and made just an obscene amount of money as a result of the merchandising rights for Star Wars.
LS: That’s great. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
LS: I like that.
CB: So that’s smart, business savvy, and that’s one of the ways if there’s a connection between the 2nd and the 5th that things can work out. Another one I found another way that can work out – so this is the birth chart of Heidi Fleiss, who was a famous Hollywood madame in the 1990s that like, came up in the news when she was arrested or busted for creating a prostitution ring, essentially, in Hollywood in the 1990s. So she was born with Aquarius rising, Venus-Mars conjunction right on the Ascendant in the 1st house. The ruler of the Ascendant is Saturn, which is in Pisces in the 2nd house, showing a focus on financial matters, and then the ruler of the 2nd house of finances is Jupiter, which is placed in the 5th house. And one of the significations of the 5th house is sex and sexuality.
LS: Right. Yeah. That’s pretty perfect. Also, the ruler of the 12th is in the 2nd in terms of, you know, connecting the topics of prisons and your livelihood.
CB: Right, because she was arrested and went to jail for a period of time. Yeah. And then also, there was a lot of scandal during her trials about whether she would release like, supposedly a black book of names of people that she had been connected with, which she never ended up releasing. But I thought it was interesting because Jupiter’s in Gemini in the 5th house, and it’s in a mutual reception with Mercury in the 11th house of friends and groups and alliances, so there’s a strong connection between like, the 11th house of friends, the 2nd house of finances, the 5th house of sex, and the 8th house of other people’s money between those two planets.
LS: Right? Yeah, there’s a mutable cross there going on.
CB: Yeah. So that was cool. Okay. I think that’s it for 5th house examples.
All right, I’m gonna splice this in in post, but there was an example chart that I forgot to include because we were gonna do a separate section on transits, but we ended up not doing that, and instead integrating most of the transit examples throughout the episode. But there was one that I forgot to re-integrate, and it’s the birth chart of the rapper Dr. Dre. So here’s his chart.
So he was born with Gemini rising, and Cancer on the 2nd house, and the ruler of the 2nd house is the Moon, which is in Libra in the 5th whole sign house. And it’s in pretty good shape. It’s applying to a trine with Venus and the Midheaven in Aquarius with reception, since the Moon is in Venus’s sign. And I’ve used him as an example for a number of years because that’s such a auspicious and positive 2nd house placement, and what happened is about 10 years ago in 2014, he had founded a headphones company called Beats Electronics, and these headphones became wildly popular back then so that lots of people were wearing them, especially lots of younger people. And they were pretty expensive headphones; they were like, designer headphones at the time. And yeah, it was interesting because like, headphones are like, entertainment and they’re used for entertainment, especially those headphones. And I think that’s part of the manifestation of the ruler of the 2nd house of finances in the 5th house of entertainment and fun and pleasure and everything else. So what happens is he founded this headphone company, but then in 2014 the headphone company was acquired by Apple. So the biggest company in the world bought out this headphone company, and it was Apple’s 2nd biggest acquisition ever where Dr. Dre and his business partner sold Beats to Apple for three billion dollars. So this is just like, a crazy amount of money, and it was gonna make Dr. Dre a billionaire, and it was gonna make him the first rapper who was a billionaire.
So what was interesting is this deal starts happening – let me put the transits up. Because I had used this as an example before, but I went back and reviewed it and was looking at the transits, and the transits were incredible. Because in early 2014 when they’re working out this deal and it first starts coming together, transiting Jupiter was in Cancer. So literally Jupiter was transiting his 2nd house when this deal comes together where suddenly he’s about to become a billionaire, basically, and become just wildly wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. So Jupiter’s transiting his 2nd house. But at the same time, Mars is retrograde in Libra, and on this date on Mars 8th… So the deal’s coming together, and he goes out and he parties, and he starts partying with his friends, and he, you know, reportedly says like, I’m gonna become the first billionaire rapper ever. And what happens is that one of his friends takes a video and then posts it on Facebook and like, leaks the video, not realizing that it needed to stay private or something, I guess. But the video went viral, and went everywhere, and it really upset Apple, and the head of Apple at the time called him in to the office to chew him out, basically, about this, and there was a real concern whether the deal was gonna be canceled altogether because the secrecy of the deal – the Apple executives had made a really important point that it had to be kept secret until it was finalized, and Dr. Dre had essentially just leaked it accidentally. So look at Mars. Mars is retrograde at nine degrees of Libra, and it’s coming up on a conjunction with his Moon at seven degrees of Libra on the day that this is leaked, basically, and then all of a sudden the press and everybody starts reporting on it.
So Mars, though, it’s actually slowing down in order to station direct. I’m gonna advance the chart. And just like, basically like a week and a half later or two weeks later, Mars stations at nine degrees of Libra on top of Dr. Dre’s Moon, the ruler of his 2nd house. And what ended up happening is that the head of Apple, Tim Cook, called him into his office and chewed him out, and he said he wasn’t gonna cancel the deal, but he was going to drop the offer by 200,000 dollars so that instead of becoming a billionaire at that time, Dr. Dre would become worth like, 800 million dollars or something like that, putting it just under a billion.
So I thought this was an amazing example, because on the one hand we have the Jupiter transit and having this like, wildly successful financial deal where your company is getting bought for billions of dollars, and suddenly you have the largest financial windfall of your life with Jupiter transiting the 2nd house. But then it’s a day chart, and Mars was transiting the ruler of the 2nd house at the same time – and not just transiting it, but actually stationing on it. And so something negative happened at the same time, which is that the deal was thrown in jeopardy; it was almost canceled, and then he ended up making significantly less than he was going to make was subtracted from the offer before it went through.
