The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 465, titled:
The Third House in Astrology
With Chris Brennan and Leisa Schaim
Episode originally released on October 20, 2024
—
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
—
Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released November 7th, 2024
Copyright © 2024 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
—
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 exploration of the meaning of the 3rd house in astrology and talking about the significations of the 3rd house and going through dozens and dozens of celebrity example charts in order to show you what the 3rd house actually means in practice and how to work with it.
So hey Leisa. Thanks for joining me.
LEISA SCHAIM: Hey Chris. Glad to be here.
CB: Yeah. So we have been doing a intense few week bit of chart research in preparation for this episode. We have over a hundred example charts; we actually have quite a bit that we’re gonna get through today. It’s been very ambitious, but we had to – we kind of set the bar high with our previous episode I think.
LS: Yeah, absolutely. It was very comprehensive, so I think we made it somehow even more comprehensive this time.
CB: Yeah. I think we estimated that we had like, 70-ish charts last time and this time we have well over a hundred charts. So we will see how that goes and how long it takes us. In terms of the structure of this episode, we’re gonna spend a little bit of time at the beginning talking about the significations of the 3rd house in general. Then we’re going to jump right into looking at example charts of the placement of the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd house and showing how that’s worked out in the lives of different celebrity birth charts in order to give you a real demonstration of what the 3rd house actually means in people’s lives.
Then after the ruler of the Ascendant section, we’re gonna jump into a larger section on the rulers of the different houses either in the 3rd house or the ruler of the 3rd house itself in each of the 12 houses so that we go through almost like, comprehensively through different combinations of what happens when the ruler of the 3rd house is in the 7th house or the 10th house or what have you.
Then finally in the very last section, we’re going to go into the planets and we’re gonna look at what it means when each of the planets is placed in the 3rd house with two to three celebrity example charts per planet. So if we’re still alive by the end of that, then we’re gonna do a little conclusion and sort of like, wrap things up. But I think we have a pretty ambitious day ahead of us.
LS: We do, we do. So yeah, it’s a little daunting, but it’s also exciting. We have lots of really cool charts to show you, and yeah, just different combinations and how they work out in real life, so.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And yeah, this is something that otherwise could be like, a book or be like, a full weekend workshop. But we’re gonna see what we can do about sort of condensing it down into a singular episode that’s like, a definitive take on this topic so that it’ll be like, the one time I ever talk about the 3rd house and then I’ll never have to talk about it again because I will have dealt with it so comprehensively. All right so —
LS: Absolutely.
CB: — let’s jump right into it. Let’s jump into the significations of the 3rd house and talk about the astronomy of it and what it means.
So here’s our usual diagram that shows the basic setup of the 12 houses. We see the 3rd house there in the bottom left. So in terms of the significations, the meaning of the 3rd house and the astronomy of it, in whole sign houses, the 3rd house is the 3rd sign of the zodiac relative to the rising sign. So whatever your rising sign is, you just count three signs counterclockwise, and that will tell you where the 3rd house is located in your chart.
In quadrant house systems, the 3rd house is the sector that is declining from the degree of the IC towards the bottom of the chart and just to the left of the IC. So that’s where it’s sort of located in a lot of charts that cast different quadrant house systems.
So in terms of other meanings of the 3rd house, in terms of just the core significations really briefly, the primary significations of the 3rd house is that it signifies siblings, relatives, neighbors, local travel, communication, and early education. So the 3rd house is also said to be the house where the Moon rejoices or it’s the place of the joy of the Moon. And some of the significations of the 3rd house are actually derived from the Moon. And one of the things for this reason is that in ancient Greco-Roman astrology, they called the 3rd house the house of the goddess. So in Hellenistic astrology they’ll sometimes instead of referring to it as the 3rd house, they’ll just say, “When such-and-such planet is in the place of the goddess,” and they’ll be referring to the 3rd house because that’s its official name. And it’s the house of goddess, which is opposite to the 9th house, which is the house associated with the Sun and is said to be the house of god.
The 3rd house is one of the fortunate houses because it’s sextile with the Ascendant, so it has a favorable aspect to the Ascendant. Even though it’s weaker through a sextile, it’s still said to be one of the more positive or auspicious houses.
Finally, it’s a cadent house that’s falling away from the 4th house, and it’s the start of a new what we call angular triad or a new sequence of houses, which is the 3rd, 4th, and 5th, which form kind of like a unit or what we might call like, an angular triad. And this sequence of three houses is associated in ancient astrology with the element of earth because it’s down at the very bottom of the chart, which is – from our perspective – under the horizon. So the 4th house then is kind of like the roots of your chart with the roots down with the 3rd, 4th, and 5th houses, and then you can imagine like, the top of the tree being up towards the 10th house at the very top of the chart, which is the most public area.
So this sets up kind of a dynamic of the bottom of the chart is like, your private life; the top of the chart is like, your public life. The first house and that sector of three houses relates to self, and the 7th house and that set of three houses relates to the other. So everything then is relative to especially those four angular houses where, for example, with the 4th house, that’s sort of the starting point, and that’s the foundation, and the 4th house represents your home, your parents, and your private life.
The 5th house, which comes up or follows after the 4th house, represents your children. So it’s like the continuation of your family lineage. And the 3rd house is falling away from or extending away from the 4th house, so for that reason it represents your extended family, which can be like, siblings but also aunts, uncles, cousins, and other things like that.
All right. So let’s talk about that as our first set of significations. One of the primary significations of the 3rd house is that it signifies siblings. So that can mean brothers, sisters, but also it can mean half-siblings or step-siblings; it’s basically just the people in your life that have that relationship to you essentially, right?
LS: Yeah. So siblings or people who are like siblings. Cousins also go in there. I often like to say about the 3rd house it’s like, siblings, cousins, and other assorted relatives. It’s kind of like the jumble of your family that’s not your parents.
CB: Yeah. For sure. And relatives is one of the ancient significations already in the 2nd century that Vettius Valens gives, so we’re talking about your like, extended family and your kin. So it’s like, you know, that includes siblings, but it’s also people that are sort of outside of that as an extension of the 4th house, which is like the core family, which is your parents.
LS: Right.
CB: So this can also then extend to things like aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, and you know there’s some people that have siblings or have a large extended family, and then there’s other people that, you know, don’t have siblings or don’t have a large extended family. So in terms of some of these people, this area is not always super important in some people’s life. But in other people, for other people, especially if they have a lot of placements there, it can be very important. So that’s one of the reasons why, as we’ll see in the example charts, this can be a crucial area. And one of the things that’s interesting about it is it’s the first area where you encounter other people, at least in the sequence of the houses. Because the first house that we dealt with first is really about you or your sense of self and your identity and existence. The 2nd house is about your finances. But then when you get to the 3rd house, suddenly we’re dealing with like, other people in the native’s life that are around them.
LS: Right. And you might think, like, oh, well, why are half-siblings important in my chart? But this is sort of a traditional astrology view of the chart, which has to represent kind of everyone and everything in your life, not just you. And so this is where those people go in your chart. And yeah, for some people that’s not really – you might think like, “Why is this very important?” But if it’s not very important for you, you probably don’t have really major things going on with the 3rd house, whereas for someone else, this is like, oh yeah, this is really central. I’ve talked with clients who are like, “Oh yeah, absolutely I have a huge extended family and they’re always over every weekend,” and that kind of thing.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So another area that sometimes there’s some debate about this whether grandparents go here or in the 4th house. I know we were having some disagreement about it. It’s not really settled, but it’s interesting. I do have like, one chart example where somebody was raised by their grandmother and they had the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd. So I feel like sometimes grandparents because the 3rd also sort of like, comes before the 4th, and that may be – to me, that’s part of the reason why I think at least symbolically the 3rd may relate to grandparents as extended family because then you actually get an interesting sequence of the family lineage, which would be like, 3rd house grandparents, 4th house parents, 5th house children and the continuation of your lineage in some way.
LS: For sure. Definitely symbolically it would make sense that way. I feel like I’ve seen a couple like that; it would be interesting to do like, a huge study on it. I wanted to say a funny interjection about siblings, which was as I was getting ready today, I got a little delayed because my sister called and needed to talk to me very, you know, immediately about something important, and I just thought it was a funny invocation of the topic today.
CB: Nice. Yeah. That happens. All right. So let’s move on to the next topic. So the next major topic for the 3rd house is your neighbors and your neighborhood. So it’s like, if the 4th house itself is your home and your living situation, the 3rd house is sort of everything that’s around that. So it’s places that are around your home and around your local city, essentially.
LS: Right. So it’s kind of like the 4th house is your actual home, and then extending from that kind of like we extended from the immediate family or your parents out towards extended family, this is like the extension of your home into your neighborhood, like your immediate neighborhood, or your city, things that are in walking distance from your home, things like that. So especially local community goes there.
CB: Yeah. So community is a really important and central topic for the 3rd house, and that’s something that we’re gonna see at different points during the course of our example charts. And you know, for some people, you know, neighbors is like, a positive topic where it’s like, they have good neighbors that they get along with and they have positive placements in their chart there. But for other people, the topic of neighbors, if they have difficult placements there, they may have like, bad luck with neighbors, or they just may happen to find themselves in like, a situation where a neighbor like, gets in a fight with them or something like that during a bad transit. And it’s actually really funny how that can actually work out very literally in the chart if you’re paying attention to your transits.
LS: Absolutely. And if you think, like, neighbors is not an important astrological topic, then you probably haven’t had like, a really bad, you know, 3rd house transit or bad 3rd house or ruler of the 3rd placement, because then it really does stand out to you as an important part of your life.
CB: Yeah, for sure. We’ve had some bad neighbors in the past.
LS: Yeah.
CB: I had a neighbor where they got like, a dog once, and it would bark like, over my head constantly with these super thin walls starting at like, four or five AM each day when the neighbors left for work. And it was just torture, and it was a really – I think it was like, a Mars transit at the time, a Mars retrograde or something.
LS: Yeah, it was really quite strikingly literal like that.
CB: Yeah. All right. So community more broadly, your immediate environment. You had pointed out that there’s actually a concept called 3rd places in sociology that weirdly is very similar connected to this.
LS: Yeah, and it’s funny that it even has “third” in the word, right, for the 3rd house. Yeah, 3rd places, it’s a sociological concept – basically places that are not your home or work that people go to gather in local community. So that can be things like public libraries, bars, coffee shops, public parks, things of that nature. And you know, the argument around that is it’s actually an incredibly vital piece of people’s wellbeing to have like, local community gathering places. So it fits perfectly here in the 3rd house.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense, even like, churches for example would be like, a local community gathering place.
LS: Right.
CB: All right. So another topic that comes up – Vettius Valens in the 2nd century mentions authority in connection with the 3rd house, and during the course of our research, one of the ways that this came through is realizing that it can have to do with local governance. And just as the 3rd house is about community, if you have prominent placements there in your chart, there’s some people that actually get involved in their community or even get involved in the local government and sometimes can rise to positions of prominence in terms of that. So we’ll have one example later of like, Harvey Milk for example was one of your examples who did local governance in San Francisco. Or we have another example of somebody that became the mayor of a city, for example.
LS: Yeah, we have a mayor – yeah, so it can be like, city governance. It can be neighborhood oriented organizations. It can be even HOAs, because that’s like, a governance of your neighbors.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So and then that also leads to the topic of community organizing. So in a number of our chart examples that we’ll get to, we’ll see that the topic of community organizing can sometimes be important because it involves working with the local neighborhood and the local community.
LS: Definitely.
CB: All right. So another signification that comes up, and this is more emphasized in the ancient Hellenistic texts where some of the earliest authors also associate the 3rd house with friendship. And in more recent times, the 11th house really for quite a long time has become the primary house of friends, and that’s typically where astrologers look to. But we have seen this as being useful actually, and especially to the extent that it relates I think primarily to especially like your early childhood friends, which oftentimes are the people that you grew up with in your neighborhood. So they’ll be like, you know, the kids that you grew up around your block that you became friends with as a result of the especially the proximity to them. And then that becomes some of your earliest socialization. So it’s like, the kids you grew up with to some extent. And then sometimes when people like, move away from home, they’ll come back to visit occasionally, and one of the things you do is like, reconnect with your old friends who still live in your hometown.
LS: Right. I’m very much used to thinking about the 11th house as friends or even the 7th house as like, best friends. But I was very persuaded by some of the chart examples that we went through in preparing for this that some – and I think it’s because it’s more important for some people than others, right, where you know if they have a concentration around the 3rd house or the 3rd house ruler, it’s like, the people they grew up with or their earlier friends like in elementary school or even high school actually are really important and they do fall there symbolically.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So you know, that’s a non-typical signification in modern times. So what we’re doing here in this episode, we’re gonna focus especially primarily on traditional ancient significations, but in some instances that it means we’re reviving some ancient significations from some ancient authors and seeing if they work or how they work in a modern context, and this is one of them.
So one last thing to mention here in this area is local acquaintances. So it’s like, you know, people that you make local acquaintances with in your neighborhood that maybe you know casually because let’s say you go into a store all the time and you make an acquaintance with like, somebody that works there, for example.
LS: I was thinking about being a regular, like, at a coffee shop or a neighborhood bar or something like that where you have some people who are like, fixtures in the local community places like that, and I would expect they would have 3rd house things going on. But those are also the places where you see people repetitively, like the baristas at your coffee shop. You can tell my coffee shop is like, a primary 3rd house thing for me.
CB: Yeah, for sure. You do spend a lot of time at coffee shops.
LS: I do.
CB: All right. So well I wrote my book at a coffee shop, actually, now that to think about it, so I guess I do too.
LS: Right, which is actually really funny in terms of doubling up 3rd house significations.
CB: Right. Writing books at coffee shops.
LS: Yes.
CB: All right. So moving on – another major topic of the 3rd house is travel. And in the ancient Hellenistic tradition, all of the cadent houses – but especially the 3rd and 9th – had to do with travel. In later traditions, this got specified even further so that the 3rd house became associated with short distance travel and the 9th house with long distance, especially international travel. And this is partially mirroring the like, Sun-Moon joys with the Moon having its joy in the 3rd house and moving so quickly, where it moves around the zodiac over the course of a month, versus the Sun having its joy in the 9th house and the Sun taking an entire year to move around through all the signs of the zodiac.
So that’s still a relevant distinction that there’s like, a connection sometimes and oftentimes when it comes to opposing houses, they have intertwined significations in some ways, and there can be either overlap or you can have like, two sides of the same coin in some sense.
LS: Sometimes they can overlap in significations in a surprising amount. Other times, there is this distinction where 3rd house really does correlate more to like, local travel or, you know, moving around your city, that kind of thing, whereas the 9th house is more like flying to another country. But it’s not a hard and fast thing. Like, those are tendencies for sure between the 3rd and 9th, but sometimes it’s just travel.
CB: Yeah. For sure. But for the most part, what we’re focused on with the 3rd house is gonna be short distance journeys, which oftentimes means local travel within your city or sometimes more broadly within the context of your country. But usually it’s like, city-based travel. As well as modes of transportation and what you do to get around a city. Like, you know, driving in your car. You know, a while ago, it was like, riding on horses, although you know, some people still do that. Riding a bike, a motorcycle, et cetera. So it’s all of those sort of like, short distance forms of travel all fall under the domain of the 3rd house.
LS: Right. I used to really laugh at like, cars showing up in the 3rd because it’s just, I don’t know, literal astrology amuses me. You know, astrology is not just metaphorical; it can be just incredibly concrete and literal. And so I would say something, you know, like, a metaphor around cars to a client, and they’d be like, “Oh no, I just had to do that with my car.” And when we looked for charts for today, there’s just so many of those like, all of the different modes of transportation showing up.
CB: Yeah. Like, cars sometimes can be very literal and very important. We’ll see some people that have like, career significators tied in with the 3rd house, and they literally are professional racecar drivers, for example. Or yeah, there’s lots of different combinations, so we’ll see how that becomes important.
One of the things I also realized within the context of the travel category and especially when I was going through a lot of the example charts in the research for this is that the 3rd house also just represents movement in general. So that’s really clear when it comes to like, cars, horses, bikes, motorcycles, and just traveling around your local city. But I realized in some individuals, it even gets manifested just in like, movement of the body in some way being like, a key aspect to what they do in life. And we’ll see some interesting examples of that later on.
LS: Right. For sure. Movement of the body or just the ability to move around. You know, movement goes in the 3rd house for sure.
CB: Yeah, which can mean the ability to move or sometimes the inability to move, which can be just as important. But the key archetype there is just movement.
LS: Right.
CB: All right. So moving on – another huge signification of the 3rd house is communication. And communication seems to be the top level sort of archetype or signification that a lot of other stuff flows from. And this is kind of interesting because communication wasn’t emphasized a lot in the Hellenistic tradition; it’s actually not mentioned until you get to the medieval authors, and then all of a sudden, the early medieval authors start talking about letters and messages associating with that, with the 3rd house, partially due to the Moon and the Moon moving the fastest of all of the celestial bodies, so therefore it sort of around that time they also had the introduction of concepts like transfer of light where the Moon can like, transfer light from one planet and move it to another. So it may have been out of that idea that we really started getting this idea of messages and messengers, but I think today a really core level signification is communication, and that can be extended to writing, to messages, but also to speaking and to more broad concepts like your voice. Or one of the things I know you focused on was like, how you express yourself.
LS: And the different colorations of the 3rd house or the 3rd house ruler, meaning something about how people prefer to express themselves, whether that’s like, through writing or through painting or, you know, singing or whatnot.
CB: Yeah, as well as their like, style within those. Like I have some different examples that we’ll see of singers that do like, different types of singing or have different like, flavors of singing based on like, the zodiac sign that’s on their 3rd house.
LS: Which can be really interesting to watch.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So more broadly, it can also relate to conveying information or disseminating information through different means. And we’ll see some examples of that later.
All right. Oh yeah, one of the things I meant to mention about that with the Hellenistic tradition – the Egyptian tradition originally associated the god Thoth with the Moon, and Thoth was the god of writing. So even if like, communication doesn’t show up as a major signification of the 3rd house in some of the Hellenistic authors, I feel like there was some sort of inherent understanding of that that must have been present to some extent in that tradition or in some of the Egyptian parts of that tradition early on, even if it’s not fully evident in some of the texts that survive to this day.
LS: Yeah, that’s really interesting.
CB: Yeah. All right. So early education is another major 3rd house topic. So usually in modern times this has become differentiated where the 3rd house represents early childhood education especially, which is like, in the US we would say like, kindergarten through high school or primary school, versus the 9th house which is usually associated with university or with college education essentially.
LS: Right. Yeah. And it’s one of those – education is kind of like travel in that there are these distinctions between the 3rd and the 9th and they often show up that way, and then occasionally it’s just like, education more broadly that does cross the 3rd and the 9th. There are a few topics like that, because opposing houses can always have some overlaps like that. But yeah, quite often you will see the earlier education showing up in the 3rd house and/or informal education, so I’m thinking like, non-degree based things, like one-off workshops or you know, smaller amounts of time of education that don’t lead to a degree.
CB: Right. So that can lead to like, learning in general, and I was interested to see in Al-Biruni and Ibn Ezra in the late medieval and also late Islamic tradition, they mention knowledge as a signification of the 3rd house.
LS: Yeah, that’s interesting, as sort of flowing from the information.
CB: Right, exactly. So and we’ll see some people where that shows up very prominently where sometimes if people have like, a career significator there – I had one person that was like, a teacher or that became a principal of a high school. Or we’ll see other people, we’ll see several examples during the course of this of celebrities who were influenced in a really major way with their overall career and life direction by a high school teacher who put them on the track that they would later end up on. Or there were other, like, there’s a couple comedians, for example, who really got their start in grade school or elementary school, like, doing little comedy routines for their class for like, 10 or 15 minutes a day where their teacher would allow them to do a little routine for 10 minutes, and that was like, a major thing for them. So even though it seems like a not major signification, it can actually be really crucial for some people.
LS: It can be. And even if it doesn’t feel like it is later in life – it still is for some people, but even if it doesn’t – that’s like, a large swath of your, you know, childhood, of your childhood experience in that house is like, going to school.
CB: Yeah, your childhood experience and like, your formative years and formative experiences, which it’s like —
LS: Especially with education.
CB: Right. Which it’s like, you’re getting that from your parents, of course. Like, everybody realizes how important the experiences are in your early home life, but part of that is also are things that are adjacent to that can be like, your experiences in school growing up and whether that went well or whether you ran into problems for some reason.
LS: Which can strikingly correlate with the symbolism in the 3rd house for people.
CB: Right. All right, and one last set of significations. So the Hellenistic authors really emphasized divination, dreams, and sometimes religious rites. And this is something that’s dropped out because it’s mainly – usually the focus of divination and prophecy and other stuff like that usually at this point is more put in the 9th house, and it does actually come up there quite a bit. But this is something that we were kind of keeping an eye out for as we were doing some of this, and we did find some charts where divination especially seemed to be very relevant for the 3rd house.
LS: Yeah. It is a crossover again with the 3rd and 9th, but it’s interesting how if you think about the 9th being more like religion as a big picture or your ideology or things like that, your worldview, the 3rd house being more locally based with some of those other topics of the 3rd house, it’s kind of like your embodied practice of that sometimes. It’s also really interesting thinking about it in terms of communication, right, because what do you do with a divination? You ask a question. So you’re like, asking a question of something or someone, kind of, you know, implicitly. And so it’s kind of an interesting extension of communication as well.
CB: Right. Like, a communication with the divine, and the concept that the universe can speak to you but also that it’s also being oftentimes or sometimes mediated through the diviner. If you like, go to somebody and get a tarot card reading, you’re having like, a conversation or a dialogue with them.
LS: Absolutely. This is also I’m thinking like, more home based. Like, something you can do on your own at home, which is like, an extension of the 4th house versus like, you know, I don’t know, going to like, a nationally affiliated temple, for instance, in the 9th house.
CB: Right, for sure. And with religious rites, there was one celebrity I saw where they mentioned like, their daily prayer routine. And so it made me think of that in terms of that may be a modern parallel for people that have some sort of not just both daily routines but also if there’s some sort of daily prayer or other thing like that or other little minor forms of religious worship, that may be something that belongs in the 3rd house. The 3rd house is referred to in the Hellenistic tradition, it’s one of the houses that’s said to be in between worlds because the cadent houses are falling away from the angle and they’re transitioning – or the sign or planets there are transitioning – into the next angular triad. So as a result of that, you’ll see these topics of being in between two worlds being very significant. Like, Rhetorius talks about the 12th house being the in between worlds because it’s the dividing point between before the native is born and then after they’ve been born, but when you’re right on the cusp or standing in between those two worlds. But he extends that concept also to the 3rd house as well as the 9th and 6th.
LS: Yeah. I can totally see that playing out, and it’s also like being an intermediary could be a thing there too with the in between worlds.
CB: Yeah. As well as like, traveling. Like, sometimes when you’re traveling even short distances, you’re going in between two worlds if you’re going like, from home to the coffee shop or you know, what have you.
LS: Definitely.
CB: All right. So those are all the basic significations. For those that want a deeper dive into that, three resources first – my book, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, where I go into the rationale underlying the houses much more deeply and talk about the early Hellenistic authors and what they say about the houses, which we sort of like, alluded to a little bit here, but if you want more of that then check that out. I would also highly, highly recommend Demetra George’s book, Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice, Volume II where she does this just like, comprehensive overview not just of what the ancient authors say, but she also takes it through the medieval and renaissance and modern authors, and she gives this amazing like, table where she will summarize the primary significations of what all of those authors say, basically, over the past 2,000 years about the 3rd house. And you can really see the evolution of what they were saying about that house and how it sometimes grew and changed and in other ways what the throughline was and what certain significations were that were constant. So a lot of the significations that we put forward here were just based on our basic understanding as well as our empirical studies of the charts and some of the things that came up as we were preparing for this, but I also looked through Demetra’s in order to get a sense of that literature review that she did and what different significations were, and that was helpful at certain points, so I wanted to definitely recommend that book if people want a deeper dive on the significations of the houses.
LS: It’s a really useful reference to compare and contrast like that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And then finally the last one is Levente Laszlo – shout out for his translations of Rhetorius and other Hellenistic authors, which he’s crowdfunding and making available through his page on Patreon under the Horoi Project, which is at HoroiProject.com and then there you’ll find a link to his Patreon where once, if you sign up for it, it’s actually very cheap, you get immediate access to all of his translations of these ancient authors. And right now, he’s doing a series of translations of the longest text on the houses that survives from ancient times, which is from Rhetorius of Egypt, and he’s going through and he was releasing one chapter of that each month this year. And I drew on the 3rd house chapter that he did from Rhetorius recently that was very helpful for getting to some of those original significations of the houses.
LS: Yeah. Definitely shout out to him; it’s really exciting that someone is still doing that work right now, and you can support him.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that is the significations of the houses.
All right. So now we’re gonna transition into looking at example charts, and first I need to do a little preface before we get there. So first things first, I wanted to give thanks and give a shout out to some of the people that gave us research assistance as we were searching for chart examples for this episode. So in particular, a shout out to astrologers Nick Dagan Best, Orla on Twitter at OCAstrology on Twitter or X, Melissa Marklin, and Lindsey Turner. So they all gave us helpful support as we were researching this episode and finding different charts and doing write ups and stuff, so that was helpful. Patrick Watson also gave me a few examples, and Madeline DeCotes actually gave us an example as well, I think, right?
LS: Yep.
CB: Yeah. So also shout out to everybody who sent in examples on social media as well as a number of patrons who sent in examples. We appreciate it.
LS: Thank you. It’s the only way to collect this many charts.
CB: Yeah. I mean, most of them I still found and you —
LS: Yes.
CB: — found, but it was helpful that we got some from different people.
All right. So other than that preface to example charts, just a few prefatory remarks. One, this is not gonna be fully comprehensive, even if it looks like it. We’re gonna cover a lot, but the point is just to give you a sample of some of the different ways that the placements can manifest instead of delineating every possible thing. So obviously there’s gonna be some things that we’re not gonna address, you know, which is fine. We can only do so much.
Sometimes we’re gonna give negative examples, and of course, negative placements or different placements will not always manifest that way. But the point is just to give you an idea of the full range of different possibilities.
For some difficult placements, we’re gonna focus on more difficult things. This is important; it doesn’t mean that these placements will always manifest super negatively, but sometimes it’s necessary to be able to address difficult topics just because sometimes people can face real hardships or adversity or even disability in certain areas. And so astrology and astrologers need to be able to speak to those topics. And that’s sometimes where you’ll find some of those things. Right?
LS: And if you’re just getting into astrology and listening to this, this isn’t the only way these can play out. There’s lots of different, you know, sub factors that influence each other in the chart. So just know that we’re not trying to say like, “This is the only way this plays out and it’s always negative and you’re doomed.” That is not the message. This is just how these particular very complex, you know, combinations of factors play out in this particular person’s life.
CB: Right, for sure. And we’re gonna focus on more like, literal manifestations for the most part that are like, obvious external things, but there can be a whole range of both external as well as like, internal or psychological manifestations.
LS: For sure.
CB: All right. So let’s see, this is not really a casual like, podcast episode, obviously. This is a workshop or an intensive. This is something I could normally actually turn into a book or do over the course of like, a whole two to three day weekend where people would like, fly out and see this presentation as a full intensive. But we’re gonna do it and put it out there as like, a free podcast because of the support that we receive from patrons through our page on Patreon and other things that allow us to do that. But for me, I wanted to do a comprehensive treatment of this topic that was like, if I’m only gonna talk about this topic one time, this is gonna be my best and most comprehensive shot at it. So that’s the goal here. Yeah. So I make no apologies for whatever the final length of the episode ends up being; we’ll see how it goes. But we’re putting it out there for free, so yeah, if deep dives are too much for you, it’s okay and you can turn back now.
LS: Fair warning.
CB: All right. Yeah, it’s fair warning. Important things often show up in multiple ways in the chart, so we’re gonna focus on a few specific things, but there may be other things that we don’t point out just because that’s not our focus or other observations that others might see that we overlooked. So if you see something interesting, then feel free to post it in the YouTube comments and let us know.
There are more timed charts in the databases, unfortunately, for men than there are women, which creates a disparity. And you know, we’ve done our best to try to offset that to some extent here, but you know, for example, as of this recording, there still has not been a woman president of the United States. So part of the issue is it’s not just the databases, but it’s how it’s the place of women in society up to this point and how different things have become in recent times compared to the vast majority of past history, and that creates some issues in terms of doing research and stuff like this. So for the sake of presenting the best examples, we’ll have to deal with the existence of this disparity, although we do try to offset it. Although hopefully in the future, this will cease to be an issue or as much of an issue both in the data collections as well as in our society in general.
LS: Yeah. And it’s not just like, people’s place in society but also who’s gathered the birth times from which people. And so we have to work with the birth times that are available because this requires timed charts, what we’re doing here, and most of what we’re doing. And so we did actually make a big effort to try to balance things out in different ways, but we also need like, good examples of what we’re talking about. So just as a heads up.
CB: Yeah. So there’s a lot of timed charts for men in the databases, but that’s one of the opportunities and I think one of the things that I’m starting to see change with this generation is, especially if this generation of astrologers gets empowered to go out and ask especially celebrities for their birth time, of people that they are fans of or people that they find interesting or people that are in the news, then that will start to offset this disparity. But it’s sort of like, a community thing that we all have to be involved in, each individual astrologer, to help fix that sort of gap in our community.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah. And then finally, as I said in the 2nd house episode, Leisa’s here helping me to present a lot of my research for this because I can’t speak for long periods of time on my own anymore because my voice goes out due to my issues with long covid. So I always need to have somebody here to talk to, even when I’m presenting stuff that’s like, oftentimes more things that I’ve researched more thoroughly where most of my chart examples in this episode are gonna be from me. And that’s just like, part of the deal. However, I just wanted to make that clear just in case it seems like I’m talking about more of these examples at different points. Although in this episode, you’ve been – Leisa’s been – much more involved, and this has been much more of a collaborative effort between the two of us over the past few weeks than the previous episode on the 2nd house.
LS: Yeah. Last time I just kind of jumped in at the last minute, more or less, but this time I have been working on it a little bit more and it’s been more of a dialogue and I found more chart examples as well.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And that’s been like, hugely instrumental, so this is definitely more of a collaboration. I’m still gonna be going on more about certain example charts; there’s gonna be certain parts that I’m more familiar with or others where you’ve contributed more in certain sections. But yeah, so just to preface to that, but it’s been exciting putting this together with you and it’s been really fulfilling over the past few weeks.
LS: Yeah, definitely. I think so too.
CB: I think that’s it. Shall we jump into the ruler of the Ascendant?
LS: We should.
CB: All right. Here we go. So I’m gonna start first – the ruler of the Ascendant, as I said in a previous episode, is one of the most important planets in the chart, and it can show something about the native’s overall life direction and focus. So when the ruler of the Ascendant is placed in the 3rd house, it means that some of those topics are gonna be more important for you in directing something about your overall life story towards that specific area or making it so that some important turning points in your life have to do or rise from 3rd house things.
So in this section, we are going to talk about some ruler of the Ascendant placements, and unfortunately in order to set up my very first and best example, I first have to do an example of somebody that had the ruler of the 10th house of career in the 3rd house of relatives.
So let’s pull it up. So that person is Queen Elizabeth II. So Queen Elizabeth II, who just passed away a few years ago had Capricorn rising and Libra on the 10th whole sign house where the Lot of Fortune is placed. And the ruler of the 10th whole sign house of career is Venus, which is placed in Libra – I’m sorry, Venus is placed in Pisces, where it’s exalted in the 3rd house, which is the place of siblings, relatives, aunts, uncles, and extended family.
So what was interesting about Queen Elizabeth and what’s interesting about her life is that originally, she wasn’t supposed to be queen. It was her uncle that was king, but what happened is that he suddenly decided that he wanted to marry a commoner, basically, and in order to do that, he had to step down as king. So he stepped down as king so he could run off and get married, and that made Queen Elizabeth’s father king, which then put Queen Elizabeth in the line of succession where she would eventually become queen after her father died not too long afterwards.
So what’s interesting about this example is that with the ruler of the 10th house of career so well placed in the 3rd house that it’s pointing to the fact that her uncle basically would abdicate, which would end up making her queen. And it’s interesting that it’s like, copresent with Uranus in Pisces at the same time also in her 3rd house, because it was kind of like, unexpected. It’s something that wasn’t supposed to happen.
LS: Yeah, it wasn’t supposed to happen, and so it’s interesting that the ruler of the 10th is with Uranus and so, like, a change of plans like, led to basically her place in society or her prominence in society. Venus is also not just exalted in Pisces, but it is in a night chart, so that’s like, the most positive placement. And so literally like, she became very prominent – like, an exalted planet can also just like, indicate prominence as well as something positive about it – via a relative, the change of plans from a relative.
CB: Right. And specifically her uncle, basically. Yeah. So that is the example, and that’s the set up. And so the payoff for our purposes additionally is the birth chart of her sister. This is the birth chart of her sister Princess Margaret, who was born with Aries rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant then is Mars, the planet that rules Aries, and it’s placed in Gemini in the 3rd whole sign house. So the ruler of her Ascendant is placed in the house of siblings. So you know, her and Elizabeth grew up together, but then when this change happened when their uncle abdicated – their father’s brother abdicated the crown and gave it to the father – all of a sudden, it meant that Margaret’s sister was the queen. So all of a sudden, this kind of changes the dynamic between these two siblings, but it also sets it up so that Margaret then was the second in line to the throne if something had happened to Elizabeth. So as a result of that, there was not a tension but there was an open question of, you know, could I become queen if something happens to my sister? And more broadly also that once her sister became queen and was put in power, a lot of Margaret’s life then was sort of not dictated by but kind of built around what her sister was doing as the queen at that point.
LS: And I’m sure it played out in other ways as well, but just think of if you’re the sibling of someone really famous in society – like, that is just literally how you’re gonna first be known. You’re the sister of the queen, right? Like, even if you do other things and even if you do other 3rd house things, that’s just like a prominent part of her identity as a whole throughout her whole life with her Ascendant ruler being placed there.
CB: Yeah, totally. One of the things that’s cool is that there was actually an eclipse in the sign of Gemini earlier in the same year that her sister became queen and her uncle abdicated. So that’s a theme that we’re gonna see a lot —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — is just we found a ton of examples where the major event that was indicated in the birth chart and then that we talk about will actually be foreshadowed or the timing will line up either by a transit or especially by an eclipse around the time of the event.
LS: Yeah. We both found a ton of those. It was like, comical after a while. It’s like, okay, yes, it’s highlighting the 3rd house and change in 3rd house.
CB: Right. So when it comes to this story, her position in the line of succession did diminish over the following decades as Elizabeth had children and grandchildren so that they became the ones that were in the line of succession. But nonetheless, her life was still inherently sort of tied to the monarchy. So while many siblings share close relationships, the unique circumstances of their royal lives really made Princess Margaret’s life particularly intertwined with that of her sister, Queen Elizabeth II.
LS: Yeah. Definitely.
CB: So that is my starting example. What do you think?
LS: No, I think that’s great, you know, because that is what the Ascendant ruler is doing wherever the Ascendant ruler is placed by house and sign and aspects. That’s like, saying something about your identity or how you are known as a person. So yeah, that’s like, a perfect first example.
CB: Yeah, and that’s what you have to ask sometimes if you have like, a client or you have somebody come in and they have the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd, one of your first questions is like, are siblings or the topic of relatives somehow important to you in some significant way in your life? And it’s like, if Princess Margaret like, walked into your office anonymously and you didn’t know who she was and you said that, she would be like, “Well, yes – yes, they are!”
LS: Right?
CB: “You know, it’s funny you mention that, because my sibling is the queen.”
LS: Totally. Yeah. And I think it’s, you know, it’s an important illustration because the 3rd house by itself, it’s not an angular house. It doesn’t otherwise stand out. So the ways it can stand out or the ways those topics can become more important or more prominent in someone’s life are things like the Ascendant ruler placed there and bringing those topics to the forefront, or the sect light – like, the Sun or Moon being placed in there, or you know, so forth. There’s different factors that can do that, whereas for people who don’t have any of those major things going on, it’s like, “Eh, 3rd house stuff, whatever. I have siblings, yeah, but it’s not a big deal.” You know? And so that’s part of the distinction there of like, why and how that can become more important in someone’s life.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
All right, so let’s move on to my next example, which is the birth chart of Walt Disney. So everybody knows who Walt Disney is. He was the founder of Disney, the animation company and animation studio, which today still makes all of those like, major animated features that we all sort of grew up watching, pretty much everyone around the world at this point. And there’s some interesting things just about his ruler of the Ascendant being in the 3rd house of communication and then the ruler of his 3rd house of communication is Mars, which is placed in the 5th house of children and the fact that he created, you know, this entire animation studio that was really into storytelling and especially retelling old fairy tales for children. So essentially, part of his example with the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd is that he helped pioneer a new medium of communication through animation.
However, not well known this day, he actually had a brother that was very important in his life whose name was Roy O. Disney. And Roy was a crucial figure in the creation and success of the Disney company where he served as its cofounder and first CEO, and he was basically responsible for much of the business and financial side of the company while Walt Disney focused on the creative aspects of it. So they were really like, a brother duo basically that were working together to create this empire.
LS: Right. Which is funny because you can see like, the drawing aspect and the creating stories as the 3rd house, which is the Ascendant ruler being placed there. But then the ruler of the 3rd being in the 5th is like, Mars in Capricorn, Mars exalted in Capricorn, right? Which is very much like a CEO of a company.