So eventually they worked things out, and the deal still went through and they finalized it I think in August of that year. But I thought this was a fascinating example, because on the one hand it shows a transit – you see like, the natal signature and the potential for wealth because the ruler of the 2nd is well-placed in the 5th. It has reception with its ruler with Venus; it’s applying to a trine with Venus. And then you see the positive Jupiter transit in the 2nd, and the negative Mars transit on the ruler of the 2nd at the same time. So sometimes people struggle with that when there’s positive and negative indications at the same time, and usually what it means is that you get both – that something positive happens but something negative happens at the same time. Sometimes they happen in parallel, just like, simultaneously, but other times one will happen and then the other will happen so you’ll have like, one step forward, one step back or something like that. But this is one way that that can manifest in his chart. So I just wanted to share that, not just as a ruler of the 2nd in the 5th example, but also as a transiting example as well, just because the transits are really important in terms of timing the activation of some of these placements at the same time.
All right. So that’s it.
LS: That’s a good one.
CB: I only have one 6th house example, and it’s Leona Helmsley, who you could do a whole write-up in and of itself. She had Cancer rising and Jupiter in the 2nd house in Leo in a day chart, and she became very wealthy. Interestingly, with Aries on the 10th house and the ruler, Mars, in the 4th house, she became wealthy from running hotels. She created a bunch of hotels and did a bunch of land deals and building deals and different things like that, but she was primarily known as a hotel person. She amassed, though, this huge wealth, and she also got some of it from marrying a very famous hotel developer, but then they worked together. But when she died, she ended up leaving behind all this money. But one of the things that she did is she left behind like, millions and millions of dollars to her dog. And I always thought tht was such a funny example and I used that as an example of the ruler of the 6th house, which represents pets, in the 2nd house of finances, and she left her dog millions of dollars.
LS: Literally the wealthiest dog in the world.
CB: Literally – probably. I mean, yeah. So what was funny, though, is I think Saturn afterwards started transiting Leo and transiting her 2nd house, and the dog with like, the new people that were supposed to take care of it put it on a diet because she had fed it like, wildly crazy food like caviar and stuff like that. And the news headlines said that it had been put on a diet of like, dog food and Alpo and stuff like that, so the dog was literally having like, a Saturn transit over that Jupiter.
LS: That’s hilarious. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. There’s other stuff with her chart that’s interesting, but I will leave it at that for the 6th house. The 6th house is underrepresented, but we’ll come back to it in future episodes.
All right. Seventh house. One of my favorite examples that I found of the 7th house is Laura Wasser, who has Libra rising, Scorpio on the 2nd house, so that Mars is ruling the 2nd house of finances and the 7th house of relationships, and it’s placed in the 9th house, which can sometimes represent the law and the courts and things related to that. And Laura Wasser is a famous lawyer who specializes in celebrity divorces.
LS: Yeah. That’s really perfect. Just, you know, Mars being severing and her livelihood being like, using the courts to sever things. Mars also ruling the 7th house of partnership.
CB: Yeah. Mars, you know, its most ancient symbol for Mars is a knife, and that’s one of its core meanings is severing or separating something. So she literally makes her fortune – 2nd house – by helping people to get divorce – 7th house – and to sever or separate their marriage – Mars – in a legal context with the courts – 9th house.
LS: Right. And her Ascendant ruler is even like, in the 8th house of shared resources, like, bringing in that topic as a strong focus of her life.
CB: Yeah, totally. And even the 10th house of career and reputation is Cancer, and it’s ruled by the Moon which is in Aries in the 7th house of relationships and marriage.
LS: Something I noticed when I was looking at this chart was just like, her Jupiter is just like, helping out everything in her chart, so you wouldn’t always, for instance, think Mars in a day chart ruling the 2nd is like, wildly successful lawyer, even if the ruler of the 2nd is in the 9th, because it’s Mars in a day chart. But it’s just like, Mars has reception with Saturn, Mars is applying to Jupiter, Mercury’s applying to Jupiter, the Moon’s applying to Jupiter. Like, Venus is her Ascendant ruler in the 8th, you know, which isn’t like, one of the good houses; it’s also applying closely to Jupiter, so Jupiter’s like, helping everything as a side note.
CB: Yeah, especially with that Moon like, at 26 degrees of Aries ruling the 10th house, and it’s applying to that exact trine with Jupiter at 27 Leo is just a perfect condition of bonification.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So she – just to give you an idea – she’s handled high profile, high net worth dissolutions, which is another interesting term, including those for Angelina Jolie, Heidi Klum, Kim Kardashian, Kris Jenner, Johnny Depp, Ryan Reynolds, Christina Aguilera, Hilary Duff, Stevie Wonder, Maria Shriver, Dr. Dre, and Kevin Costner. And the last interesting point – it says… Yeah, actually, I’ll skip that, but very interesting chart. Very cool chart.
LS: Yep.
CB: All right. So moving on. You already mentioned Charles Ponzi who had the ruler of the 2nd in the 7th, and he ripped people off.
LS: Yes.
CB: I’ve mentioned Johnny Carson – oh, I’m still showing the charts. I mentioned Johnny Carson who had the ruler of the 7th in the 2nd and he had a very famous and costly celebrity divorce, one of the most costly divorces in history at the time. There’s a similar thing with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had Capricorn on the 7th house, the ruler is Saturn in the 2nd house. And he was very successful financially, but then he had a famous celebrity divorce, and it was like, a very costly celebrity divorce with Saturn in the 2nd house.