CB: Yeah, totally. So right, the brother being the CEO – the brother is like, the ruler of the house.
LS: Right.
CB: So other interesting facts, though, that are kind of funny is that Walt Disney, the owner of the chart, actually had a thing for trains. Like, trains come up like, all over the time. He’s almost kind of obsessed with trains. And Patrick Watson actually was the one that pointed this out to me, and it was funny researching it and finding out that that is actually true. Additionally, Disney really liked creating communities and neighborhoods, and that’s essentially what Disney World was originally supposed to be. And if you go on YouTube and look up like, “original plans for Disney World,” you’ll find some really interesting videos about his original plans were far broader. They eventually had to scale it back a bit. But even what it is now you can see how it has all these specialized areas that have different themes and stuff like that, including like, a futuristic area which is like, Epcot, or like a fantasy area or what have you. But he wanted to do more of that, but he was also interested in creating these idealized communities and like, cities. And that’s another interesting way that his ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd house placement manifested.
LS: And it’s interesting when you have the Ascendant ruler there especially, although it can happen with other 3rd house factors too. It’s like, there can be more than one 3rd house topic that’s important in the person’s life and that’s like, three of them right there.
CB: Yeah —
LS: Right? Like —
CB: — exactly.
LS: — mode of transportation with the trains, and neighborhoods, and then animation or storytelling.
CB: Yeah. Communication and writing. So it’s one of the reasons why you kind of when you’re asking a client, you kind of have to ask about a few of the key significations if you see an important planet in their chart there of like, siblings, is communication or short distance travel significant to you in some way.
LS: Right. Because if it’s not one, like, it’ll still be one of the others. You just have to get there.
CB: Right. Well, and sometimes with like, Disney, I always knew about his ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd and thought that was just his, you know, getting into animation and doing that, but I didn’t know that he had like, this brother that was huge in his life. So with some of these when you’re researching chart examples, it really pays to like, search and see if they have 3rd house placements, like, asking did they have an important sibling, and oftentimes you’ll find that the answer is yes.
LS: Right.
CB: All right. So those are my initial examples. Other contemporary examples of people that have prominent 3rd house placements – Logan Paul and Jake Paul actually both have prominent 3rd house placements. So Logan has Capricorn rising with Saturn in the 3rd house of siblings, while Jake has Taurus rising with the Moon ruling the 3rd house of siblings, placed in the first house. So they both contributed to each other’s success on social media, and Logan, who has the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd house also has a major podcast and seems like the more sort of savvy social media person, although he periodically gets himself canceled by doing controversial things since the ruler of the Ascendant is Saturn, and it’s a night chart, so Saturn is the malefic that’s contrary to the sect.
LS: Right. Yeah. So sometimes the trouble is like, coming from yourself, like something you’re doing.
CB: Right. Sometimes as we’ll see it’s like the killer is inside the house, or the call is coming from inside the house.
LS: Yeah.
CB: There’s his chart really quickly, just very briefly for those watching the video version. All right, so other examples – Eddie Van Halen had Venus in Sagittarius as the Ascendant lord in the 3rd house, and he famously started the band Van Halen with his brother.
LS: Nice.
CB: So shout out to Orla for this one, and I think the last one with Logan Paul as well for finding those two. I thought that was brilliant.
Another one I wanted to mention in passing is the actor Armie Hammer was born with Gemini rising and Mercury in Leo in the 3rd whole sign house, and he famously played the Winklevoss twins in David Fincher’s movie on Facebook that was called The Social Network that won so many awards around like, 2010 or so when it came out. So this is interesting, because that was actually a breakout role for him that garnered him a lot of recognition where it was just one guy playing two twins. And so, you know, sometimes the idea of siblings can be literal and other times, especially frequently with like, actors or creative types, sometimes what’s in the chart they end up embodying at some critical point in their life creatively in some way.
LS: Because the astrology itself doesn’t care whether it’s like, fictional or real if you’re actually like, doing something in your life with it. Like, it still matters.
CB: Right. Exactly. So there’s Armie Hammer’s chart. There’s Van Halen’s chart; we can see the ruler of the Ascendant is in the 3rd house in both of those.
Moving on, a more recent example that’s interesting that I wanted to mention briefly is Zendaya was born with Aquarius rising and Saturn in Aries in the 3rd house. So let me put her chart up. There it is. There’s Zendaya’s chart with the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd house. And Zendaya, of course, at this point is famous as an actress as well as a singer, and she’s a really versatile and talented performer who’s achieved success in acting, singing, dancing. She’s also the youngest two-time Emmy award winning actor, achieving this at the age of 26. And there’s actually some interesting things in terms of like, the ruler of the 3rd house of communications is in the 6th house of illness, and she actually got her two Emmys for playing the character Rue Bennet in the show Euphoria, who was the character that really struggled with drug and alcohol addiction that were really central to that character.
But other interesting things about Zendaya is that both of her parents were actually school teachers, and I think her mom is actually still a teacher and her dad has become her manager, but they both started out as school teachers, so we have that 3rd house topic coming up. The other though main reason that Zendaya’s interesting is that she actually has five older half-siblings as well as several nieces and several nephews, and she’s mentioned them a few times. She mentions them in interviews. So I have a few quotes. So one of them it said,
“I have five older siblings. I’m the youngest, so I got to learn and grow through them. I had a lot of people to look up to.”
On the influence of her older sister, she said,
“I look up to my big sister and realize the influence she’s had on me in making me a better person.”
Elsewhere talking about her large family, she says,
“Having such a big, grounded family, I realized as you get older how important that is.”
And then finally on being an aunt with many nieces and nephews, she said,
“I have many, many little nieces and nephews, so they’re like my borrowed children. I get to have fun and then give them back to their parents.”
LS: Nice.
CB: So you know, it’s not like, groundbreaking stuff compared to some of the other ones, but I just thought that was interesting because sometimes what I wanted to point out is just when an important planet is placed in the 3rd, it can really indicate that siblings play a more important role in your life in some way in influencing you as well as that, you know, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, and nieces can also then be more important to you as well. Where in her case, she just has like, a lot of half-siblings and a lot of nieces and nephews.
LS: For sure. And you know, even if it’s the Ascendant ruler there, it doesn’t have to be a career thing, right? The career’s more the 10th house. And you know, the 3rd house being right next to the 4th house of home and being in that, you know, angular triad at the bottom of the chart and sort of more rootedness as you were talking about earlier – it’s like, where you come from or the people around where you came from or your extended family can just literally be more important to some people than others. Right? And it doesn’t have to be something that’s like, a public thing. It’s just more important to them, and it’s like, a part of the chart.
CB: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so you know, she’s also still very young, so it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out in the future and other ways that she grows into and manifests that 3rd house ruler of the Ascendant placement in her chart throughout the course of her life.
LS: Right, which there probably will be more.
CB: Yeah, undoubtedly.
All right. So moving onto my next example – my next chart example is the actor Rami Malek, who is a famous actor at this point, but he really became known hugely a few years ago for – he became best known for playing Freddie Mercury in the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody that came out that was based on the singer where he played the lead singer of that band, Queen. And he actually won an Academy Award for best actor for that role.
So there’s a couple of – two things I wanna focus on with this. The main thing relates to communication and that role, but then the other thing was, you know, it was funny because as I was researching this… Actually, let’s focus on the communication part first and then I’ll introduce the second part.
All right, so he’s best known for playing Freddie Mercury. One of the things that’s really interesting in his chart is that it’s Cancer rising, and the Moon is in Virgo conjunct the IC in the 3rd house. And the lunar significations really come through with him, both in the receptive significations of the Moon but also in the significations of the Moon having to do with the body. Because I think a great keyword for that portrayal is that he really embodied Freddie Mercury in that role. And one of the things that was interesting I looked up was their synastry and it turned out that Rami Malek’s Moon is at 11 degrees of Virgo, and it’s exactly conjunct Freddie Mercury’s Sun, which is also at 11 degrees of Virgo. So I thought that was just stunning that the actor who played in the biopic of this, you know, singer who had died years earlier, that the ruler of his Ascendant was exactly conjunct the Sun of the guy that he was playing.
LS: Yeah, I love that. And you can often see that like, interesting synastry with yeah, actors who are playing other people.
CB: Yeah. But that one was really close and further, what was really interesting was actually the timing of that because I found that when he was auditioning for the role, there was a solar eclipse at nine degrees of Virgo that was very close to Rami Malek’s Moon and Freddie Mercury’s Sun. So there was additionally – it wasn’t just the synastry, but then there was something that came along that showed the actual like, timing of when he took on this role to embody Freddie Mercury. And then subsequent to that, he did this physical transformation where he had to use fake teeth in order to sort of imitate Freddie Mercury’s like, very unique dental structure. But also it wasn’t just acting; he also had to sing. So he worked with a dialect coach and a movement coach in order to get both the voice down and the singing, which is also a 3rd house thing, but also even to imitate his movements by watching like, hundreds of hours of video of him and really trying to get his movements down.
LS: Right. And the singing and the dialect pieces are definitely like, the communicative pieces of the 3rd house, but then the movement you really get the Moon part. Like, the mobility, like how you’re moving your body through space.
CB: Right. Yeah. And this is one of the first examples, this and another example, that really started keying me into that movement and motion are really key archetypes and underlying significations that a lot of other things are derived from when it comes to the 3rd house.
LS: Right.
CB: So he won an Academy Award as best actor for the role; it was the highest grossing musical biographical film of all time. And he’s the first actor of Egyptian heritage to win the Academy Award for best actor. So this is where it was interesting, because he kept coming up when I was searching for like, who has the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd house. He would sometimes come up, but like, I knew he had done that role, but I didn’t know if his like, how compelling the story would be or where that would fall in terms of my research. But then I was researching like, a week or two again famous twins, and at the top of the Google results, like, his face came up. And I’m like, oh my god, and it turns out he actually was born with – he has an identical twin brother named Sami who was born four minutes later. So it’s not just that Rami Malek has the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd and he’s good at communicating and embodying, you know, roles, but it turns out he also has a twin brother who’s also very important to him. And interestingly, his twin brother grew up and became a high school English teacher as well as somebody that teaches English as a second or foreign language. So his brother who has a very similar chart, you know, also embodied the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd house placement.
LS: Right, in two different ways. That’s really interesting in terms of languages and then in terms of early schooling.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So Rami frequently attends his brother’s award shows, or his brother attends his award shows. And they’ve spoken publicly about their admiration. He’s spoken publicly about his admiration for his brother’s dedication to teaching. And they have some funny stories about like, switching places to give a speech when they were younger and things like that. But the last thing that was really interesting about Rami Malek is his parents immigrated to the US from Egypt not too long before he was born, and so he spoke Egyptian Arabic at home until the age of four. So that made him actually bilingual, which is kind of interesting because the Moon is in a mutable sign. But early on, he found it difficult to assimilate because of cultural differences where people especially would mispronounce his name for most of his childhood, and this is something that really bothered him and he said in an interview once that it wasn’t until high school where he finally worked up the courage to start telling people like, how to pronounce his name correctly.
So I thought that was such a first house thing like, to have the ruler of the Ascendant in the first house and the first house represents like, your identity. But to struggle with people like, mispronouncing your name is a very striking manifestation of that.
LS: Right, and especially that that was like, a focus for him in his early childhood years or in his early schooling years, which would, you know, just again echo the Ascendant ruler being in the 3rd.
CB: Yeah. For sure. So he said as a result of that it was difficult for him to find a self identity as a child and he gravitated towards “creating characters and doing voices” as he searched for an outlet for his energy. And this is actually very similar to some other figures that have the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd house like Jim Carrey as we’ll see later who grew up sort of like, doing different voices and then eventually made a career out of that.
LS: Right.
CB: And finally, the last thing – he wanted to be a lawyer, so he joined the debate team in high school, but his debate teacher said he wasn’t any good. But they said he was really good at acting dramatic roles, so his debate teacher in high school noting his talent for drama suggested that he try acting, and that’s actually how he got his start acting through who he said was a “brilliant drama teacher” named Judy Welden. And so both him and his brother became involved in the school’s drama department.
LS: That’s cool. Yeah, and you can sometimes see acting come up in different places or ways in the chart, but it’s interesting that Mars – if I’m remembering; I don’t have the chart up, but – Mars I think is the ruler of the 5th, right? As well as the —
CB: I don’t —
LS: — 10th?
CB: Yeah.
LS: Okay. And the Moon is —
CB: Yeah, it is.
LS: The Moon is closely applying by trine to that Mars, so it’s like, interesting that the 3rd house initial like, debate experience led him to the 5th house and 10th house ruler, which was Ascendant ruler in the 3rd and then applying to the ruler of the 5th and 10th.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
So anyway, that is my example where it’s both like, siblings, communication, and like, high school are very important for him in his life as we can see.
All right, so that’s a transitional figure that transitions us into the next section where we’ll – I wanna focus on examples that have to do with communication. And the most striking example of this that I found that I was so excited when I found it is Jimmy Wales, who’s the founder of Wikipedia, doesn’t just have the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd house but he actually has a mutual reception between the ruler of the first house and the ruler of the 3rd house.
So he has Taurus rising, and Venus is in Cancer in the 3rd whole sign house along with Jupiter and Mars. And then the ruler of the 3rd house is the Moon, which is actually exalted in the sign of Taurus in the rising sign and thus in the first whole sign house of the native. So mutual receptions are extremely important as I talked about in previous episodes like on the rulers of the houses because when the ruler of one house is in another, it shows a connection between those two areas of life, and that’ll manifest at different points in different ways to some extent. But when there’s a mutual reception where the rulers of two houses have exchanged signs, it always shows a super close connection between those two houses. And it oftentimes manifests as just a really dominant theme in the person’s life so that they become some of our best examples as we’ll see during the course of this. And he’s one of the first that really demonstrates that concept.
LS: Right. So what he’s known for is a website that’s literally about information, communication, communicating information, different people contributing to like, a body of information and so forth.
CB: Yeah, it’s like a free online encyclopedia that’s built and maintained by a collaborative community of volunteers around the world. And it’s also – one of the things that’s interesting is its open editing model makes it so that anyone can contribute and improve so that it’s constantly evolving and is a dynamic source of information. And I think that’s really interesting because that really fits the symbolism of the Moon and of Cancer, because the Moon is constantly moving. It’s constantly changing phases. So it has that quality that’s associated within ancient astrology and here we can see a very literal manifestation of that.
LS: Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Because I mean, sometimes you’ll just see like, if the Moon’s like, in the 3rd for example, you’ll see like, people, I don’t know, traveling a lot or something. There’s like, that constant movement. But here it’s like the movement of the information – the ruler of the 3rd in the first being the Moon.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So at this point, it’s the largest and most widely read reference work ever created containing millions of articles in hundreds of languages. So you really bring together all of those different concepts of communication there and writing. He has other relevant background things, but I won’t dwell on them, like his mother and grandmother ran a small private school, he has three siblings, he enjoyed reading, especially after his mom bought him an encyclopedia at age of three and he would read it, and it became an object of reverence. And yeah, we can just see this theme of early childhood education coming up a lot with him in his biography as well as themes of knowledge, writing, and communications.
LS: That’s a perfect example of the 3rd house.
CB: Yeah. You can’t basically get any more perfect than that. If anyone can find a better example, let me know.
LS: Yeah. We may have one that’s like, tied with that in a bit.
CB: Yeah. Well, that’s actually our very next example.
LS: Okay.
CB: Alright. So our only other example that can kind of like, rival, you know, Jimmy Wales at the founder of Wikipedia is Elon Musk, who was born with Cancer rising, and he also has a mutual reception between the rulers of the first and 3rd houses, like a very strong mutual reception. So he has Cancer rising and the Moon is in Virgo in the 3rd whole sign house along with the Lot of Fortune and the planet Pluto. And then the ruler of the 3rd house is Mercury, which is in Cancer on the exact degree of the Ascendant at 14 degrees of Cancer conjunct the Ascendant at 13. So the Moon is actually at eight degrees of Virgo applying with reception to a very close sextile with Mercury. So this creates a very close connection between the rulers of the first and the 3rd houses, and of course, one of the ways that that’s worked out is that he has been the head of Tesla, which is all about creating electric cars and obviously short distance travel, and it’s basically pushing the world to adopt electric vehicles. He also bought Twitter a couple of years ago, which is one of the largest social media platforms and is unique in that of all the social media platforms, Twitter was really the one that had a specific focus on written communication.
LS: Right.
CB: Now more recently, he’s doing Neuralink, where it’s like, putting a chip in people’s brains to allow them to control computers and essentially to communicate with a computer with the mind directly rather than using your hands or your voice even. So this may be like, a new way of communicating in the future.
He also has another company called Starlink, which is putting up communications satellites up into space and creating like, satellite internet. And then finally, he’s also the head of Space X. And usually we think of space as more of a like, a long distance, 9th house type of travel. However, what may be happening is it may be creating a future where quick trips to space are more possible.
LS: Right. It is possible. And then it also can just be like that overlapping signification of travel being in the 3rd and the 9th.
CB: Right, yeah. So you know, whatever you think about the guy, whatever – we don’t have to get into all of the problematic stuff, but you know, that’s a pretty good example with a mutual reception between the ruler of the first and the 3rd.
LS: Right. That was like, I think, five different things that were like 3rd house topics?
CB: Yeah. And that’s always what happens where there’s a mutual reception. It’s like, when the ruler of one house is in another, it’s like there’s some connection and you can see it. But it’s like, when there’s a mutual reception, it’s a very strong connection that’s like, a very defining feature.
LS: Yeah, definitely.
CB: Yeah. All right, so other ones to mention just very briefly in passing – this one’s just kind of funny although there’s a lot of depth to it that I’m not gonna dwell on, but turns out Nikola Tesla also had the ruler of the Ascendant in the first house, which is funny since that’s, you know, what Elon Musk’s company is named after. And in terms of a lot of his work with like, wireless communication or wireless transmission of information so that communication actually played a very significant role in the life of Tesla. So I’m gonna skip that for the sake of time, dwelling on that, but it’ll be in the show notes that are available to patrons afterwards.
Another example – you really liked this one, right?
LS: Yeah, the Ascendant – this is Ted Turner, Sagittarius rising with Jupiter ruling the Ascendant, placed in the 3rd house in a day chart. So it’s like the best benefic is in the 3rd house, and he’s famously founded CNN, the news network, which is like, putting out information into the world.
CB: Yeah. So he founded CNN, a major news network, and has the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd house. And of course, it’s like, he has other things as well – for example, the planet Mercury is conjunct the degree of the Ascendant, so there’s other factors going on. But it’s interesting, you know, founding a news company and media company and having the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd.
LS: Right. The ruler of the 3rd’s also in the 5th, and like, earlier in his career, he like, bought at least one sports team in part just to like, have something to broadcast on the TV network, which is really funny to me with the connection between the 3rd and the 5th.
CB: Nice. That’s good.
LS: Yeah.