One that I came across that was interesting that I just came across the birth data of and researched was the comedian Bobby Lee, who evidently we have a timed chart for. He has Sagittarius rising, Capricorn on the 2nd house of finances, and the ruler is Saturn, which is located in Gemini in the 7th whole sign house. And Bobby was like, a famous comedian that was famous in the ‘90s because he was on the hit television show Mad TV. And he was also in some movies and like, some music videos, but his career was kind of in decline by the early 2010s. And what happened is that he got together into this relationship with a woman, his girlfriend named Khalyla Kuhn, and they ended up starting a podcast together called TigerBelly. And this podcast became very successful and it basically revived his somewhat declining career as a comedian and as an actor when they started it in 2015. But the only reason he did it was with her and getting together, and there were tensions later because they eventually broke up just in the past few years. But they’ve stayed friends and they’ve continued working together and hosting the podcast together so that it’s still something they do together. But it’s something that wouldn’t have happened without that connection through his partner at the time.
LS: Right. Yeah, for sure. Nice to see a non-divorce example of the connections between the 2nd and 7th.
CB: Right. It’s not always negative things —
LS: No.
CB: — it can also be really, really positive things.
LS: Right.
CB: There’s a lot of interesting transits connected with his chart and their relationship. Like, she has Jupiter and Mars in Capricorn in his 2nd house, so it’s like, that’s the other thing is sometimes people’s synastry plays a role as well.
LS: Right, for sure.
CB: All right. So that was interesting. Another one like that that I – it’s not like that, but another connection is Monica Lewinsky. Can you see this chart?
LS: Yes. I can.
CB: Okay. So this is Libra rising. She has Scorpio is the 2nd house, and the ruler of the 2nd house is Mars, which is placed in the 7th house of relationships in a day chart. And she famously had an affair with Bill Clinton. And then one of the things I thought was interesting just in seeing this, just as I was searching for examples, was just how this impacted then her finances. Because on the one hand, she would later do some interviews and some books and stuff so that she ended up making some money from it as a result of the affair later on. But she also had, like, huge amounts of debt from legal cases and stuff. So she ended up having to use a lot of that money in order to pay some different things off as a result of that. And when she later tried to get different jobs and stuff, she ran into challenges and was unable to as a result of the stigma of that sort of following her. So I thought it was interesting just in the case of both negative and positive things, but just that there was a connection between that and her finances.
LS: Right. That like, initially her place of, you know, making a livelihood made her meet a romantic partner in a sense, but then later it was like, the scandal of that affair then hindered her future finances.
CB: Yeah, exactly. More recently she became, later she became an advocate against cyber bullying and against – like, an anti-bullying activist in general, and that’s also I think partially tied in with that as well as having been on the receiving end of that with Mars in the 7th house of like, other people.
LS: Yeah, totally. Yeah.
CB: All right. And then one last one is a historical version of this, which is William Lilly, the 17th century astrologer who had Pisces rising, Aries on the 2nd house, and the ruler is Mars in Virgo in the 7th house. And he famously got together with a woman who was like, well off, and he like, courted her and then they got married, and then she passed away at some point. She was like, an older woman and she passed away, and then he inherited her estate, essentially. It made him a wealthy person.
LS: Yeah. Interesting with one of the benefics in the 8th of inheritance and then… Yeah, this being a night chart with Mars ruling the 2nd and the 7th is like, very different. You can see then the day chart of Monica Lewinsky’s same placement.
CB: Exactly. And just Mars being more challenging by day or more constructive by night.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. That’s the last 7th house example. Eighth house… Eighth house is kind of tricky. Have we talked about some 8th house ones so far?
LS: We have, yeah. Because like, inheritance, investments, other people’s money. There’s all those connections —
CB: Right.
LS: — with the 2nd. If the 2nd house is connected with the 8th house, it’s often one of those topics.
CB: Okay.
LS: Mortality, in Danny DeVito’s case.
CB: Right. I mean, that’s one of my examples. I’m gonna skip – some of my examples are kind of morbid so I’m gonna skip that one. I think we’ve probably done some other 8th house examples already, right?
LS: Yeah. I mean, a bunch of them – basically, a lot of the wealthy people like, either inherited it or was from investments, other people’s money in other words, so —
CB: Right.
LS: — yeah, there’s been a lot of 8th house already.
CB: The very first example I did was the inheritance one from Lisa Marie Presley who had the ruler of the 2nd in the 8th and the ruler of the 8th in the 2nd.
LS: Right. Yeah.
CB: Okay. I think that’s good then.
LS: Okay.
CB: I’m still showing William Lilly’s chart —
LS: You are.
CB: — while we’re talking.
LS: Yes.
CB: Let me just show Lisa Marie Preseley’s chart again then for the sake of video viewers so you can remind yourself of what that looked like where she had Leo rising, Jupiter in the 2nd house in Virgo. The ruler is Mercury in Pisces, and the ruler of the 8th house is Jupiter, which is in Virgo. So very strong connection between the place of inheritance, place of money, and she inherited Elvis’s entire estate at the age of 25 at the beginning of a 2nd house profection year.
Okay. Ninth house. We talked about Madonna’s chart a little bit – probably actually way extensively enough, but I just wanted to reiterate that I think it’s interesting she has that Mars in the 9th house, and there’s sometimes those issues of perception of like, blasphemy in religious matters or sometimes integrating like, sexual imagery with religious matters, which is also like, a Mars thing. But it’s like, that Venus is ruling the 9th house and the 2nd house, and so it’s like, that’s part of what’s also generated money for her to some extent was her – some of the ways in which she did that and some of the rebelliousness she has, because that Mars is actually pretty closely square Uranus at 12 degrees of Leo. And that’s the primary – it’s not the only way, but it’s the primary way that the Uranus placements comes through in the chart.
LS: Yeah. It makes sense.
CB: Yeah. And then also that I think part of the delineation for her was also with the ruler of the 2nd house of finances and the 9th house of religion in the 12th house of enemies is that she ended up benefiting to some extent from some of her enemies and people that were protesting against her that tried to shut down that partnership with Pepsi, but ultimately – arguably you could say that it potentially may have worked out in her favor, I think, because Venus is sextile the Midheaven, therefore it’s mitigated in the 12th.