CB: All right, another major example for me where I found somebody with a mutual reception – and this was actually sent in to me by Melissa Marklin was Eartha Kitt is an amazing example. She was born with Sagittarius rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Jupiter, which is located in Aquarius in the 3rd house along with Venus in a night chart. And then the ruler of the 3rd house as well as the 2nd house is Saturn, which is actually conjunct the degree of the Ascendant in a night chart, which is a more difficult placement but there is a strong mutual reception then in connection between the first and 3rd houses.
So Eartha Kitt is, may not be as well known to like, younger people, but she was this legendary singer and dancer and actress as well as a writer, a comedian, and an activist. But she had this really distinctive voice, and if people are watching this on YouTube or wherever, I’d really encourage them to just like, stop to pause and just go to YouTube and look up “Eartha Kitt voice” and like, you’ll see some examples of her where, for example, she is famous for the song “Santa Baby,” which is still sometimes like, played as like, a holiday song. She also played Cat Woman in the Batman TV series in the 1960s and had this like, amazing cat voice. And then finally more recently, some younger people may know her as the voice of Yzma from The Emperor’s New Groove, which is an animated movie that she voiced in the year 2000. So she just has this crazy distinctive voice that as soon as you hear it, you’ll be struck by it. It’s very like, Aquarian. But interestingly, she was also remarkably multilingual. She spoke four different languages fluently – English, French, German, and Dutch – but she also was able to sing in 11 different languages. So it’s not just like, having a distinctive voice but also having a fluency in languages. She also was an incredible writer, and she wrote four different autobiographies during the course of her life, and there’s something about autobiography in particular that seems to come up as a recurring theme, I’ve noticed, where a number of our people that have especially the ruler of the Ascendant or other major placements in the 3rd house have often written autobiographies about themselves.
LS: Right. And especially it makes sense with the Ascendant ruler there, yeah, in particular.
CB: Yeah. So she did have a really difficult, really terrible like, life early on, a lot of which was like, stemming from having Saturn placed on the Ascendant in a night chart. And one of the things was that it’s ruling the 2nd house and she was born into just like, really extreme poverty basically where she had to deal with some really terrible things. With the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd house – oh yeah, other terrible things she had to deal with is like, extreme racism and interesting like, a really uniquely terrible form of racism because she was biracial, and so she had like, a special form of sort of type of racism that she received growing up that was unique to the fact that she was biracial.
So with the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd, other tragedies that happened when she was growing up is that her mother may have been poisoned or essentially murdered by her stepsisters when Eartha was only eight years old, which is another way that the 3rd house shows up in her life.
Another way that the 3rd house shows up is that her aunt saved her after that and brought her to New York. And this was – she actually rode a train to New York, and this was her first time seeing a big city because she was born into poverty out in the country in South Carolina. So her aunt sent her to school, and there she started making local friends at school and realizing that she had a unique voice.
So a teacher at school encouraged her to go see a play at a theater, and this is what sparked her love for acting so that she eventually started as a dancer and performer and singer and then later transitioned into television. When she became successful, she supported Rebels with a Cause, which is a group of people working to improve their communities for young people through recreational projects and through cleaning up neighborhoods. So there was this real like, neighborhood and community component to her work.
Later she had this interesting thing where she was blacklisted after she spoke out against the Vietnam War, specifically at a White House luncheon on how to reduce crime that was hosted by the president’s wife at the time, Lady Bird Johnson. And she spoke out. There’s actually a video – you should see it – where she spoke out to both Johnson and his wife directly, and she was actually really brave to use her voice to speak out directly in that way. But Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, was particularly angered, and I thought that was really interesting because one of the significations that all the Hellenistic astrologers give is the queen – that the 3rd house signifies the queen. And that’s not usually like, a very relevant signification anymore at this point —
LS: Right.
CB: — especially in the United States, but this is like, the one instance where it actually is relevant because she spoke directly to and angered and then got blacklisted specifically by essentially the functional equivalent of the queen in that country in the 1960s.
LS: That’s really good. Really good. And it really speaks to like, the benefics being there in terms of being invited to be there with her at all, and yet it being ruled by the malefic contrary to sect and there being some negative repercussions.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So she was blacklisted; she had to escape to Europe. She did work doing anti-apartheid things during that time, but then eventually like, over a decade later, she was eventually able to return and act on Broadway, and she was invited back to the White House by Jimmy Carter during his administration. So at this point, she acted in movies and did some major voice work in animated films.
And then the last thing that was really – in the animated films, you can look up this video of her doing the voice of Yzma in The Emperor’s New Groove, and it’s the most amazing thing; I’d recommend everybody listen to it because just her voice is so distinctive but also so strong. And the animator in the video says that the voice performance is like, the soul of the character. So I thought that was really interesting that as a voice performer, she gave soul to this animated character.
LS: Right.
CB: And finally, her daughter says that when she passed away that she “left this world literally screaming at the top of her lungs” and like, using her voice. She didn’t die like, violently, but just for some reason it was like, she was using her voice and almost like, roaring almost at the very end of her life.
So my summary of this example is that I think that her legacy serves as a reminder that our voices, whether through song, speech, or action, possess the power to move people, to inspire people, and sometimes to transform the world around us.
LS: Yeah. And that’s like, one of the more – I mean, if you just kind of set the Saturn aside, I mean, having both benefics in the 3rd is like, that’s how you get all of those really positive expressions of the 3rd house is someone’s life.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And I also love it because it’s like, they’re in Aquarius, and her voice is kind of weird almost. But it’s weird in a good way, and that’s like, very Venus and Jupiter in Aquarius.
LS: Right. It’s very like, distinctive.
CB: Right. Yeah. But then of course, you know, dealing with a lot of hardship early in life with the ruler being like, on the Ascendant.
LS: Right.
CB: Saturn in a night chart.
LS: Yeah.
CB: All right. So moving on to my next example. Another area of people that use their voice that I found that was really striking sometimes is comedians, especially stand-up comedians, and the most notable example that I found of that was Richard Pryor, who was born with Pisces rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Jupiter, which is located in Taurus in the 3rd whole sign house along with Saturn and Uranus. So he had Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus in the 3rd house and they’re opposing Venus, Mars, and Mercury, which are all in Scorpio in the 9th house. And that becomes his central thing.
So Richard Pryor was a comedian, and one of the insights I actually had when I was looking up comedians is, you know, comedians go and perform at their local club, and then they sort of hang out afterwards with each other at these clubs and build these local communities of comedians. And I think that’s a major 3rd house element for stand-up comedians, especially like, a few decades ago, but even to this day to some extent.
LS: Yeah. Sometimes they are also touring, but usually more like, in your country or your state or even your city, and so there’s like that local travel component. And then they’re just like, speaking. Like, that’s what they’re doing is like, speaking in front of people.
CB: Right, exactly. So Richard Pryor is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most important stand-up comedians in modern times. And I thought it was interesting that with Uranus in the 3rd house that comedians often talk about him having revolutionized stand-up in different ways. So he has all sorts of accolades where he won the Grammy for best comedy album five times, he’s the first person ever to be awarded the Mark Twain prize for humor, and he’s consistently ranked like, for example, in Comedy Central’s list of all-time greatest stand-up comedians he’s ranked as number one. And he’s also ranked as number one on a Rolling Stone list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time. So —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd.
LS: Right. And interesting that it’s actually that Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in a day chart especially, right? Because sometimes like, when people have that Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in a house – especially if it’s a day chart because it’s making both of those planets more positive then – it’s like, they’re groundbreaking in some way. They’re like, starting a new cycle of something, because that’s one of the things that the Jupiter-Saturn, you know, conjunction and then the cycle does.
CB: Right. It’s like the start of a new era. And in mundane astrology, we’re used to as astrologers knowing that that’s what Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions do and that’s what they’ve been used for for over a thousand years to like, know the start of different eras, either in 20 year periods or sometimes as much as thousand year periods. But one of the things that came up as you were talking about it, in some example charts we’ve seen some instances of people that started a new era with respect to their chosen career field when they had a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in a certain house in the chart.
LS: Right. Or with respect to like, a 3rd house topic, they like started a new era of that thing.
CB: Yeah, like the one we saw last – we’ll see later is Henry Ford.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So the story with Richard Pryor is that he did a clean act at first because when he was coming up in comedy, yeah, there was another comedian that was like, a clean actor and he tried to imitate him. It was Bill Cosby, actually. And so in his 20s, like, he tried to imitate Bill Cosby and just do a clean act that would be as like, widely applicable as possible, especially to white audiences, and Richard Pryor was a black man. So he did that because he wanted to be more, he wanted to have the widest appeal, but then what happened is at one point he had an epiphany or almost sort of like, a breakdown onstage one night in 1967 when he was doing a show in Vegas. And he just like, looks at the audience and the faces of everyone in the audience and then he’s just like, “What am I doing?” And he leaves the stage, and he gets in a bunch of trouble and I think he loses his manager and loses a bunch of contracts, and he just goes on this like, sort of odyssey at this time, this inward odyssey in order to find his voice.
So this was September 15th of 1967 from what I can tell is the day that he had this epiphany, and he goes on this odyssey, and there’s a bunch of stuff transit-wise that’s happening at this time. Let me put his chart back up. Okay. There is chart with Taurus on the 3rd house.
So he was 26 years old when this happened, so he was actually in a 3rd house profection year that was activating all of those Taurus planets. And what happened additionally is that there was a solar eclipse that happened in Taurus in his 3rd house just four months earlier that was like, the start of this period of having a bunch of eclipses bouncing back and forth between his 3rd house and his 9th house. And he was also having major activations to his Uranus placement in the 3rd house at this time. So what he did is basically he stopped having a clean act, and one of the things that he did is he started using profanity and became this like, legendary comic that just used like, extreme profanity, which is really funny because he has a Mercury-Mars conjunction in Scorpio that’s kind of part of what he’s, what’s getting activated at that time essentially.
LS: And the Ascendant – sorry, and the 3rd house ruler conjunct Mars like, even more closely.
CB: Right. So I found one quote where it said that he, Richard Pryor, was “one of the most profane but also profound voices in comedy,” which I thought was great with the ruler of the 3rd in the 9th, but also like, Mercury conjunct Mars.
LS: Right.
CB: So not long after this time, he went into his Saturn return that went through his 3rd house, and he released his second album, and he basically developed his voice during this time, but he did it partially through finding community. So he left Hollywood and he went to Berkeley, and this is Berkeley in the late 1960s where there’s all of this like, radical counterculture stuff that’s starting to take place. And in Berkley, he said that he didn’t have to worry about being too extreme either in his views or in his language. And one of the Saturn elements in his 3rd house is that he started talking about his shortcomings, his hardships, and the things that he really messed up with because like, a critical part of his act is like, his openness and vulnerability. And part of this included even talking about the rough neighborhoods that he grew up in. So he also had a really difficult upbringing where his grandmother actually was the primary one that raised him. And this was one of the examples that really made me think of like, grandparents as a potential 3rd house topic.
LS: Right, in terms of extended family.
CB: Yeah, exactly. And he, in school, his teacher – this is one of the people where his teacher gave him 10 minutes every afternoon to perform his like, comedy routines. But then at one point, he got in a fight with a teacher in school and he got kicked out of school, so he just left entirely.
Anyway, in Berkeley, he developed his voice; he found community. Unfortunately, during his Saturn return, only a handful of clubs across the country were willing to book him with his new obscenity-laced act. There were other life-changing things at the time like a divorce, both of his parents died, but eventually he emerged from this period with his own characteristic style and then hit his creative peak in the early to mid 1970s, and subsequently just influenced generations of comedians and became a legend in the comedy world.
LS: And that’s really interesting in terms of like, getting his start with, you know, in early schooling being allowed to do like, a 10-minute act. Because not just the 3rd house part itself, but Jupiter is both the ruler of the first house of self and the 10th house of career in the chart. And oftentimes when a planet rules two different houses in a chart, it like, pulls those topics together into the place where it’s actually sitting in, which is the 3rd house in this case. So it was like, he got his start for his career literally like in early schooling time.
CB: Right. Yeah, exactly. And had both good things happen of having a teacher that was supportive in that way, but then also had bad things that was happen of another teacher that was not supportive of it and was tired of him being a comedian or whatever and confronted him and then they got in a fight and it led to him being kicked out of school.
LS: Right, with the ruler of the 3rd closely conjunct Mars, it’s like, an interesting interplay going on with his benefics and malefics associated with the 3rd.
CB: Yeah, as well as even just Saturn in the 3rd house and where even in a day chart, Saturn is more difficult for people when they’re younger, but then later sometimes it can become a strength as they get older as it did for him eventually during and after his Saturn return when he found his voice.
LS: Right, for sure.
CB: Yeah. So that is my example of the ruler of the Ascendant and one of the most influential comedians of all time having the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd house.
LS: That’s great. It’s a great example.
CB: All right, so moving onto my next example is another comedian who I just wanna mention a few brief points about very quickly, which is Jim Carrey.
So I mentioned Jim Carrey briefly in the first house episode as somebody that has Neptune conjunct the Ascendant, but he also has the ruler of the Ascendant is – he has Scorpio rising with Mars ruling the Ascendant placed in Capricorn in the 3rd house conjunct Venus and Sun, which are also in the 3rd house. And you know, Jim Carrey is also a comedian, but something I sort of overlooked in the first house episode that I kind of forgot about is that he really started out in his primary thing, especially if you see his early appearances on like, The Tonight Show and stuff, is that he was an impressionist. So he was an impressionist, and with Neptune conjunct the Ascendant, he’s able to like, contort his face and change his appearance into these different like, wildly different characters, but what’s interesting is that with the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd house, one of his talents also is he has a talent for voices and doing different voices, basically, ever since he was like, a young kid. And one of the things that’s interesting with him is he’s basically, his primary thing especially early on was doing funny voices and also movements. And part of what he’s imitating or creating is a speech style, and that he was doing this since he was a very young kid.
So he said when he was a kid he would stare into the mirror for hours practicing his impressions and that it was fun to sit in his room and make faces and talk to himself in voices. So one of my like, insights in researching him – I actually had a much longer writeup that I’m not gonna get into; I might in a separate episode – he basically initially was an impressionist who became incredibly iconic and successful, so much so that you sort of forget that that was and still is his thing to a large extent, because it’s kind of been obscured by his transition later on into dramatic acting, which he also was very good at and did a great job in.
LS: Right. Right, and so the voice and just like, focusing a lot on like, voicing different people was like, yeah, really focal to like, who he was.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So of course later he became frustrated because he views it all as a mask, and he thinks of Jim Carrey even as like, another impression that he was doing in some way that wasn’t real, and that’s led to some of his crises in recent years. But other interesting tidbits about him – he had a brother who was very important to him, especially growing up, and a few years ago in 2019 his brother actually passed away, and this occurred when Saturn was closely conjoining Jim’s Mars in Capricorn almost to the degree.
LS: Wow.
CB: He was having a Saturn transit when he lost his brother who was very important to him. Other interesting facts – he won a speech contest in the 6th grade where he gave a speech about comedy, so another early schooling important thing. His teacher allowed him to make a 15-minute presentation for his class every day where he was doing his like, comedy routine and impressions, so another example of that. His original audience, aside from classmates, may have been his neighbors, because he talks about like, doing these not just presentations but doing his acts, basically, for people that would come over to the house. But I think what’s implied by that a lot is that he was like, entertaining his neighbors.
LS: Right.
CB: But interestingly, his primary reason he said or motivation for comedy was that he had a sick mother, and that he just wanted to make her feel better with comedy. And I thought that was really interesting with the ruler of the 3rd house is Saturn, which is in the 4th house in a night chart.
LS: Right.
CB: So the ruler of the 3rd house of communication is in the 4th house of parents, and it’s like, part of his initial motivation for developing his comedic abilities was trying to like, help his mother who was suffering.
LS: Right. Yeah. And that is one of the ways where you can see the connections between two houses if like, the ruler of one is in the other, and the other would be like, I guess he was starting his voices and impressions for like, neighbors at home, like in his home.
CB: Right. And then the last other really impressive thing is that at one point, part of his early story is that his dad lost his job, and at one point the family had to live in a van for a period of time when he was younger.
LS: Wow.
CB: So literally they lived out of a car or out of a vehicle.
LS: Yeah. Right. Another ruler of the 3rd in the 4th.
CB: Yeah. So but he was eventually once he grew up, he was the first star to have three films that grossed over a hundred million dollars in the same year, and he was the first actor to receive a 20 million dollar paycheck for a single movie. So he grew up to be an iconic person where his communication style and his ability to not just use his voice and create different voices but also his movements and stuff became part of his success.
LS: And he was another one like Richard Pryor where he had the Ascendant ruler and 10th house ruler in the 3rd, although in this case it was two different planets.
CB: Yeah, it’s the ruler of the 10th house of career in the 3rd, and that’s actually interesting because he tells a story about him and his father at one point that – he said he actually, part of his inspiration for comedy was his father because he said his father was wildly funny. And also him and his father tried to get into broadcasting early on, I think around the time that he was 15 or so give or take, which would be like, a Mars period. But they both went and took broadcasting classes, basically, because they wanted to get into like, show business or entertainment.
LS: That’s cool. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So a lot of different things manifest in different ways through those placements, but sometimes very literally.
All right. So another one that I’ll just mention in passing without going into is John Cleese, who’s a famous comedian, writer, and actor who also has a very distinctive voice. He has Virgo rising with Mercury in the Scorpio in the 3rd house along with Venus and the Sun and is famous for like, Monty Python but also for he does like, audiobooks, he narrates documentaries, commercials, and advertisements, and also animated films and television shows. So it’s interesting because he has kind of like, an iconic voice that’s very distinctive in a different way.
LS: Right. And Mercury is, again, ruling the first and the 10th conjunct the benefic of sect – Venus in a night chart.
CB: Right.
LS: In the 3rd.
CB: Yeah. So and that takes us into – because he’s also a comedy writer, and that takes us into the next section I wanted to focus on writers. So an iconic writer in our community is Linda Goodman, who was born with Aries rising and Mars in Gemini in the 3rd house. And Linda Goodman wrote the bestselling astrology book in modern times, her book Sun Signs, it came out in the late 1960s, and it’s like, everybody had this book basically. And it sold over 60 million copies worldwide, which is just – it’s huge for any book, but it’s unheard of for an astrology book. And it played a crucial role in helping to popularize astrology in the 20th century, making it more accessible and engaging for a broader audience.
LS: Right. And that’s what you’ll see sometimes with the Ascendant ruler in the 3rd or a 10th house connection with the 3rd since those are both of the most prominent places in the chart is like, sometimes they’re like, known for a book. Either like, one book or like, a few books, but that’s like sort of the summary of like, who they are known as to like, the public.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And she has other interesting things, like she got paid some crazy advance for her second book because the first one was so successful that it set some records. It was like, 10 million dollars or something like that; it was something really high —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — that, especially for the time, was like, unheard of.
LS: She also has the ruler of the 3rd in the 2nd, so. Connecting —
CB: There you go.