LS: Yeah, and it’s so interesting when people have like, positive 12th house things and that’s one of the ways that can work out is like, you somehow benefit from your enemy’s actions. Which you wouldn’t think would be like, a thing that happened very often, and certainly it doesn’t much of the time. But in those cases where there’s like, benefics connected with the 12th, that can sometimes happen. You can sometimes see that happen.
CB: Or to phrase it differently, like, you benefit from those who try to work against you or from those who you don’t get along with.
LS: Yeah, exactly.
CB: Is one possible delineation. There’s other delineations. I know isolation is like, a theme of the 12th that you really like.
LS: Yes. Yeah. People who earn their living in seclusion, yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. One other I like for the 9th house – what?
LS: No, go ahead. I was just gonna say, “But the 9th house,” which we’re still on.
CB: Deepak Chopra has Pisces rising, Aries on the 2nd house, and the ruler is Mars in the 9th house in a day chart along with Jupiter and Mercury. And he’s famous for writing a lot of books. Essentially, he’s made money talking about spirituality and trying to tie that together with like, science and religion.
LS: Yeah. Interesting. I like that he has the Ascendant ruler, Jupiter, and Mars copresent in the 9th house. It’s like, tying together his life orientation and the way he makes a living in the house of religion.
CB: Exactly. All right. Moving on. Tenth house ones. I was super stoked to find this one. We have the birth chart, we have the birth time, of founder of Forbes magazine —
LS: Nice.
CB: — who was born in like, 1880, but his name is B. C. Forbes, and he had Leo rising, Virgo on the 2nd whole sign house, and the ruler is Mercury, which is in Taurus in the 10th house conjunct Venus with a whole Taurus stellium of Mercury, Venus, Neptune, Sun, and Pluto. And he ended up founding a magazine, you know, studying wealth and studying the wealthy, basically.
LS: Wow. That’s perfect. I mean, especially with the ruler of the 2nd, you know, not just prominently placed – this is saying he’s like, a prominent person, right, with regard to finances or the topic of finances – but Mercury like, applying to conjoin closely the ruler of the 3rd, and it’s like, the magazine.
CB: Exactly.
LS: And then just that Taurus stellium in general in terms of like, wealth, materiality.
CB: Yeah. So and it’s like, many of the people who we’ve talked about in terms of their net worth and knowing that, it’s like, we know that because of like, Forbes magazine today tracking some of the wealthiest people in the world.
LS: Yeah. That’s really good. I like this one.
CB: Yeah. Tracking the wealth of the eminent.
LS: Exactly. Yeah, with that 10th house stellium.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that was one. J. Paul Getty is like, a really common example that I use; it’s one of my core chart examples in my book in my course. And he had Capricorn rising with Aquarius ruling the 2nd house, and the ruler is Saturn, which is exalted in Libra in the 10th whole sign house in a day chart opposite Jupiter. And he was like, this huge tycoon, and he was the wealthiest man in the world at one point, but he was like, obsessed with work and focused on work constantly. And he was also a little bit like, miserly where he refused to pay like, a ransom for a family member that was kidnapped at one point.
LS: Wow. That’s terrible.
CB: Yeah. So good times. There’s two other examples that tie together of Mercury like B. C. Forbes that I thought were interesting and complementary examples. One of them is Ruben Hurricane Carter, who had Leo rising, Virgo on the 2nd house, and the ruler is Mercury in Taurus in the 10th house. So it’s similar to the Forbes chart, except in this case Mercury is retrograde. And what happened is that he was arrested; somebody was murdered, and then he was falsely arrested and convicted for the murder and imprisoned for it for a number of years. But then eventually, his story became known and he became known for it. And different people lobbied to get him released and even wrote songs about him. Like, Bob Dylan in the 1960s or ‘70s wrote a famous song about him to bring awareness to his case. And then eventually he was released, and after he got out, he was able to make some income by talking about his story and doing different deals related to that, and then eventually becoming an advocate for other people who were falsely imprisoned. So the main point I wanted to make with this is one of the core interpretations of retrograde planets in ancient astrology is that they indicate delays in the manifestations of whatever they signify in the chart. So in his case, because it’s ruling the 2nd house, it’s delays in financial income or wealth so that it came about very late in his life, essentially, that he became successful financially because he was falsely imprisoned, which is the other part of the Mercury retrograde.
LS: Yeah. That makes sense. He’s also got the ruler of the 12th like, applying to that Mercury closely.
CB: Yeah. And there’s some other stuff. I used his chart as an example in the episode on the Lot of Fortune because he has the Lot of Fortune in Gemini, and so Mercury – the ruler – is actually in the 12th house from fortune, which is the place of jail in fortune houses or prison. And he was arrested with a friend who was also falsely accused.
LS: Okay.
CB: So there’s all sorts of things there. So his chart and then… I found that George Carlin was actually born very close to him, the comedian, and he was also born with Leo rising, but on the other side of the retrograde where Mercury’s retrograde but it’s not long after the cazimi. So he has Virgo on the 2nd house and Mercury is ruling that; it’s retrograde in the 10th house, retrograding back to conjoin Uranus. And he was a comedian, but he wasn’t very successful when he was younger. It was mainly once he got older that he eventually found success as a comedian and then made quite a bit of money in his later years. But in his early years, it wasn’t as good.
LS: Interesting. Yeah. That’s a good example of that. I also like that it’s like, right on the Midheaven and then like, with Uranus while Mercury’s retrograding back to Uranus, because he’s like, I don’t remember a lot of his stuff but I know that he was like, known for trying to be edgy like, as a persona.
CB: Yeah. He had like, a joke about – what was it – the 10 curse words that you can’t —
LS: Things you can say, yeah, right.
CB: Yeah. All right. So I think that’s it for the 10th house. Moving on to the 11th house, you have an amazing example with Anthony Bourdain.
LS: Yeah. So this is one of those where sometimes it’s like, one pivotal event in someone’s life makes like, the most sense of a placement. And so he had Leo rising; Mercury’s ruling the 2nd house of Virgo, placed in its own sign of Gemini in the 11th house copresent with Venus also in Gemini. And Venus is ruling the 3rd house of like, books, and you know, he was a chef, he was cook for like, many years into his 40s, and it’s only then when he started to become really famous like, from his books, and then the books spawned into, you know, TV shows and things like that. And so anyway, I was like, why is the ruler of the 2nd house of income in the 11th house of friends or groups? And I thought partly it was like, that he worked with teams, right? Like, even when you’re a cook in a restaurant, you’re working as a team, and like, he worked with teams on his shows, but I was like, is there a friend connection here? And I finally found that it was his college roommate that actually kind of randomly got him his first book deal which was like, a novel; it wasn’t even like, the books he got famous for. His college roommate was like, talking to some mutual friend who was like, you know, worked for a publishing place and was like, “I have a friend” – he was kind of boasting – he was like, “I have friends who write better than the people you’re publishing,” and the agent was kind of like, challenging him, like, “Okay, well, then find me one.” And he called his bluff, and so he told Anthony, who did write; he was like, “I need a manuscript.” And so he like, paid him to like, write 100 pages of a book to give to the guy, and the guy said, “Okay, I’ll buy it for 10,000 dollars.” And they went in 50-50 on this, and so Anthony gave his friend 5,000 of it. And that is how he started doing his books. That was like, his first published book.
CB: Wow. That’s amazing. So it’s like, his —
LS: Yeah.
CB: The most general thing we could say about this chart with the ruler of the 2nd house of finances in the 11th house of friends is that somehow your finances at some point will be connected with your friendships, and that would be stunningly true in this instance.
LS: Yeah. But it was like, you know, he did lots of other collaborative stuff later too. You could say, you know, as a general thing that was true. But like, the really pivotal thing about the connection between those two houses was like, this kind of one time, unique event.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And there was probably like, activations at the time by progressions and transits and stuff as well.
LS: Yeah, I’m sure.
CB: Yeah. All right. I have a lot of similar examples like that with 11th house ones. Steve Wozniak is like, my classic example that I always use of that because he was the friend of Steve Jobs, and then the two of them founded Apple Computers in like, their garage. And Steve Wozniak has Virgo rising and Libra on the 2nd house, ruled by Venus, which is in the 11th house of friends – extremely well-placed – and he became incredibly wealthy as a result of this connection or this friendship that he had with Steve Jobs when they founded Apple Computer and then Steve Jobs was so brilliant in terms of marketing and other things, whereas Wozniak was like, the technical genius who literally programmed and created some of the early Mac Apple computers and then created what is today I think like, the biggest company in the world or maybe one of the most profitable companies or something like that.
LS: Yeah. Right. So again, just like, you know, without that friend connection, that whole thing would not have unfolded for him.
CB: Exactly. So another way that I see the 11th house come up when I was doing this research is in social media. And the most stunning example of that is Jack Dorsey, who was the founder of Twitter.
LS: Yeah.
CB: He was born with Virgo rising, the 11th house is Cancer, and the ruler is the Moon, which is placed in Libra in the 2nd house conjunct Pluto widely. So it’s like, again, the connection here is between like, friends and finances, but in a modern, 21st century context sometimes what “friends” means is like, social networking. And for him, he literally created one of the leading social networking sites in the early 21st century, which is Twitter, which is now “X.” Yeah.
LS: Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, I see social networks come up a lot with the 11th as well.
CB: Yeah. And I’m trying to find it; where is it? He’s worth an estimated four point one billion dollars today.
LS: Venus ruling the 2nd in a night chart as the benefic of sect.
CB: Yeah. So just to give you some context about, you know, extreme connection between wealth and in this instance social networking.
LS: Yeah. Good one.
CB: Another one like that that I found is Kim Kardashian, and this is one that I’d used before, but I came back to it and it was – the more I looked into her life, because I didn’t know like, a ton about it before, but the more I did, the more the chart made sense and the more amazing it was. But the primary thing here is that has Sagittarius rising, Capricorn ruling the 2nd house of finances as well as the 3rd house of siblings, and it’s placed in the 11th house where Saturn is in Libra, it’s exalted, it’s got an out-of-sign conjunction with Jupiter. It’s a very well-placed Saturn. And I’d always used this as an example because she initially came to prominence through her friend, Paris Hilton, where she had this friend connection with Paris Hilton who was like, a famous socialite that was in reality television in the mid-2000s. And then through that connection, Kim Kardashian made a few appearances on Paris Hilton’s like, reality television show. And then later, would end up going on to star in her own reality television show that involved her family as well as several of her siblings as like, the focus on the show. So but, you know, one, the point is that she originally sort of started making a lot of money through her connection with Paris Hilton, but then two, she credits social media with a large part of her success.
LS: Yeah. That makes sense.
CB: Because she’s in that tie-over period between like, the late 2000s and the early 2010s, and one of the things that she did is she really was one of the first people that really used social media to its utmost extent in order to promote her products, basically. Not just her products but her show, her siblings, and everything else. And she’s actually worth an estimated one point seven billion dollars today according to Forbes. She had one of the longest running reality television shows in the country, in history, and… What else about that? I’m trying to see what else. That she – I have a quote from her where she talked about being wealthy as a result of social media, that she has developed a significant presence online across numerous social media platforms, including hundreds of millions of followers on Twitter and Instagram, and that it played a crucial role in her success so that she says,
“I totally attribute my career to social media. There are pitfalls,” she added, “such as lack of privacy, and that’s not for everyone. But for me, I can handle it.”