LS: — your means of living and books.
CB: There you go. Here’s that chart again to show you… Yeah, so the ruler of the 3rd is Mercury, which is placed in Taurus. Nice. Nice, as they say.
All right, moving on. The next one I want to talk about is Ursula Bloom, who was also a writer who had Cancer rising and the Moon in Virgo in the 3rd whole sign house conjunct the degree of the IC. And she was a British novelist, biographer, and journalist, and she wrote over 500 books throughout her career. So this is the opposite end of the spectrum. This is like, we were talking about the person that writes like, the one book. This is —
LS: Yeah!
CB: — she wrote over 500 books throughout her career, so much so that the Guiness Book of World Records says that she’s the world’s most prolific female writer. So her 3rd house is interestingly it’s ruled by a retrograde Mercury in Sagittarius cazimi, and I think that’s what we’re talking about writing a lot. Like —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — Sagittarius.
LS: Right. For sure.
CB: So she primarily wrote romantic fiction and family sagas, which is kind of interesting with it conjunct the IC. But she also delved into nonfiction, plays, and journalisms. In some of her novels, which are often set in like, historical periods, are featured strong female protagonists. They oftentimes captured the hearts of readers by having these really engaging narratives and really relatable characters.
So she’s not as popular these days, but her work’s like, starting to see resurgence recently, and this renewed interest of her just like, vast literary legacy that’s emerging in recent years has started to recognize her as having a really significant contribution to popular fiction as well as just her amazing, her remarkable writing discipline.
LS: Yeah. And this is one where it’s not a mutual reception with the Ascendant ruler, but it is reception. So its Ascendant ruler is Moon in Virgo, and then that in turn is ruled by that Mercury in Sag, and they are in an aspect, even though it’s not a mutual reception. And that in itself is oftentimes again a strengthening thing where, you know, something will be really notable about that area.
CB: Yeah, totally. Reception really helps all planets, including planets that are not well-placed, like in the sign of their fall or detriment. It can really soften or cancel any difficult placements out.
LS: Right, which is the case here. I’m also laughing at the like, close square between the Mercury and Mars, which I think is like, gotta be another piece of like, her prolific output, because that’s like, writing quickly, you know?
CB: Yeah, and having like, a lot of energy as well and drive.
LS: Yes.
CB: All right. So moving on – one other writer I wanted to mention really briefly is Agatha Christie, who had Sagittarius rising and the ruler is Jupiter in Aquarius in the 3rd house. And she also has Mars conjunct the degree of the Ascendant pretty closely, and Agatha Christie is one of the most influential and beloved mystery writers of all time where she wrote detective fiction. And she’s another prolific writer, because she wrote over 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections. So her – she’s really interesting because she has Saturn in the 10th house in Virgo ruling things, and she’s usually lauded for her masterful storytelling that is filled with really intricate plots and suspenseful twists and clever red herrings, which just kind of like, enthralled readers across different generations.
LS: So all the details. So like, writing with details.
CB: Exactly, writing with details with the ruler of the 3rd in the 10th —
LS: In Virgo.
CB: — in Virgo. And also just like, having Mars on the Ascendant and writing sometimes like, crime fiction —
LS: Yeah, for sure.
CB: — is something we see come up, I see come up, a lot.
LS: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Mars is definitely a thing for that.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah. Mars is the ruler of the 5th here, and I noticed as I was researching charts for this there can sometimes be crossovers between the 3rd and the 5th because the 3rd is the literal expression or the writing of it. But the 5th is sometimes your creative output or artistic work or something, and so sometimes, you know, like the opposite houses for instance – sometimes there can be a little bit of a crossover, or if there’s an aspect it plays in more, and here there is at least a sign-based aspect between the ruler of the 5th and that Ascendant ruler in the 3rd.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Good point. All right, other authors I’m gonna mention and flash their chart briefly but not talk about – Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll was a ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd example. Robert Louis Stevenson was a ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd. Oscar Wilde.
LS: Nice.
CB: William Faulkner. And then – so those are our writers; there’s many others that could be mentioned. But at this point, I wanna transition into another category, which is writers and famous orators.
So one of the things I was looking up is like, some lists of like, what are some of the most famous speeches and speakers in history. And one of them that came up – oh yeah, I forgot to mention Kurt Vonnegut was also another ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd.
Anyway, speakers and orators – Winston Churchill is a ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd person. He was born with Virgo rising and Mercury in Scorpio in the 3rd. His Ascendant is very late, so it’s like, it could be in Virgo, it could be in Libra. I feel pretty good that it’s in Virgo, but just a heads up in terms of that in the rounded time, but I think he had Virgo rising with Mercury in Scorpio, and part of the reason is that he was renowned for his powerful speeches and writing, and he’s considered to have given some of the most inspiring and influential speeches in history and some of the most iconic speeches in history. The one that’s at the top of many lists is one that’s referred to as like, “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” that he gave in 1940. And Mercury was exactly conjunct the Midheaven degree at 29 Gemini when he gave this speech, which is another good reason to think that he has 29 Gemini rising or something very close to there —
LS: In Virgo.
CB: — in Virgo, yeah.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And this speech rallied the British people in the face of the imminent threat of a German invasion, and Churchill’s unwavering resolve and determination instilled courage and resilience. And some of that’s coming through the fixed Scorpio placements of the ruler of his Ascendant being there in Scorpio.
LS: Yeah, absolutely. People with Mercury in Scorpio especially if it’s ruling like, the Ascendant or yeah, they often have really powerful, impactful ways of speaking and it really stands out.
CB: Yeah. I agree.
LS: Not that you’re biased or anything.
CB: No. I just obviously…
LS: You’re really objective.
CB: Right! So outside of, you know, that speech or other speeches that he gave – because he’s given a number of other famous speeches – his ability to communicate effectively as a politician was essential to his success. And he could sway public opinion by debating fiercely in Parliament and negotiating with other world leaders, as he did especially in World War II, where his communication skills were vital both in maintaining morale but also galvanizing support for the war effort. And his radio broadcasts and public appearances provided a sense of hope and determination during a time of great darkness.
Interestingly, even after World War II, Churchill wrote extensively on the history of World War II, including his own memoirs and a multivolume history of World War I and World War II. So he was actually lauded for his ability to communicate complex historical events in a clear and engaging manner, which cemented his legacy as a historian so much so that he actually won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953 for his mastery of historical and biographical description.
LS: That’s really interesting, you know, with both the Sun and Venus in a night chart in the 4th house of like, the past, and like, history often goes there. And then the ruler of his 3rd is that Jupiter, very closely sextile Venus with reception, you know, from the 4th house.
CB: Right, that connection between those two.
LS: Right. So like, writing about historical topics like, makes so much sense.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So you know, and this is a good example to me because I think communication was not just a tool for Churchill, but it was at the core of his identity and his achievements, and that his mastery of language and oratory shaped his political career, his leadership during wartime, and his enduring legacy as a writer and a historian.
LS: Right. Because sometimes you think, oh, communication – it’s a topic, but whatever – you know? But sometimes people can use communication to very persuasive ends, and then it can actually impact the world like in this case.
CB: Yeah, like famous speeches – sometimes you can change the world with the power of your voice and with the persuasiveness of your speech, and yeah. That was my best example of that, but there’s many, many others.
All right, so now I wanna transition into another section on singers, which is another type of, another category of people that use their voice, you know, in powerful ways. So my first example in this section is Patsy Cline, who is a famous American singer who was born with Gemini rising and Mercury in Leo in the 3rd whole sign house along with Venus.
So she’s considered to be one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century and was one of the first country music artists to cross over into pop music, basically. It’s like, we take that for granted now with people like Taylor Swift and even, you know, Beyonce’s recent album earlier this year. But Patsy Cline was literally like, one of the first.
So she had several major hits during the course of her only eight-year recording career, including two number one hits on Billboard, Hot Country, and Western Sides charts. But unfortunately, in March of 1963, she was killed in a plane crash when she was only 30 years old. And when she died, transiting Mars was actually retrograde in her 3rd house.
LS: Wow.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah. What’s interesting though – her Ascendant ruler being in the 3rd, even if it’s like, widely copresent, which this is almost as widely copresent as you can get by degree, right? It’s the beginning and the end of Leo. But it’s still copresent with like, Venus in a night chart, which is the most positive placement, so that’s how you get like, you know, really renowned positivity around one’s voice.
CB: Right. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, Mercury is at 29 and Venus is at zero, but as long as they’re in the same sign, they’re rubbing off on each other just like two people that are living in the same house would rub off on each other even if they’re living on opposite ends of like, a mansion.
LS: Right. Like, it’s a really good illustration of copresence still being really important.
CB: Totally. Definitely. All right, so for a more recent example for people that are not familiar with like, decades ago country singers, here’s a more recent example with Katy Perry who has Scorpio rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Mars in Capricorn in the 3rd house along with Jupiter. And interestingly, the 3rd house is ruled by Saturn, which is actually in Scorpio in the first, so this is actually from a technical standpoint the most striking example of a singer because she has a mutual reception between the first and the 3rd, so it’s one of those examples then that theoretically from a technical standpoint should really stand out as being notable from that standpoint, and indeed it does because she’s globally recognized as a singer, songwriter, and television personality. And she’s actually one of the best selling music artists of all time. She’s the first female artist to have five number one Billboard Hot 100 songs from one album, second only to Michael Jackson to achieve that feat out of anybody.
She’s also one of the highest earning women in music. In 2018, she topped the Forbes list for highest paid woman in music with an earnings of 83 million dollars. She also is one of the few people in the world who have performed at the Superbowl, and she was a judge on American Idol.
So there’s some interesting like, religious themes that I kind of wonder if are coming from her 3rd house because she actually grew up in a very strict religious upbringing basically, and part of her story was about sort of growing up and rebelling and like, moving away to Hollywood essentially or to Los Angeles. And she started out, her first album was doing like, Christian music basically, and then with her second album she broke from that and she did like, a pop album basically and then became wildly successful.
LS: That’s really interesting, like Saturn being the ruler of the 3rd in the first and like, conjunct the ruler of the 9th very closely.
CB: Yeah. And it’s tricky because it’s like, the ruler of the Ascendant in Mars in a day chart, so she’s had a number of controversies and backlash that’s sometimes arising from like, doing things that are not very good, and she’s actually going through one of those right now, and transiting Mars is like, opposing some of her stuff. It’s going through Cancer right now opposing her Mars and opposing her Jupiter, and there’s some like, not good things going on. But you know, nonetheless, it’s a prominent example of a famous 3rd house singer and performer basically.
LS: For sure. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So in a similar vein, another person that’s performed at the Super Bowl that has the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd is Usher. So Usher has Virgo rising and the ruler of the Ascendant is Mercury, which is in Scorpio in the 3rd house along with a stellium planets of Uranus, Mars, and Venus all in the 3rd house. And I love this as an example because he’s often referred to as like, “the king of R&B.” He also performed at the Superbowl; he has all sorts of accolades like a total of eight different Grammy awards, nine number one singles, all sorts of other stuff. But what’s funny is like, he’s widely recognized for his sexy songs basically with Mercury and all of those planets in Scorpio. And his image is of like, a charismatic and sensual R&B artist where, you know, many of his biggest hits are kind of like, known for their romantic themes, smooth vocals, and suggestive lyrics.
So I thought that was pretty funny, and while he’s explored other themes of course and like, musical styles throughout his career, like, his sexy songs have sort of undoubtedly become a sort of defining element of his musical legacy and has helped to cement his status both as kind of like, a heartthrob or a romantic icon and continue to also just be enjoyed by fans across generations with him performing really recently at the Superbowl.
LS: Yeah. That’s a great example of like, your vocal style or like, what your voice is known for, right?
CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s like, different people – because especially having a Venus-Mars conjunction there imports that, but also having it in Scorpio, but just sometimes… You know, we’re showing all these different examples of the 3rd house placements with the ruler of the 3rd but sometimes we’re not showing how it can really be flavored by the quality of the zodiac sign that they’re in or other factors like that, but it can really come into play in distinctive ways sometimes.
LS: Yeah, for sure. This is a good example of that.
CB: Yeah. All right. Other miscellaneous singers that I won’t get into that have the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd – Julie Andrews, Luciano Pavarotti, Tom Waits, Marvin Gaye, and also Shirley Manson of Garbage who was like, the front singer of Garbage. So I thought that was all good, but those are my singers. There’s many more that we can mention, but we will not for the sake of time.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So the next section I wanted to move onto is about travel, movement, and mobility. And I have a funny transitional one that somebody on Twitter sent in actually, which is the birth chart – I didn’t know we had a timed birth chart – for Charli XCX, who has Cancer rising and the Moon is in Virgo in the 3rd house along with Jupiter. And this was sent in by shout out to the astrologer Lohla on Twitter for this example. But Charli XCX is an English singer and songwriter, and what Lohla pointed out is that her discography is notable for repeated and frequent mentions of cars. So several of her song titles, lyrics, and even her name of her record label – which is Vroom Vroom Recordings – reference cars.
LS: Yeah. When we were talking about which charts to include in the final list, I was like, you have to include this one briefly just so I can laugh at it, because – not laugh at it, like, laugh with it. Because it’s just such a funny, literal – like, “Vroom Vroom Recordings!” And that’s like, she’s got that connection between her 3rd and her 2nd house, so it’s like, that’s like her means of making a living she labeled like, Vroom Vroom Recordings.
CB: Vroom Vroom – that is… I need to add that to the significations list from earlier in the lecture.
LS: Yes, I think so.
CB: Yeah. I think that was actually what Vettius Valens meant in Greek when he was describing the 3rd house. There’s this one —
LS: Probably so.
CB: — obscure Greek term. Yeah.
LS: You just have to translate it carefully.
CB: Exactly. Anyways, so I thought it was a good example because it’s a great transition – I’m a fan of good transitions, and that was an amazing one – into this area from singers to people where mobility and transportation is important to them. One of my favorite examples of this that I’ve always used in my lectures, like in my book and my courses, is Evel Knievel, the famous stuntman who would like, drive motorcycles and like, jump them over buses and cliffs and stuff like that. He was born with Aquarius rising and the ruler of the Ascendant is Saturn, which is located in Aries in the 3rd whole sign house. And the ruler of the 3rd house of travel and the 10th house of career is Mars, which is actually in the 8th house of death. And what’s hilarious about that is he was always doing these like, death-defying stunts or like, jumping over stuff, but oftentimes he would sometimes like, crash and like, injure himself, so it didn’t always necessarily go well because he would sometimes have these spectacular crashes and serious injuries. But nonetheless, his like, fearless spirit and flamboyant personality made him a cultural icon.
LS: Yeah. And that’s so interesting and evocative with the Ascendant ruler being Saturn in Aries in the 3rd and then ruled by that Mars, because not just the connection between the 3rd and the 8th and like, the death-defying stunts, but just, yeah, the Ascendant ruler being in Aries – it’s like, that’s that like, courageous piece, right?
CB: Yeah, totally. One of the things that’s cool about this example too is it shows the protective function of the benefics sometimes, because he has Jupiter in the first house of the body, which just being placed there is helping him out —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — to like, you know, not die from or be seriously injured from some of these stunts, and it also has the superior sextile over Saturn. And even Venus is up here, and it has a superior trine over Saturn, the ruler of the Ascendant. So I love that example because it also shows the protective function and power of the benefics, because you know, he could have died or been seriously injured from some of these stunts, but it wasn’t the worst case scenario when he was. And there will be like, other examples I’ll show later of people where it was more serious in terms of their injuries.
LS: And you can see the benefics are definitely doing that and like, playing a major role, because otherwise, you know, it’s the Ascendant ruler ruled by Mars in a day chart in the 8th house of death, right, so —
CB: Right.
LS: — clearly he was getting some help and protection elsewhere.
CB: Yeah. Although it’s interesting that Mars is like, conjunct Neptune, and I almost wonder if like, part of the mystique is like, creating the illusion of like, almost dying or that he could die or something like that but then not.
LS: Sure. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Anyway, so let’s see. So moving on, my next example… All right, let me share my next example here, which is Dale Earnhardt Junior – there it is – was born with Leo rising… Oh wait, I got the wrong chart. There it is. That’s his father, so here’s Dale Earnhardt Junior, who was born with Virgo rising and Mercury in Scorpio in the 3rd house, also ruling the 10th house of career. And Dale Earnhardt Junior is an American stock car race driver, team owner, and also later broadcaster. So he holds the record for winning NASCAR’s Most Popular Driver Award for 15 consecutive times, which is kind of like a testament to how widespread his appeal and fanbase was when he was racing. And then later after retiring from full time racing, he transitioned into a broadcasting role to be a broadcaster commenting on races and things like that. He’s also a New York Times best-selling author and is successful for his memoir that was titled Racing to the Finish: My Story, which is a great title.
LS: Nice.
CB: I love that title.
LS: Yeah.
CB: He also wrote a series of children’s books that were like, very car and like, racing themed. And then finally he has an older sister named Kelley that plays a major role in his life who both took care of him growing up and that he was close to, but also later became his business partner, confidante, advisor, and had a shared passion for racing.
LS: That’s good.
CB: So yeah, another one of those examples where like, sibling’s important. Writing, broadcasting, and most importantly racing and going fast.
LS: Right. And it’s funny with both the race car driving and the broadcasting, because sometimes when you see people kind of have a career transition and they end up doing something that seems like, totally different – like broadcasting seems totally different than like, race car driving for instance – that’s sometimes why, because there are like, multiple topics in the same house.
CB: Yeah. Multiple topics in the same house, and sometimes it’s like, he’s commenting on racing. So it’s like, he’s still like, focused on racing in some way —
LS: Right.
CB: — but just in a different capacity.
LS: Right, yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right, so moving on – my next example is a little bit more depressing. So this is the birth chart of John F. Kennedy Junior, who had Virgo rising with Pluto conjunct the Ascendant along with the North Node, and Mercury – the ruler of the Ascendant – is in Scorpio in the 3rd house conjunct Neptune.
So he was the son of President John F. Kennedy, and the native was known for his adventurous spirit and for a love of outdoor activities. So he liked to go flying; he liked cycling, hiking, scuba diving, roller blading, paragliding – this guy basically did like, everything involving movement that you can imagine. Additionally in the 1990s, he started a magazine called George which was trying to bridge the gap between politics and pop culture, and he served as the editor in chief in this monthly periodical or magazine basically from 1995 forwards.
Additionally, as a Kennedy and part of the Kennedy family, he had a very large extended family. And in his biography, I noticed he was very close in particular to one cousin named Anthony, and they were said to be like brothers, and in fact when Kennedy – when John F. Kennedy Junior – passed away, his cousin passed away within a month of him, basically, so they both died within a month of each other.
LS: That’s really striking.