LS: Yeah.
CB: So I thought that was really good. Interestingly, her mother, Kris Jenner, is the one who evidently came up with the idea of doing a reality show based on the family and who originally pitched it. And she actually has Virgo rising with Mercury in Libra, conjunct Neptune and Mars in Libra in the 2nd house. So I know there’s been things there about like, questions about how much she’s like, the matriarch of the family and how much she’s the architect behind the like, hugely successful careers that each of her children have had through the social media and different things. And it’s interesting just seeing her focus on the 2nd house with the birth chart placement.
LS: Totally. And then Jupiter ruling the other chart, ruling the 4th house, placed on the Midheaven.
CB: Yeah, with Kim Kardashian’s chart. Totally. She has Pisces 4th house, and the Midheaven – Jupiter ruling the 4th house, and it’s exactly on the Midheaven at 28 degrees of Virgo.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah, that’s perfect. So interesting side note that I have to mention in terms of a transit – a few years ago in 2016, Kim Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint in her Paris hotel room when she was visiting Paris for Fashion Week. And it was this hugely, like, traumatic experience for her where masked men broke into her room, tied her up, and stole millions of dollars worth of jewelry. And she has spoken openly about how the experience changed her perspective on security, privacy, and material possessions. So I was able to track down the date it happened – October 13th, 2016. And Mars was transiting Capricorn, her 2nd house, at the time.
LS: Wow. Yeah. That’s crazy.
CB: Isn’t that striking?
LS: It’s very striking. Yes.
CB: Let me show it really quickly; there it is. So Mars was at four degrees of Capricorn transiting —
LS: I’m not see it. Just so you know, I’m not seeing a biwheel.
CB: Oh, let me just switch… There we go. Let me know if you can see it.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So Mars was at four degrees of Capricorn the day that the robbery happened in her 2nd house of money and possession and finances, and it was squaring her Saturn, which is the ruler of her 2nd house, which is at three degrees of Libra.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So I think that’s part of what it was is she had not just a – she has a day chart, so Mars is the most difficult planet for her. She’s having not just a negative transit through that house but also hitting the lord or the ruler of the 2nd house at the same time. She also had Saturn transiting over her Ascendant; Saturn was at 11 degrees of Sagittarius, hitting her Ascendant at 13, so you can see the bodily fears and stuff as well. But there was also counteracting positive transits where transiting Jupiter was at five Libra, sort of near that Saturn, so it didn’t end up being the worst case scenario. And Jupiter at five degrees of Libra was also sextiling her Mars at six degrees of Sagittarius in her first house, because that’s, you know, that’s a problematic placement for bodily things potentially – Mars in the first house in a day chart – but it was getting mitigated by that transit from Jupiter.
LS: Yeah. That’s really good, because yeah, that sounds like a terrifying experience. So it’s good that she had some positive transits going on as well.
CB: Yeah, totally. So lots of other interesting stuff there. I’ll leave it at that. Weirdly, I noticed – I’m not gonna spend a lot of time talking about this story because I know we’re running out of time – Paris Hilton, her friend who Kim Kardashian originally became famous and started becoming wealthy as a result of that connection with, Paris Hilton also has Sagittarius rising, so that’s probably why they got along because they have almost the same Ascendant degree. And Paris Hilton also has Saturn ruling the 2nd house placed in the 11th house conjunct Jupiter and the Midheaven, and she was famously, you know, a socialite and became famous early on especially not just as a socialite but having a reality television show called The Simple Life that she did with her childhood friend Nicole Richie. And that was when her sort of popularity really blew up in the 2000s.
LS: Yeah. That’s interesting, you know, thinking about the nature of the 11th house and it being like, social media very much these days as well as your, you know, just regular friends or groups you belong to. But like, thinking about the nature of like, some of those houses, you know, the specific manifestations can change over time or culturally. And I was thinking about like, that is probably like, what that was before is like, the socialite, like the society pages, right? It would be like, you would expect if you had birth times for people, they would like, have 11th house connections from like —
CB: Right.
LS: — you know, hundreds of years ago.
CB: Yeah, totally.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. That’s a good point. All right. Let’s move on to the 12th house, the very last house. I’ve already talked about Madonna’s 12th house placement and how that worked out, which is probably one of our most striking examples of that and how it can sometimes work out positively if there’s good connections with the 12th house. Making money from one’s enemies or as a result of them.
LS: Right.
CB: Another one – Yoko Ono has Libra rising, Scorpio on the 2nd house, Mars ruling the 2nd house of finances and the 7th house of relationships, but it’s in the 12th house of loss. She ended up, her husband John Lennon was assassinated by like, a crazy person in the 1980s and died – he was shot – unexpectedly. And then she inherited his entire estate. So that’s part of that placement or how I would connect that a little bit.
LS: Right. Yeah. Go ahead.
CB: Go ahead.
LS: Oh no, no. You go.
CB: And then the other ones that I found were connected with jail. So one of the most ancient associations with the 12th house is prisons. Actually, really quickly, I had mentioned Liliane Bettencourt as another 12th house example, so just remember her and that somebody potentially took advantage of her in her old age for finances and gifts in a weird relationship thing with the ruler of the 7th in the 2nd and the ruler of the 12th in the 2nd, yeah.
Anyway. The other ones, the last ones that had to do with prisons – one of them is Sam Bankman-Fried. Do you see the chart?
LS: No, net yet. I see Bettencourt still. Okay, there we go. Oh – we had it for a minute.