CB: Yeah. So John F. Kennedy Junior, of course, nowadays is known most for that he famously died in a plane crash on July 16th, 1999, and what was happening is that he was piloting a small plane that crashed into the ocean near Martha’s Vineyard. And he was actually headed to his cousin’s wedding at the time, so there’s like, a cousin theme that shows up. Unfortunately, his wife Carolyn and her sister Lauren were also on board. And what happened, they think, is that he crashed due to spatial disorientation while flying at night over water and that he lost control of the aircraft during a descent in hazy conditions, which is pretty striking because Mercury is conjunct Neptune of course in his natal chart.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So in terms of transits, he was 38 years old when he passed away, so he was actually in a 3rd house profection year that was activating that Mercury-Neptune conjunction in his 3rd house. And when he passed away, Mars had actually recently ingressed into his 3rd house, so he was having a negative Mars transit through his 3rd house of travel when he accidentally like, crashed the airplane and died.
Additionally, there were other transits – like, Saturn was at 15 Scorpio opposing his Mercury. Uranus was at 15 Aquarius in his 6th house, squaring his Mercury. And even Mercury in the sky had recently stationed retrograde, I believe, in his 12th house, squaring his Neptune closely. So it was just this huge combination of different bad transits that were all hitting that Mercury placement.
LS: Yeah. And interestingly, Mars also natally rules both the 3rd and the 8th house, and then death is one of the 8th house topics and then that Mars natally is closely like, within a few degrees opposed Saturn in a night chart. So it’s not to say that that was like, always happening with his 3rd house topics, but at least at one point in his life, you know.
CB: Yeah. And one of the things that sucks is his cousin Anthony had cancer, and so John was actually working on the eulogy for his cousin’s funeral when he died —
LS: Wow.
CB: — and then his cousin ended up dying, like I said, within a month. So it’s like, that’s also kind of like, showing up there as a factor as well when you’re mentioning like, that 3rd house ruler also ruling the 8th and like, being placed in the 11th opposite Saturn.
LS: Yeah, exactly.
CB: So there’s other stuff there, but I think that’s it for that example. There’s one last example in the mobility section which is important and very famous, and this is the birth chart of Christopher Reeve. Do you wanna take this one?
LS: Oh sure. So Christopher Reeve, he has Leo rising with the Sun in Libra in the 3rd house. He also has a stellium in the 3rd house, so that is… Sorry, the chart’s not fully showing up for me for a second. He has a stellium in the 3rd house, though, and so what was interesting about him, you know, before he had his sort of famous accident later was it seemed like in his life story modes of transportation kept coming up in different ways. So he was like, a glider pilot just recreationally. He rode horses. And I just thought, I was like, I don’t think this is a stretch because just like some of the other actors, like, and how that showed up in their charts, one of the most iconic things he was known for as an actor was like, flying, right? And I was like, yes, that’s not technically like, a mode of transportation currently that is possible – nonetheless, it was a mode of transportation in the movies. And I think that actually really counts.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I mean, actors sometimes play out their charts, and he was literally the guy that could fly around – Superman – in the movies.
LS: Right, exactly. So I thought that was actually pretty funny and evocative. So he’s got Sun-Mercury cazimi there, Saturn, Neptune, and Venus. And then later on, he had a major accident. He was horseback riding, so it was again a 3rd house thing. As an aside, I was like, wondering where horses go, and I think it was the mode of transportation that was going on. So it wasn’t his pet horse, which would be like, a 6th house thing. It wasn’t like, a wild horse, which would be a 12th house thing. Anyway, in case anyone is wondering about us talking about that with the 3rd house, I think that’s why. So he was thrown from his horse and landed on his head, which resulted in a severe spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the neck down. And you noted that an eclipse happened in his 3rd house actually one month before the accident, right?
CB: Yeah. It was the first in a series of eclipses that would take place there over the next two years, which was wild, just that there was an eclipse that acted as like, an omen in his 3rd house for this event that was about to take place only a few weeks before it happened, and then he would have a series of additional eclipses there as he, you know, the extent of what had happened became clear.
LS: Exactly. And so this is one of those where it’s because it’s the Ascendant ruler that like, these different forms of mobility and then eventual like, challenges to mobility came up as a major life topic. It’s also that like, Venus and Saturn are there in a night chart, and so Venus is like, the positive manifestations and then Saturn was the later like, challenges around that.
CB: Yeah. It’s Saturn in a night chart, so it’s the more difficult Saturn. And then Venus is ruling the 10th house of career, and it’s in the 3rd house in its own domicile in the 3rd, and it’s like, so you have the most positive planet and the most negative planet in that area, and so you kind of get both. But one of the things that I always, one of the reasons I always… He was also in a Saturn profection year when the accident happened, so Saturn is actually the planet activated as the time lord for that year. But one of the reasons I always have used his as an example because it’s not just negative but there’s also some inspiration and hope, because he became a tireless advocate for spinal cord injury research and disability rights after his injury and after becoming paralyzed for the rest of his life. And he ended up founding the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, which continues to support research and improve the quality of life for those living with paralysis.
LS: Which is really interesting also with the ruler of the 6th house in the 3rd house. 6th house like body and sometimes injuries or illness.
CB: Right.
LS: Which is that Saturn.
CB: Yeah. So it’s both, you know, someone who is in some sense and that became the contrast later in life that like, the news stories and ones that would contrast is like, he was the man that flew in the movies but then later became unable to move or had limited mobility later in life. But nonetheless, you know, part of the legacy of his life by setting up those foundations and nonprofits maybe hopefully at some point in order to help make progress so that other people may be able to regain some degree of mobility in the future through some of that research at some point.
LS: Yeah. It could be, and especially with Venus being the 10th house ruler in the 3rd, which is his most positive planet.
CB: Yeah, exactly. All right. So that is my mobility section. And I just have one more chart example I wanted to do in this final section where I wanted to talk about neighbors and neighborhood. And I actually had this great quote from bell hooks in her book All About Love where she has this entire chapter – I think it’s like, chapter eight – where she’s talking about community. And one of the quotes that I wanted to pull out, because the entire chapter’s actually amazing and it gave me a lot of like, insight into the 3rd house even though she wasn’t talking about astrology. The way she wove together themes of community with other topics I thought was super insightful, actually, so I’d recommend reading chapter eight of her book All About Love. But the quote says this – it said,
“We are all born into the world of community. Rarely if ever does a child come into the world in isolation, with only one or two onlookers. Children are born into a world surrounded by the possibility of communities. Family, doctors, nurses, midwives, and even admiring strangers comprise this field of connections, some more intimate than others.”
So that’s my transitional point in talking about how the 3rd house can sometimes represent your neighborhood and your community and the city that you sort of grow up in or are living in at the time. And for some people, that’s gonna be more or less important if they have important placements placed there.
So one of the things that was interesting that arose during our research, you know, it’s kind of hard with these major celebrity charts to find examples of ones where like, their neighborhood was important to them or where they had like, good or bad things happening with their neighbors. It’s something that does come up if you follow your own chart or transit, like, if you have a difficult transit going through your 3rd house sometimes you’ll have problems with neighbors. Or if you have a good transit sometimes something positive will happen with a neighbor or what have you. But one access point for understanding it that I did see is when the ruler of the Ascendant is in the 3rd house, sometimes a person can become involved in organizational efforts in their community. And one interesting example of that that I found, actually a prominent one, was Gavin Newsom.
So he was born with Virgo rising and Mercury in Scorpio in the 3rd whole sign house. And his story is interesting because he was born in San Francisco and then eventually later in life he became the 42nd mayor of San Francisco for a number of years. So imagine like, being born in a place and then rising up through the ranks of like, local organizing to eventually become the mayor who’s sort of in charge of the entire city. And what’s interesting is that he was having eclipses in his 3rd house the year that he became mayor in 2003/2004. So eventually he would go on to become the governor of California and go up to an even higher level of sort of local governance. But I thought this was interesting just because the Hellenistic texts, a number of them talk about like, governing and leadership and authority as a significations of the 3rd and 9th houses, and I was sometimes perplexed by that, but in doing this research I’ve come to understand why, and it’s because sometimes when important planets are placed in the 3rd house, it means getting involved in your local community. And sometimes that can be as little as being like, a community organizer or being on a HOA board or something like that. But if you take it to its utmost extreme sometimes, being in a position of power or authority in your local community could be something like this, which is like, you know, becoming the mayor of a city.
LS: Yeah. Your city can really show up there, whether it’s just like, personal interest or you know, professional. Here it’s the Ascendant ruler and the 10th house ruler in the 3rd, so it’s like, he became the mayor of the city because of that. And sometimes you just see people who just like, really care about their local community and are like, much more involved in local community events and things like that than like, the average person.
CB: Yeah, for sure. You know, and sometimes it can be a stepping stone to other things of course. Like, George W. Bush famously started out as the governor of Texas before he became president. And he has a Moon-Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in this 3rd house.
LS: And like, if you just live in a place – like, because I’ve lived in a place like this before – where there’s just like, a lot of focus on local community, and sometimes there will be someone who’s like the unofficial mayor of the town, right? And it’s not like they’re the official mayor of the town; they’re just like, known for being all about the community. It can be that kind of vibe.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So and we’ve all like, sort of known things like that. But the fact that you can access that dimension of things with astrology is really interesting and really important, but it’s something that’s subtler and a little bit harder to track. But you can track it locally if you’re paying attention to your own chart or the charts of people around you.
LS: Right. For sure.
CB: Cool. All right. Well, that brings us to the end of our first section, so why don’t we take a little break?
All right, so we are actually releasing a PDF that contains our research notes that we prepared as we were getting ready for this episode over the past couple of weeks. And that’s gonna be available as a 75 page PDF download, and you can actually access that either by becoming a patron of The Astrology Podcast through our page on Patreon, or you can access it as a separate download without becoming a patron. So this PDF contains bonus material where there was a lot of research that went into each of these biographies, and sometimes we found a bunch of additional points that we didn’t include for each individual chart that we talked about just because we didn’t have time to include everything. So there’s bonus material about the stories that we did cover, and the writeup also contains a number of additional chart examples that we cut from this episode or that we didn’t get into due to time constraints. So it has a ton of bonus material, so if you really wanna go deeper into this material, it’s a very helpful little PDF that has a nice table of contents so that you can have sort of like a written reference guide to refer back to, both as you’re listening through this episode as well as if you wanna go back to and review some stuff in the future without having to rewatch the entire video. SO you can get access to that by going to our page on Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast and finding the entry for this episode on the 3rd house, and there you’ll see that you can either sign up to become a patron in order to support this work and support this research that we’re doing, or you can just buy the PDF outright by purchasing just this episode.
So this really helps us, because it’s from our patrons – the patrons that support and donate to the podcast each month – that we’re actually able to do these huge workshops on astrology for free. And that’s basically what’s funding these episodes in order to be able to devote all the time to the research that was necessary for this instead of putting everything behind a paywall. So that’s also allowed me to help to hire some additional assistants that have helped to research things for me or help me do additional research, and basically it’s been a huge thing. But if you support this work and you’d like to help support me get through the rest of this series on the houses, then please consider becoming a patron. When you sign up and become a patron, you get access to other bonus stuff like early access to new episodes, the ability to attend live recordings and workshops sometimes, like we’ve been doing a workshop on the houses where I interview different patrons about their house placements each time I do one of these new house episodes, and those have been a lot of fun. We also have a monthly electional astrology podcast. And for the higher tier patrons, we have an entire exclusive podcast series called The Secret Astrology Podcast, and there I actually recorded an entire bonus episode that was two hours long on different 3rd house birth charts that didn’t make it into this episode at all. So that’s an entire bonus episode on the 3rd house that’s only available to patrons. And then finally, you can also get your name listed in the credits if you become a patron as well.
So you can find out more information at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast, and I’ll put a direct link to the Patreon page where you can buy a PDF of the show notes for this episode in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website in the entry for this episode. So check it out there.
All right, now we’re gonna transition into talking about the rulers of the houses in the 3rd house or the ruler of the 3rd house in different houses, because this is where you start seeing interconnections in the chart between different parts of the person’s life and the 3rd house.
LS: Yeah. We have a lot of cool examples in this section in particular.
CB: Yeah, this is one where I had more examples in the ruler of the Ascendant section, but you’ve got a lot more examples that you found in the rulers of the houses.
All right, so let’s start with the first house. The first house often people’s names become indelibly associated with what they created with this house, and that’s something I tried to explain a little bit in the first house episode, but it’s sometimes hard to explain until you actually see it. And I have two excellent examples of that that really demonstrate that principle right at the top. So we’re talking about in our first one the ruler of the 3rd house in the first house.
So my first example of that is Enzo Ferrari, who is the creator of the Ferrari luxury like, car line basically, and he was a car enthusiast and a race car enthusiast and a race car driver. He was born with Sagittarius rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant actually is in Libra, but he has a stellium of four planets in Aquarius in the 3rd whole sign house. He has a Mercury-Mars conjunction in early Aquarius, and then he has an exact Sun-Venus conjunction or cazimi at 29 degrees of Aquarius, and then the ruler of the 3rd house of movement and of cars, essentially, in this context is Saturn, which is located at 11 degrees of Sagittarius conjunct the Ascendant at around 15 degrees of Sagittarius. And he literally, his car company was named after him, and now his name has become synonymous with, you know, fast race cars and like, luxury cars – the name Ferrari.
LS: Right. Yeah. So basically, mode of transportation is like, indelibly connected with like, your personal identity with ruler of the 3rd in the first.
CB: Exactly. So that’s what happens, and it’s also funny that it’s like, it’s in Sagittarius. The ruler of the 3rd is in Sagittarius and his Ascendant’s in Sagittarius, and Sagittarius is like, the centaur which is like, half man and half horse. And of course, the prancing horse emblem is like, this globally recognized symbol at this point of the Ferrari brand.
LS: Yeah. That’s really funny and like, even extra literal.
CB: Yeah. I thought that was good. All right, so moving on – we can also see obviously how 3rd house things are very important to him.
All right, so moving on. The next example – I had another example like that, which is the birth chart of Maria Montessori, who was born with Leo rising and the 3rd house is Libra, where we find Mercury in that house. And the ruler of the 3rd house is Venus, which is conjunct the Ascendant in Leo. So Venus is at 12 Leo, and the Ascendant is around 15 degrees of Leo; it’s a rounded 3:30 AM time, but Venus is somewhere on the Ascendant basically. And she is – if you’ve ever heard of like, Montessori schools, they’re named after this woman, Maria Montessori, who was an educator who created this sort of way of teaching children in order to and her goal was to like, empower children to become independent and to have more confidence and things like that based on she worked with children that had learning disabilities and developed some ideas about how what kind of environment to create that would work with them best.
LS: And what I love about this example, I mean, not just the ruler of the 3rd in the first, which is, you know, again one of those like, the thing is named for the person – but it’s Venus in a night chart ruling the 3rd placed in the first. And just the little bits I know about Montessori education – one of them is like, there’s a sort of ease. Like, they’re not trying to force children into doing certain things, but there’s like, an ease about, you know, going with their natural proclivities and that sort of thing. And like, also treating every child as like, a unique individual, which is like, very the ruler of the 3rd in Leo in the first house.
CB: Yeah, totally. Like, what is unique to you and what is your unique learning style, and then adapting it to that rather than having everybody, every student, do the same learning style.
LS: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, that’s brilliant. So those are my two examples of the ruler of the 3rd – and then also obviously with those two examples, it’s not just that it was like, named after them, but it was named after them because that topic and that area was a special passion for them. Like, you know, it was very personally important to them, and they focused on it so much that their identity becomes wrapped up in it. Their existence like, leaves an indelible mark on that topic in general for the rest of time.
LS: Yeah, definitely.
CB: Yeah. All right. So you have an example, yeah?
LS: Yeah, so the next one’s Audre Lorde, and shout out to Lindsey Turner for this example. I added a bit at the end to it as well. So Audre Lorde had, she was an American writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet, and civil rights activist. And she has Libra rising with Jupiter ruling the 3rd and placed in the first house in Libra. She was a self-proclaimed “Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, and poet,” and one of the things that Lindsey was noting about that was that she gave like, equal weight to each of her identities, her like, you know, basically self-identifications and that she didn’t prioritize any one over the other, which is kind of like, definitely the first house identity themes, and then in Libra kind of balancing them all.
So one of the things that was interesting about her as a child she communicated via poetry before she started writing poetry. And there was this quote where she said,
““People would say, well what do you think, Audre. What happened to you yesterday? And I would recite a poem and somewhere in that poem would be a line or a feeling I would be sharing. In other words, I literally communicated through poetry. And when I couldn’t find the poems to express the things I was feeling, that’s what started me writing poetry.”
So that was a really cool like, literal ruler of the 3rd in the first and it being in a Venus sign with the poetic expression. She got a master’s degree in library science and was a librarian for the New York public schools throughout the ‘60s, and again, early education is a 3rd house topic. And the word “sister” or “sisters” shows up prominently in Lorde’s work, and of course siblings is a 3rd house topic, such as in her Sister Outsider, which was an anthology of her essays and speeches. And I was a little bit – I took a moment where I was like, is that definitely unique to her, because this is also a term that’s used by lots of people. But it was really persuasive that Lindsey noted that that anthology was released in 1984, and it was during one of her 3rd house profections – it was age 50 —
CB: Nice.
LS: — which is really cool, right?
CB: Yeah.
LS: It’s not just the written work, you know, coming out, but also like the name of it.
CB: Which is really important, and that’s something that we looked for, and it’s something we tried to establish in our research methodology here is obviously we have like, the example we give of a natal placement or signature that we think is compelling and has at least like, a one-to-one correspondence with some literal thing that happened in the life if not like, multiple things. But sometimes the way to confirm our interpretation of that thing that we think the chart matched with in terms of the life events is to look at the timing and see if that part of the chart was actually also activated by important transit at that time. And if it was, that helps to confirm that you’re sort of like, on the right track in terms of how you’re looking at the chart and researching it.
LS: Yeah, definitely. And that was one of those where I was like, oh, okay, that actually really was highlighting the 3rd house and so calling it that name like, made actually a lot of sense right at that time.
She developed breast cancer in 1977, which led to her writing about disability and disease such as in her book The Cancer Journals, which was also her ruler of the 3rd in the first is also the ruler of the 6th in the first of like, illness. And she discussed ways illness can intersect with other aspects of identity, which is very like, ruler of the 6th bringing the topic of illness to like, the first house of self and identification. And as I was like, copying some of this over, I suddenly remembered that one of her most iconic lines she’s known for goes, “Your silence will not protect you.” And it’s very ruler of the 3rd in the first in terms of the first being yourself, both body and mind. You can also kind of see it coming in with her Mercury-Mars, but anyway. I looked up again like, the larger context of where that was from, and I wanna read it. I shortened it for time’s sake, but it’s actually really powerful and really evokes her ruler of the 3rd in the first being Jupiter in Libra. So —
CB: Do you want me to show it on the screen?
LS: Sure.
CB: Okay.
LS: Yeah.
CB: I will show it from the doc… There we go.
LS: So I cut a little bit of this out, but it goes,
“I was going to die, if not sooner than later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. What are the words you do not have yet? What do you need to say? … And, of course, I am afraid – you can hear it in my voice – because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger. … I began to ask each time: “What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?” … Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever. Next time, ask: What’s the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find that you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
And I really love that whole passage. But I – yeah, isn’t that powerful?
CB: Yeah, that’s really good.
LS: And so I read it partially because it is really powerful, but it also evokes her voice, which I thought was very Jupiterian; it’s almost like a little sermon or like a little inspiration to speaking, you know? And also, those few different things that I highlighted there in bold were like, very like, ruler of the 3rd in the first or ruler of the 3rd Jupiter, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, right?
CB: Yeah, that’s really the ruler of the 3rd in the first – like, the first house is like, self. And self —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — revelation is actually a good keyword for the first house because that’s often what happens when you have major transits or placements there is you go through a process of self-understanding and revealing of the self.
LS: Exactly. So that was like, just that really jumped out at me. And then the part where she said our speaking out will permit other people, other women to speak until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever – it’s like, very Jupiterian. It’s very like, this will improve everything; laws – like, legal system is associated with Jupiter and so forth. But it’s very like, inspiring in a sermon-like way. And then that last bit – “and you will find that you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had” – there’s also like, really ruler of the 3rd in the first is like, you, yourself, your own manner of seeing and being, you know? And like, that even coming from speech rather than like, vice versa. Like the act or the process of speaking like, unveiling that for you.
CB: Right. Yeah. I love that; that’s such a great example of the ruler of the 3rd house of like, speaking and communication in the first house of self.
LS: Yeah. It’s amazing.
CB: What’s that excerpt from?
LS: It’s one of her essays; I think it’s in… No, it’s not in Sister Outsider. Sorry. I’d have to pull it up again.
CB: Okay, no problem.
LS: Yeah.
CB: I was just curious. Maybe we’ll see if we can put that in the notes for afterwards that we —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — send out to patrons.
LS: Yeah, I’ll find it.
CB: Okay. All right. Anything else?
LS: No, I think that’s it.
CB: All right, so I’ll move on with my next example. My last example of the ruler of the 3rd in the first, which is Johnny Carson, who’s like, the archetypal talk show host. So he was born with Scorpio rising. His 3rd house is Capricorn where he has a Moon-Jupiter conjunction in a day chart along with the Lot of Fortune. And then the ruler of the 3rd house is Saturn, which is conjunct Mercury in Scorpio in his first house not too far from his Ascendant.
So I thought this was interesting just because like I said, he’s sort of like, the iconic American television host and comedian because he hosted The Tonight Show for over 30 years. He actually started hosting it when Saturn was in Aquarius, and then he stopped hosting it in the ‘90s when Saturn returned to Aquarius, so there’s some interesting like, Saturn themes in terms of his host, not just in terms of his chart but also in terms of the timing. And the way that he hosted it sort of shaped late night talk show hosts for generations. Like, everybody that has like, a late night talk show at this point today still is influenced by Carson in different ways. And you know, one of the things that’s interesting about having a Moon-Jupiter conjunction in the 3rd is especially for comedians, he would host different comedians and they would come on and do their act or do their bit, do a set basically on his show. And for many of them, that would be their big break. But one of the things is that if he liked them, he would like, give a thumbs-up if he really liked the act, or if he like, really really liked it, he would have them come over to the couch and he would talk to them for like, a few minutes after they did their set. So there was this quality of like, hosting, which is like, the Moon, like collecting things, but then also affirming something, which is very like, Jupiterian.
LS: For sure.
CB: Yeah. So that is my other ruler of the 3rd in the first example.
LS: Very good.
CB: All right. So let’s move onto the 2nd house, the ruler of the 2nd in the 3rd or the ruler of the 3rd in the 2nd. And the 2nd house is the house of finances. I guess we should mention a few significations each time, but finances, money, possession. I guess we just did a whole four hour episode so people can —
LS: If you don’t know what the 2nd house is yet!
CB: They can listen to that if they’re not familiar.
LS: Yes. Means of livelihood is a big one.
CB: Yeah. So my —
LS: Like, how you make a living.
CB: Right. So my first example of that is Kylie Jenner, who has Pisces – so Capricorn rising, Pisces on the 3rd whole sign house, and the ruler of the 3rd house is Jupiter. The ruler of the 3rd house of siblings is Jupiter, which is placed in the 2nd house of finances. And Kylie Jenner is the youngest of the Kardashians, so she sort of like, grew up in that context where she became wealthy especially as a result of her siblings and her finances were very much tied up with them because they were like, American television – what is it – like, reality television show family.
LS: Right. Like, a family of like, socialites kind of?
CB: Yeah, but that they sort of did a whole show, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and some other related shows where her sister especially became really famous especially for doing that show, but then it involved the entire family. And so it’s interesting how much she got her start really and success and especially financial wealth being tied up with her siblings.
LS: Right. Yeah. For sure.
CB: Yeah. This example is also interesting because it’s one of a… I came across a few of these where it’s like, with her chart, it’s Capricorn rising with Saturn in Aries, which is in the 4th whole sign house, which is the place of parents. And her mom is the driving force behind the family, and she’s actually the original one who proposed and pitched the idea of doing a reality television show and got it to happen, basically, even though the show Keeping Up with the Kardashians that her daughter was like, the centerpiece of it – Kim Kardashian. But it’s interesting because the ruler of the Ascendant is on like, the left hand side of the degree of the IC which is at 29 Aries, and Saturn is at 20 degrees of Aries. So technically, it’s on the 3rd house side of in quadrant houses the degree of the IC. And I think it’s interesting that that’s the ruler of her Ascendant. So I was trying to like, I was sort of thinking about that and wondering like, is that an example of like, overlapping significations where both the whole sign houses are showing you something important about what her life is directed towards, which is the 4th house, but then the quadrant houses are also showing you something important. It was an interesting thing that came up in several of these charts.
LS: Right. Which I know you were gonna explore in here at greater length, and now it’s gonna be possibly a separate episode of some sort later on.
CB: Yeah, I think I’ll do a separate episode on that at some point, but I just wanted to point out this example as an example, early example, of that that seems suggestive.
LS: Yeah, absolutely. There were some others; I know I have one in my own chart, too, so I like to keep an eye on those as well.
CB: Definitely. All right, so moving onto my next example of the ruler of the 3rd in the 2nd is Alexander Graham Bell, who is famous for patenting the telephone. So he had Pisces rising, and the 3rd whole sign house of communication is Taurus in his chart, and the ruler of the 3rd house of communication is in Aries in the 2nd house of money and finances but also like, possessions and like, things you own. And Venus is copresent in a sign-based conjunction with Uranus, Pluto, and the South Node, and that’s one of the most famous things that he ever did was patent the telephone. Although he had patents on a bunch of other communication devices besides the telephone as well, so it’s kind of interesting that it’s not just that one, even though that’s the one he’s most known for.
LS: Right. Yeah. And like, Venus is yeah, ruling the 3rd and placed in the 2nd, so it’s just like, communication is his means of livelihood.
CB: Right. Exactly. So —
LS: And revolutionizing actually, with the Uranus there too. Revolutionizing means of communication.
CB: Yeah, exactly. Although that’s interesting because also Mars is like, ruling the 2nd and square that from the 11th, and there was a debate about – there’s still some controversy even to this day about his patenting of the telephone, because another inventor, Elisha Gray, filed an intention to patent basically a telephone on the same day. So there’s always been disputes about that if like, was there something sketchy going on? Was it parallel invention or what?
LS: Right. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And then of course his is another example of that where he has Pisces rising and the ruler of the Ascendant is Jupiter, which is in the 4th whole sign house in Gemini. And a lot of his inventions were motivated initially by on the one hand the fact that his mom was profoundly hard of hearing. So part of his interest in like, hearing and developing things was in order to help people like his mom who were hard of hearing. And similarly, his dad was involved in teaching deaf people sign language or like, a form of sign language so that from his father he also gained some of this focus on language and communication and different things like that so that motivation makes sense and is there form the ruler of the Ascendant. And then of course, the ruler of the 4th whole sign house is Mercury, which is in the first house, but then we can see that the degree of the IC is later in Gemini, probably around 25, give or take since it’s a rounded time. But then Jupiter is on the 3rd house like, quadrant side of the IC. So in quadrant houses, the ruler of the Ascendant is in the 3rd house, so it’s interesting where again it’s kind of like, open to debate, but there could be an indication of like, an overlap there between the whole sign house and the quadrant house placements, although it’s tricky because this one – there’s so much going on there.
LS: Yeah, there’s a bunch of different factors sort of interlaced here. I mean, it’s interesting also because I know when you told that to me earlier I was like, “Right,” and then I was like, “That could be a thing.” And then also the Ascendant ruler in whole sign houses is Jupiter in Gemini in the 4th, and back then when the telephone started up, it was a means of connecting communication between people in their homes. That was like their first use. You know, we weren’t carrying around pocket cell phones yet, so yeah. Thought that was interesting as well.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point. So anyway, we’ll leave that investigation for like, another episode, but couple of suggestive things I’m like, writing down and keeping an eye on for possible synthesis of the different house systems and attempts to reconcile them.
LS: Right.
CB: All right. So my last example in this section is Dr. Drew Pinsky, who has a mutual reception between the rulers of the 2nd house of finances and the 3rd house of communication where he has Cancer rising and the Sun is in Virgo in the 3rd house of communication conjunct Pluto widely. And the ruler of the 3rd house of communication is Mercury, which is over in Leo in the 2nd house of finances conjunct Venus and Uranus and also very widely conjunct Pluto. So there’s a close connection, like I said, when those exchanges of signs happen. And what’s interesting is that he was a doctor by training and a board certified addiction medicine specialist, but then what happened is he started running, like, doing radio, and he got into doing late night radio and like, a call-in advice show that was very popular in the ‘90s called Loveline. And he ended up becoming very financially successful by becoming a radio personality where people would call in and ask for advice about like, sex, about relationships, about sometimes really difficult stuff because Pluto is also there in his 3rd house, and there would sometimes be some really serious calls. But I just thought it was really interesting, somebody where communication is tied in so closely to the finances and where, you know, he otherwise was just a doctor where, you know, he was reasonably successful financially from that, but then becoming hugely successfully financial as a radio host.
LS: Interesting. Yeah, for sure. It’s also interesting that like, that Sun in the 3rd in Virgo is applying to square that Saturn, and Saturn’s in a night chart ruling the 7th house of like, partnerships. So it’s like, people calling in about their problems in their love life, you know, with their partners.
CB: Yeah. I mean, that’s true. And then also he got a partner, a comedian basically, like joined him at one point – Adam Carolla – and that’s when the show became wildly successful because it was like, the two of them running the show and answering calls and stuff, and there was kind of like, a heyday of that in the ‘90s and early 2000s.
Yeah. So those are all of our 2nd house examples. Now we move into the 3rd house, except the 3rd house we don’t really have examples for because – and I know in the last episode a lot of people asked questions about this, and the answer is that when a planet is in its own sign, when like, the ruler of the 3rd house is in the 3rd house, it just indicates that that is a strong or auspicious placement in the person’s chart. And so sometimes that can indicate that things will be more fortunate in that specific area of life, whatever the topics are. So the topics of communication might go better. And for example, many of the charts that we talked about earlier, some of the charts where the planet was in its own sign or when it was in a mutual reception and the person was really notable or successful in that area are examples of what happens when the planet is well-placed in its own sign. So there’s other factors that go along with that, but it can also indicate that the person has a talent or that they have more autonomy in that area of their life.
LS: Yeah. I notice we’ll get to William Lilly at some point; he’s got the ruler of the 3rd in the 3rd.
CB: Yeah. When we get to the planets section, we’ll actually see a number of examples of people that have the planet in its own sign and what we’ll see is these are often like, people that are successful in that particular area of life. Or sometimes it can indicate like, a positive sibling relationship if the aspects are also good and if the sect factor is also good in terms of day versus night chart and other things like that. It’s just one of those additional factors that can indicate a more positive placement in that area of the person’s life.
LS: Right, for sure.
CB: All right. So let’s move forward to the 4th house, which is the house that has to do with the home, the parents, the living situation, and the private life. And my first example of this is a guy named Steve Frobes, who is actually the head of I think he’s like, the current editor in chief of Forbes magazine which he inherited from his father, which was then started by his father, which is like, a financial magazine. So and I thought this was interesting because Steve Forbes has Taurus rising, Leo is on the 4th whole sign house, and the ruler is the Moon, which is placed in Cancer in the 3rd house along with a stellium of Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. So having the ruler of the 4th in the 34d, he literally inherited from his father, from his family, this magazine basically and this media company at this point that talks about financial matters. And the Moon is in its own sign there in the 3rd house, and it’s very successful.
LS: It’s funny that the ruler of the 2nd house and the ruler of the 4th are conjoined in the 3rd house. So it’s like, it’s a magazine inherited from family about financial topics.
CB: Right. Yeah. And we can see also here it’s like, the Moon is in its own sign; the ruler of the 3rd house is in its own house, and he’s like, the owner of this company essentially or at least the head of it or is running it in some sort of head role where he has more autonomy in terms of being in charge of things.
LS: Yeah, for sure.
CB: So that’s one way; it doesn’t always work out that way, but that’s one way it can work out. All right, so moving on – my next example – this is one of yours actually, which is Charles Dickens.
LS: Yeah. So Charles Dickens – we’re noting we’re using the 11:55 PM birth time. There are I guess a couple birth times out there, but there are some persuasive reasons that this one is probably correct, and astrologically it really makes sense.
So he had the ruler of his Ascendant is Mars in Aries in the 6th, and it’s closely square Saturn in Capricorn in the 3rd house in a night chart. Saturn is also ruling the 4th house and then placed in the 3rd. And his story was basically his early life, his father ended up going to debtor’s prison. He grew up like, very poor initially. So his father went to debtor’s prison and he had to subsequently stop going to school because of this and go to work instead at age 12. And that just seemed like a really literal ruler of the 4th in the 3rd, especially Saturn in a night chart, is like, the poor conditions of family led to interruption in schooling. Interestingly, with that close overcoming square to his Ascendant ruler in the 6th house, because of his life experiences with like, poor working conditions and poverty, he ended up writing about those themes later in his written work.
He did eventually go back to school for a couple years, but he felt it was a bad experience. There was a quote that said,
“He encountered what he called ‘haphazard, desultory teaching [and] poor discipline. The school’s sadistic headmaster was later the inspiration for the character Mr. Creakle in Dickens’ semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield.”
So it was like, really bad 3rd house early schooling experiences as well as the interruption. And then —
CB: That’s amazing. Like, immortalizing your terrible schoolteacher in a legendary like, story.
LS: Gotta be careful, you know. Those kids might grow up to write badly about you!
CB: Exactly.
LS: And then when he was 15, his education was interrupted again and he had to drop out of school and work again to contribute to his family’s income. But he worked in an office, and the job actually became a launching point for his writing career. So within a year of being hired, Dickens began freelance reporting at the law courts of London. Just a few years later, he was reporting for two major London newspapers, which is another 3rd house topic. And then eventually he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, 5 novellas, hundreds of short stories and nonfiction articles. So and I think part of what’s going on there is, you know, not just Saturn in its own sign becoming better over time – you know, which can happen even in a night chart. That is a major mitigation. But he also had Venus exalted in a night chart in the 5th house of like, creative output. So I think that’s part of like, why it ended up so positively later in addition to, you know, Saturn improving over time.
CB: Yeah. Well, Saturn’s also in its own sign, which is —
LS: Right, that’s what I was saying, yeah.
CB: — mitigation, but also Venus in Pisces is sextiling Mercury through an inferior sextile, and even Saturn through an inferior sign-based sextile. So since it’s a night chart, Venus is able to help offset things a little bit as opposed to if it was completely in aversion to that sign and wasn’t able to help at all.
LS: Yeah, absolutely. So this was a good example of a few things. I mean, we put it in the ruler of the 4th in the 3rd section because it was literally like, coming from family poverty, ended up interrupting his education multiple times, but it was also just a really fascinating square with the Ascendant ruler in the 6th square Saturn in the 3rd of like, working conditions being a theme in his written work later because of having to, you know, work bad jobs and drop out of school.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That’s really good.
All right, so moving on. You have another example in this section, right?
LS: Ansel Adams. So Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist. Most people know him for like, his grand, sweeping photographs of like, nature. So he has his Ascendant ruler, Jupiter, Venus and Mercury in the 3rd house in Aquarius. Jupiter rules the first and 4th houses and placed in the 3rd. And you know, this is one of those things where astrology just like, never lies. You just don’t always know initially why it’s gonna work out, but it always does. You know, so initially I was like, why would the ruler of the 4th be in the 3rd for him? Why would that be important? It ended up being really important. So he was a lifelong advocate for environmental conservation, so his photographic practice was like, deeply entwined with his nature advocacy, basically. And also just intertwined in odd ways. Like, at age 14, he was given his first camera during his first visit to Yosemite National Park. So again, just like, even from the first start of getting a camera, it was like while he was out in nature. Age 14 also is a 3rd house profection year, so it was activating that ruler of the 4th in the 3rd, which makes sense because it does sound like it’s very literally playing out that way. Age 14 is also the Saturn opposition, of course, and with Saturn as the ruler of the 3rd placed in the 2nd, that was like, the beginning of his making a living via photography.
So this is one of those things where your expression isn’t always in words. So basically his manner of expression was via these photographs. And you’ll sometimes see that with Venus in the 3rd; it’s like, an artistic expression of what you’re trying to say. He developed his early photographic work as a member of the Sierra Club, which is like, a group dedicated to protecting wild places on earth. And really interestingly, to me anyway, he was later contracted with the United States Department of the Interior to make photographs of national parks, and he eventually photographed 27 of the then 28 national parks. Which is like, I don’t know, that’s like, okay yes – the ruler of the 4th in the 3rd, you know?
CB: Right.
LS: And it eventually actually helped expand the national park system, his work did, because he was, you know, basically like, advocating it via his beautiful photographs of it. Funnily, later on in 1943, he had a camera platform mounted on his station wagon to give him a better vantage point and a better angle for expansive backgrounds. And so most of his landscapes from that time forward were made from the roof of his car rather than from summits reached by rugged hiking like he did when he was younger. It’s a really funny like, transformation, vehicle tie-in with communication and expression. And in 1943 when he did that, there were two eclipses in Aquarius in his 3rd house at 15 and 22 Aquarius. And 22 Aquarius is the exact degree of his Venus, so it was a change in like, how he was making his art via his station wagon.
CB: Wow. That’s incredible.
LS: That’s so funny.
CB: Yeah, I love that, that you get all the different themes tied together of like, cars, his photography/artwork with Venus, and also like, photographing land with the 4th house representing land, like very literally – it’s the very bottom of the chart under the earth at the lowest point that is represented, represents the earth the most closely.