CB: Here we go. So he was born with Taurus rising. He has Gemini on the 2nd house and the ruler is Mercury, which is placed in the 12th house. And he was involved in the largest financial fraud in history where his cryptocurrency company essentially folded and he was doing negative things. And then he’s been sentenced to, I think, 25 years in prison and to face a huge amount of restitution.
LS: Right. Yeah. So his financial activities led him to prison. The ruler of the 2nd in the 12th.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So his attempts to enrich himself led to imprisonment I think is the delineation essentially, and he committed the largest financial fraud in history due the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, and the associated misappropriation of customer funds where the estimated losses are in just tens of billions of dollars.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, three years supervised release, and ordered to pay 11 billion dollars in – interesting keyword – forfeiture for his orchestration of multiple fraudulent schemes. In the context of what he has to pay forfeiture refers to the forced surrender of assets he acquired through illegal activities, and I think that’s it. Like, that’s a really 12th house-y, 2nd house-y set of keywords there, because he defrauded people through a complex scheme that primarily involved the misuse of customer funds deposited in his cryptocurrency exchange.
LS: Yeah, and it’s interesting he has that Mars in a day chart, so the out of sect malefic ruling that Mercury, ruling the ruler of the 2nd and ruling the 7th house of like, the other party, yeah. As well as Pluto there – not like, Pluto by itself would, you know, do all of this, but it’s interesting that that’s the same placement as Charles Ponzi.
CB: Right. Yeah. So all of his assets were frozen. He’s got a crazy amount of legal fees, bail conditions, as well as numerous civil lawsuits from investors and creditors. So yeah. His once vast fortune has been decimated is one of the lines that I saw.
LS: For sure. Yeah.
CB: All right. So other ones, though – I found two others that were similar. One of them was recent, which was Gypsy Rose Blanchard was a story that was in the news over the past year. She has Libra rising and Scorpio as the 2nd house, and it’s ruled by Mars, which is in the 12th house along with Venus and Mercury. So she ended up – this is kind of a complicated – how do you explain this one; do you know?
LS: Well, she was – her mother I guess was faking the daughter’s illness, this person’s illness, and was like, making her do lots of like, surgeries and medications that she did not need and like, harming her in the process for years.
CB: Yeah, like, she —
LS: I can’t remember how you pronounce the name of that, but.
CB: It’s like, Munchausen by proxy —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — was potentially the disease that her mother had, and then the owner of the birth chart, the daughter, is like, a survivor of that where her mother was keeping her sick and was forcing sometimes very extreme medical procedures on her that she didn’t need, which often left her in a wheelchair and even surgeries that she didn’t need.
LS: Right.
CB: So she was subjected to lifelong physical, mental, and medical abuse. So what ended up happening is she ended up getting a partner or a boyfriend, and the boyfriend at her request potentially ended up murdering the mother, and then both the boyfriend and Gypsy Rose Blanchard went to jail. But because of the circumstances surrounding her just sort of like, torture growing up from her mother, she was only sentenced to like, 10 years or something like that, but was released after serving eight years. And in the meantime while she was in prison, some like, dramas were made or documentaries were made about her case, and she developed a sort of like, following on social media so that once she got out over the past year when she was released from prison, she’s become successful as a result of that, as a result of the notoriety of going to jail for having murdered her mother or had her mother murdered. And so she has like, a book that’s coming out later this year; she has a book deal and other sort of like, deals like that. So it’s something I can’t fully articulate, but something about a connection between the 2nd house of finances and the like, 12th house of prison and just that those two topics are intertwined here.
LS: Right. Like, if she hadn’t gone to prison for that, I mean that’s the thing that led to like, her at least earning some income subsequently, was like, that connection. And like, interesting also with the Pluto in the 2nd, because it’s kind of like one of those true crime things that becomes like, you know, in the popular imagination of society for a while. There’s like, you know, hordes of people who are like, following this with fascination. So on the one hand, her Ascendant ruler in the 12th, you know, closely conjoining Mars in a day chart was like, really bad for her physically and I’m sure emotionally. Right? Like, just the circumstances of her growing up and, you know, getting medically abused —
CB: Which itself was a form of like, imprisonment. She was being —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — imprisoned by her mother.
LS: Exactly. Yeah, that’s what I was about to say. But then at the same time, Mars is the ruler of the 2nd, and so the circumstances of her earning an income are like, related to like, hard things that are related to prison.
CB: Right. Yeah, exactly. So you know, sometimes you just have those unique stories like that, and that’s one of the ways that that can work out – an obviously very extreme scenario.
LS: Yeah.
CB: One other that I found that was actually similar like that was Amanda Knox, who has Gemini rising, Taurus on the 12th house, and the ruler is Venus, which is in Cancer in the 2nd whole sign house, along with Mercury and the Sun. And Mercury is the ruler of the Ascendant. And she famously, she was like, an American from Seattle who went to study abroad for a year in Italy during college. But then her roommate was murdered, and she evidently was like, falsely accused of the crime and then convicted and imprisoned for a period of time. But then later, she was exonerated and released, and subsequent to that has written books and done podcasts and other interviews related to it, as well as done some advocacy work, I think, for people that are falsely imprisoned. So I thought that was another interesting case where there was like, a connection there between the 12th house and the 2nd house.
LS: Absolutely. Right. And of course, you know, that’ll play out differently for different people. Most people are not imprisoned who have a 12th house connection with the 2nd, so don’t worry if you have something like that in your chart; it’s not always that. But sometimes it is literal like that.
CB: Yeah. Sometimes it can be very literal, and that’s – you know what I said at the beginning of doing this was I was just looking for literal examples that fulfill some of the most basic ancient significations. And so there’s a whole range of other, both positive and negative or even like, middle-of-the-road significations for each of these houses that we’re not getting to. But the point here is instead just to demonstrate that some of the core significations that astrologers have always associated with those houses really do still work out, sometimes in very literal ways today.
LS: For sure, yeah. And seclusion, as we talked about earlier, is a much more common 12th house connection than, say, prisons. But you know, the commonality between the two, of course, is just being away from everyday life.
CB: Yeah. Seclusion and sometimes that’s why it can represent not just, you know, prisons but also hospitals or, you know, sometimes I think monasteries or other places like that.
LS: Yeah. I have a friend who has a connection between the 2nd and 12th, and he’s a doctor and works in hospitals. So there you go.
CB: Nice.
LS: It can be really positive.
CB: Yeah. Well, sometimes, you know, in these instances, it’s sometimes taking a bad experience that you’ve had in the past and then turning it into something positive for you that helps you to support your life in the future, I think is the broadest way you can interpret that. Or in the case of your friend, sometimes it’s externalizing that and it’s like, taking something that’s a bad experience for other people and then, you know, finding a way that that can be something you do in order to help people that also supports you and your life and your livelihood.
LS: Yeah. Exactly.
CB: Which is also the case of some of these people to the extent that they become advocates for people that are suffering similar situations as them in the past.
LS: For sure.
CB: Yeah. And I am surprised, but that means we have reached the end of my chart examples and the end of this episode. I mean, unless you’d like to keep going. I mean, we could keep talking; I don’t know. It’s not – honestly not the longest episode I’ve ever done; definitely not the shortest. But I think we covered an incredible amount of ground today.
LS: Yeah. I think this was a great overview of the 2nd house and different connections with the 2nd house and how that plays out in terms of one’s livelihood, income, possessions, et cetera.
CB: Yeah. For sure. So there’s probably other things we didn’t get into, other ways of looking at the 2nd house. Obviously it wasn’t comprehensive in terms of all planets in the 2nd or all – the other thing is we focused on celebrity examples in this episode because their lives are like, documented because they – we have timed charts for them, and because sometimes they show extremes of, you know, good and bad scenarios, which is sometimes helpful because once you’ve established the extremes, then you can then sort of figure out what the intermediate steps are, like, the moderate manifestations might be if you’ve seen what the utmost extreme it.
LS: Right. The extremes sometimes make for better storytelling for the example purposes.
CB: Exactly. So we’re also in the series – this is only the 2nd episode in this series, so we’re gonna continue to see other manifestations of the different houses as I go through each of these. So this was kind of a crazy research project for this month; I actually did it – I took longer on it than I might have because I’ve been sick and dealing with like, brain fog and fatigue and long covid stuff this month. But it actually, interestingly, allowed me to spend more time researching this than I did the first house episode, which was actually thrown together a little bit more quickly. But I spent more time on this, but it also gave me more time to really find some great examples and come to some new realizations, so I really appreciated that. And I think I’ll do my best to see if I can spend more time on other houses like I did to whatever extent I can. Thankfully, I have a bunch of patrons that sign up through my page on Patreon.com to support this work and that’s the reason I’m able to do this and to put this work out there for free instead of putting it behind a paywall. So if you got something valuable from this, then consider joining and becoming a patron, and in exchange you’ll get benefits like early access to new episodes and other stuff like that. Yeah. But otherwise, thanks to the patrons that supported this work so that I could do this research and put it out there.
So for you, you are – you’ve got stuff going on. You’re potentially speaking at a conference next year, the Northwest Astrology Conference in Seattle, right?
LS: Yeah. So I should be doing a lecture and workshop if all goes well between now and then. My website is LeisaSchaim.com; in the future, you will be able to visit it. It’s down right now in preparation for a rebuild. But you should be able to see that in the future.
CB: Yeah. You’ve got some great – you’ll have some great lectures there for sale on things like annual profections and zodiacal releasing.
LS: And electional astrology. Several things, yeah.
CB: Cool. All right. And then you’ll be announcing that soon on the NORWAC website when that conference is out what workshop you’re gonna be doing next May.
LS: Yes. Probably a ZR thing, but still working out the details.
CB: Cool. All right. Well, I think that’s it, then. Thanks a lot for joining me and helping me to get this research out and these chart examples. Thanks for talking it through and also letting me bug you every day for the past like, two to three weeks constantly with like, new examples that I would call you and then start babbling on about like, the life of Madonna and like, the details surrounding like, all of the different intricacies of different people’s lives.
LS: Yeah, you’re quite welcome. It was sort of a daily like, “Do you wanna hear more examples?”
CB: Yeah. How many examples can you take today?
LS: Yeah. But thanks for asking me; it was a fun discussion. Yeah, and I love seeing all of the astrology come to life. It’s just always so fascinating and vivid, no matter how many charts you look at, you know, just to see another one.
CB: Yeah. For example, the – yeah, for sure, that it really comes alive once you start looking at examples. Because it’s one thing to learn the principles, but then when you actually look at people’s lives, you realize – the principles, even if you don’t expect it, like, just come alive in really unique and unusual ways that fulfill the basic concept and the system of astrology that we’ve had for 2,000 years. But somehow that system still works stunningly today.
LS: Right. Even if you can’t think ahead of time of like, how could this possibly manifest? You know, or how specifically could that come about? And then you see, oh, okay, that’s how.
CB: Yeah. For sure. And I have lectures where I go into more of this in my Hellenistic astrology course; I forgot to mention. Because I tried to say I used some of the examples from my book and my course in this, but I also saved some that are just in the course and the book where I go into the ruler of the Ascendant, the rulers of the houses and other techniques more. So if you wanna learn more about some of the techniques that we used in this, that would be where I would go. So you can find that at TheAstrologySchool.com. But otherwise, I think that’s it for this period, so thanks a lot for joining me today, Leisa.
LS: Yeah, thanks for having me.
CB: All right. Thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
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