LS: Right. People often wonder about like, 4th house things and like, oh well, I’m not really that attached to my home or whatever. But sometimes it’s like, land or environmental concerns.
CB: Yeah. Or like, ancestry or other things like that as well.
LS: Right.
CB: It’s also interesting because it’s like, you know, it’s in Aquarius. It’s like, Venus in Aquarius and Mercury in Aquarius and they’re both like, sextile Uranus, which is on his Ascendant, and it’s like, he’s using a technology which is so commonplace – photography at the time – that we sort of take it for granted, but —
LS: Right.
CB: — back then it was even more of like a actual technology that he was using that was like, kind of advanced or new in some way. Not like, super new by that point, but still there’s like, a technological edge to what’s going on there.
LS: There’s a lot of specific equipment involved, and yeah, it is a technology thing. Not like we have in every single phone now, but like, it wasn’t like that back then.
CB: Right, yeah.
LS: Yeah, no, that’s a good point.
CB: That is a great example and a great find. Good job finding that one.
LS: Thank you.
CB: All right. I think that’s good. So I think that completed the 4th house, so like I said, we’re just giving a little taste of each house with like, a few handful of examples for most of these houses. So now we’ll move onto the 5th house, which is the house that has to do especially with children. Children, also sometimes creativity, sometimes sex is a topic that comes up with the 5th house as well and its connection especially with procreation but also recreationally.
All right, so my first example here is actually just a callback to a previous one, which is reminding you that Walt Disney has the ruler of the 3rd house of communication in the 5th house of children and he created Dsiney, which is literally a whole media empire and animation studio that’s based on essentially like, entertaining or communicating stories to children for the most part as well as, you know, taking some of those old fairytales and adapting them to modern times and modern animations.
LS: Right. Yeah. Entertaining and children are like, you know, really clear thiemes here.
CB: Yeah, as well as just, you know, working with his brother who was also helping him with that at the same time. So there’s a lot of things going on.
LS: Right.
CB: All right. My next example after that – this is one you actually first showed me, so do you wanna do this one?
LS: I did. I haven’t looked at it in a while, but I do remember gathering for you. So this one’s Judy Blume; she was a prolific children’s book author. And she had the Ascendant Libra rising, Venus in the 5th house in late Aquarius with the Sun, Jupiter, and Mercury. And Jupiter is the ruler of the 3rd house and is placed in the 5th house. And so basically she just like, wrote lots and lots of books for children, which is like, the ruler of the 3rd of writing or books or communication in the 5th house of children.
CB: Yeah. She was like, a prolific children’s book author and also won a lot of top awards for her children’s books.
LS: Right. With Venus being the benefic of sect there in the 5th.
CB: Yeah. So very similar to Disney, but just from a different angle or different vantage point.
All right. Another one to give a different example angle on things that I found in my searches was Hugh Hefner, who was the founder of Playboy and Playboy Magazine, had the ruler of the 5th house – which represents sex and sexuality – was Saturn in the 3rd house of communication in the sign of Scorpio. So he was born with Virgo rising, Saturn in Scorpio in the 3rd house, and he created, you know, a magazine that was based on, you know, a large part of it of like, sex and sexuality basically.
LS: Right. Yeah, that is basically his story.
CB: Yeah. And then that created a whole media empire that continues to this day, but it partially arises out of that placement.
LS: For sure. I remember writing him up as a Saturn return story eons ago for his 3rd Saturn return.
CB: Oh right.
LS: He got married to like, someone in their 20s when he was at his 3rd Saturn return.
CB: Right. Yeah. There’s lots of like, weird stuff —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — in terms of the different things going on there as well.
LS: For sure.
CB: But yes. So that was his placement in terms of part of the founding of that.
The next one was bell hooks. And this is one that I noticed; it’s kind of complicated to talk about. But she had the ruler of the 3rd house of communication in the 5th house, and one of the things that I thought was really interesting about that is she wrote a book not super long ago called All About Love, and in this book, chapter eight is actually really interesting. But it explores the meaning of love in contemporary society, and she really tries to offer like, a vision for creating more loving relationships within the context of communities where she wants to like, remove love from just being a thing that happens between individuals, like two people in a relationship, and she tries to recontextualize it by placing in a broader role that makes it sort of like, vital to creating communities and to shaping communities.
So I read that quote from her earlier about communities where, like I said, it’s one of the most interesting treatments of like, the 3rd house even though she’s not talking about astrology. But her whole discussion of communities ties together like, friends, siblings, other people in your neighborhood and community, and all of this other stuff. It was really quite striking. So I’d recommend reading it. I had some quotes somewhere, but it looks like I don’t have them handy right now. But I thought it was an interesting example because Venus – like, the 5th house is associated with Venus, and it’s the joy of Venus. And so one of the things that might be associated with Venus to some extent and with the 5th house by extension would be the concept of love. And I thought it was just interesting how there’s a connection then, at least in this book in her work, where she’s trying to connect those two things – of community and love.
LS: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Yeah. So anyway. She emphasizes community care, promotes justice and equality, encourages open dialogue and understanding, and even at one point in that chapter like, tries to nurture a spiritual connection as part of community, which I think is connected with the Venus-Neptune conjunction in her chart.
LS: Yeah, that’s really cool.
CB: Yeah. So I would recommend everyone check out that chapter of her book, because you’ll – it’s hard for me to convey here.
All right. And then we had one last example in this section, but it doesn’t require a chart, right?
LS: Right. Yeah. I had just – so as we were dialoguing about the 3rd house, all the 3rd house things the last couple weeks, I had this sudden realization as I was thinking about like, house rulers in different houses and I was like, wait – my mom has the ruler of the 5th house of children in the 3rd house. And there’s lots of other ways that plays out, like she used to like, have a teaching career, for instance. But I was like, her child is a diviner. Like, that’s me! It was suddenly like I’d never thought about that facet of that placement before, and you know, typically I do see astrology more in the 9th house, but you know, I do other divination and I’m actually quite fond of divination in a few different, you know – I Ching and Lenormand cards and tarot – and quite often she’ll come looking for me and I’ll have like, cards spread out all over the floor. And so I was like, I think that’s me.
CB: Yeah. I think that’s really good, because you’re not just an astrologer, but you’re somebody that regularly uses tarot cards and uses the I Ching and all sorts of different forms of divination on a regular basis.
LS: Yeah, and I love to like, compare and contrast the different types of divination and like, what they can and can’t say depending on their systems and so forth. And I use it pretty much almost every day, so I was like, all right – your child is a diviner.
CB: Yeah. That’s really good. Well, there’s one instance then of that 3rd house connection with divination.
LS: For sure. And we’ll have some more later.
CB: All right. So let’s move onto the 6th house. The 6th house is one of the more challenging houses; it can pertain to injuries and illness, and so some of the significations we find there have to do with that.
My first example of that is Bruce Willis, who has Virgo rising and Saturn in Scorpio in the 3rd house. And Saturn is ruling the 5th house and the 6th house of illness. And what happened is a few years ago, it was announced that he was diagnosed with something called aphasia in 2022. And aphasia is a language disorder that affects a person’s ability to communicate, specifically impacting their speaking, but also their writing, and also understanding of both the spoken as well as the written language. So this diagnosis led him to retire from acting, as the condition made it increasingly difficult for him to perform his roles. And, you know, this was really striking to me at the time because for several years, like, people had been criticizing him. Like, I know one YouTube channel that did like, a whole reel at one point where they were criticizing him for taking this seemingly endless string of really, like, high-paying but low-quality movie roles in a bunch of movies. And then after this news came out and was announced, it became clear that the reason why he was doing that potentially is because he knew something was wrong and he was running out of time to like, make money for his family before he couldn’t anymore.
LS: Right.
CB: And so it was really interesting, because then all those people that had been making fun of him for several years looked like assholes, and it was a really good sort of, to me, like, insight that you have to be careful sometimes that you never know what a person’s, like, going through, especially when you’re dealing with celebrities like that.
LS: Yeah. When in doubt, it’s best not to make fun of other people, because you really don’t know what’s going on.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So there was some interesting timing because when his family publicly announced his aphasia diagnosis, Saturn was actually transiting through Aquarius, so it was actually going through his 6th house, and it was very closely squaring his natal Saturn in the 3rd house, where Saturn was at 21 Aquarius and it was squaring his natal Saturn at 20 Scorpio. So that’s a super close transit. And then at the same time, Mars was 18 degrees of Scorpio, squaring his Mars and conjoining his Saturn or making a hard angle. The South Node was also conjoining his Saturn, and also eclipses were starting to take place in his 3rd and 9th houses. And if that wasn’t enough, Uranus was also conjoining his Mars in Taurus, which is the ruler of his 3rd house of communication. But then also Jupiter was transiting his 7th house and training ghis Saturn and Jupiter in the 11th very closely at the same time, which I thought was interesting because it showed the outpouring of support from family and friends and fans that happened at that time and how it just like, almost immediately overnight changed the narrative that had built up about him the past several years to something much more positive and supportive.
LS: Totally. Yeah.
CB: So that’s what happens sometimes when you have like, extremely negative but also extremely positive transits happening at the same time.
LS: Right. You know, and the ruler of the 6th in the 3rd, you know, will have some other sort of more positive manifestations. Obviously, this didn’t happen until later in his life, so it’s not that that was the only thing that that placement was about, right? But you know, at some point sooner or later, if people live long enough, most people develop some sort of disability. You know, whether that’s when you’re younger or older. So it’s not something to, you know, get frightened of because we’re speaking of those chart placements.
CB: Right, yeah. But symbolically, it’s just interesting how literal that is that Saturn sometimes says “no” to things in its function as a malefic. And here in the 3rd house of communication, it was saying “no” to communication, and then —
LS: Right.
CB: — literally becoming unable to speak.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah. But you know, it’s offset so positively otherwise, because —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — you know, he was such a successful actor and everything up to that point, and we can see his Jupiter up here in Cancer trining his Saturn as well as Venus squaring it. So I tried to look to see if like, if he had any other like, speaking issues earlier in life, but I couldn’t find anything. So I don’t know if this is something that really did just like, manifest later on or if there were any other like, ways that that archetype manifested in other ways earlier in his life. So if anybody knows, you know, let us know in the YouTube comments.
LS: Right. And I guess one more note about that – you know, it’s just a reminder that the natal chart has to represent like, everything that can happen to you at any point in your life, versus like, some of the timing kind of narrowing down when different things are activated and so forth. So just because there’s like, something that looks like, a little scary or negative or something, it doesn’t mean that that’s gonna be like, throughout your entire life.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
All right, so moving on. The next example – this was, shout out to Melissa Marklin for this one – it was found – this is Tammy Faye Bakker, who’s now known as Tammy Faye Bakker Messner. And Melissa found this one where there’s a mutual reception between the rulers of the 3rd and the 6th. So this is another one of those like, really strong connections between those houses where Tammy has Sagittarius rising, Aquarius on the 3rd house where we find Mercury and Venus both in the 3rd house of communication, and then Venus is in a mutual reception with Saturn in Taurus in the 6th house. So there’s a connection potentially we might say symbolically between the house of communication and the house of illness.
So one of the things that’s interesting about her – Mercury is also there, and Mercury is the ruler of the 10th house of career and the 7th house of relationships. And she was an American evangelist who cofounded the evangelist television program The PTL Club with her husband Jim Bakker in 1974. And it was also known as The Jim and Tammy Show. With, you know, the ruler of the 7th house of relationships in the 3rd house of communications, she starts a televangelist program with her husband. But she made waves in the televangelist and Christian community at one point because in the 1980s, she openly supported the LGBT community amidst the AIDS epidemic. So the AIDS epidemic was like, raging at the time, and her views really diverged from a lot of the other mainstream evangelists because she reached out to HIV/AIDS patients at the height of the AIDS epidemic in order to sort of do outreach and to try to educate and help people, basically.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And it was something very positive and very striking at that time. She also tried to help people with issues related to addiction and like, substance abuse. And I thought that was interesting as well, since drug addiction is also like, a 6th house thing because it’s usually seen nowadays as an illness.
LS: Right. Yeah. That’s really fascinating, the combination of those two. If you wanna see her husband’s chart, we talked about that in the 2nd house episode. But yeah, this is more of a 3rd house focused one.
CB: Oh right, you had used her husband as an example.
LS: Yeah, Jim Bakker.
CB: Got it.
LS: This is more of a redeeming piece.
CB: Yeah, definitely. All right. So I think that’s it for that example. Thanks to Melissa for finding that one.
So there’s one more example in this section, and this is Jane Goodall, and this is an example that you found.
LS: I did originally find it. You looked up some of the information, but it’s basically the ruler of the 6th house in the 3rd. So Jane Goodall, Sagittarius rising and Taurus is the 6th house, which is ruled by Venus, and Venus is placed in Aquarius in the 3rd. And it’s really funny because – okay, there we are – Venus and Saturn in the 3rd house. And so communication with animals was like, I mean, literally if you would like, hear that, you would be like, communication with animals, and that’s pretty much how it worked out. So chimpanzees in particular was like, a major part of her life and work. She focused heavily on understanding chimpanzee behavior and communication, especially like, nonverbal. I mean, vocalizations, but also nonverbal communication like facial expressions and postures and gestures, which is really funny, right, when we were talking about some of the, you know, comedians with the —
CB: Yeah.
LS: — 3rd house placements and like, the gestures and facial expressions.
CB: I’m imagining like, an alien species trying to interpret Jim Carrey’s like, facial movements and like, understand what he’s trying to convey.
LS: It’s very much like that.
CB: Yeah.
LS: So she like, immersed herself in their world, and you know, built trust with the chimpanzees, and she was able to study their communication as well as other species. So you know, and she basically recognized the intelligence and sentience of animals and like, advocated for greater understanding and respect for their like, forms of communication. Now something else I was thinking about when I was looking at that chart, because I was like, I read this passage where it said as she was immersed with this, you know, group of a few dozen or so chimpanzees, it basically said that they accepted her as – there was kind of a hierarchy in the group – they accepted her as kind of like, the lowest rung of the hierarchy but as like, belonging to the group. And then they detailed the other kinship relationships between the different chimpanzees that were in the group. Like, who was whose father and aunt and uncle, and I was like, I don’t think this is too much of a stretch; I think this is actually like, you know, she was not just studying their communication. It was like, animal extended family that she was like, a part of, or she was at the very least studying, but like, also kind of a part of, which I thought was a really funny like, 3rd house thing.
CB: Right. Didn’t you say she was at like, the lowest rung of the ladder, though?
LS: Yes. Yeah. So she was accepted as one of them, but she was accepted at like, the bottom of the hierarchy.
CB: I think that’s really funny because I was wondering what that Saturn in the 3rd house in a night chart meant, and sometimes it’s like when you’re – in normal people, it’s like you might be estranged from like, a sibling or —
LS: Right.
CB: — your extended relatives or something, but she’s like, kind of like an outcast within the animal society that she’s been accepted into or that she’s like, not, she’s sort of like, on the periphery of the edges of it.
LS: That’s really funny. I think that’s totally fair.
CB: All right. Maybe – I don’t know if that’s stretching it, but there’s probably —
LS: No, I think it’s —
CB: — other ways that it manifested —
LS: — it’s true.
CB: — but yeah.
LS: It’s true because I have another example with Aquarius 3rd house things, and it was about like, the edges of society.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Nice. Well, I think that’s an amazing example. I always love the 6th house rulership stuff where animals come up. Of course I used Leona Helmsley in the last example of like, ruler of the 6th in the 2nd where she left like, millions of dollars to her dog that became the richest dog in the world. So this is a nice continuation of that theme.
LS: Right. And oftentimes when people worry about like, illness or injury with the 6th house, I mean, that can come too, but animals are part of our world. And usually if there’s like, an important placement or rulership with regard to the 6th house, like, people often have like, a greater focus on animals in some way.
CB: Yeah. Definitely. It’s really striking. It’s one of those things where you first learn it and read it and you don’t know how that works out or why that would make sense. But then when you start seeing it, like, you realize that’s really a thing.
LS: Yeah, definitely.
CB: All right, so let’s transition now into the 7th house, which is the house that’s associated with relationships, partnership, and marriage. And when I was searching through my timed chart files, one of the charts that came up for this that I was initially like, perplexed about, but I saw that Miley Cyrus had a mutual reception between the ruler of the 3rd house of communication and the 7th house of relationships. She was born with Taurus rising and Cancer on the 3rd house, which is ruled by the Moon, which is placed in Scorpio in the 7th house conjunct Pluto and Mercury. And then the ruler of the 7th house of relationships is Mars, which is in Cancer in the 3rd house of communication. And I thought about it for a little bit, and I thought that was funny because I realized recently – I think it was like, a year ago now – her biggest hit song to date, “Flowers,” is widely interpreted to be about a relationship, and specifically to her past marriage to somebody that she broke up with; it’s basically like, a breakup song. So while it’s not explicitly like, confirmed by Miley Cyrus at this point, the lyrics and the timing of the song’s release strongly suggest that it is like, referring to this marriage that fell apart. And in fact, when I was looking into it more, I realized that she actually has several songs about relationships that have been successful beyond “Flowers,” which was her most successful one. And if you remember like, 2013, the power ballad “Wrecking Ball” was also about reflecting on like, heartbreak and emotional turmoil surrounding a breakup at the time. But then there’s other songs as well about relationships, like “Malibu,” “Slide Away,” and “Midnight Sky,” which is another popular song in 2020 about like, self-love and independence after a breakup.
So you know, obviously lots of different singers write songs about relationships and stuff, but so one could make an argument about it, but I just thought it was interesting that like, her most successful songs have been about relationships, especially that one “Flowers,” which I think she won awards for. Like, it sold really high. It was like, her Saturn return success story song that I’ve talked about a lot over the past couple of years because I was anticipating that she would be a successful Saturn return story with Saturn in her 10th house. And then that song was like, one of the reasons why it was a success story.
LS: Interesting. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
LS: That’s good.
CB: So communicating about relationships or singing about relationships.
LS: Right.
CB: All right. So moving on – my next example is Leona Helmsley, who had Cancer rising and the 7th house as well as the 8th house, so the 7th house of relationships and the 8th house of other people’s money, is ruled by Saturn, which is located in the 3rd house of not just communication but also neighbors and neighborhood. And what’s interesting about her is that Leona Helmsley married a real estate tycoon named Harry Helmsley who owned property around New York City. And they ended up becoming this like, powerful real estate couple in New York especially where they owned properties like the Empire State Building, many prestigious hotels all around New York City. So she basically married into immense real estate wealth and power, and then together they became a prominent couple in the New York real estate scene and she did a lot of work in that area. So I thought that was a really interesting connection then where, you know, that’s not communication, that’s like, literally like, your neighborhood. But for her, her neighborhood was New York City.
LS: That’s a good neighborhood one. And I have a funny quote to add from her.
CB: Okay.
LS: One of her most famous quotes she’s known for is saying, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” And that’s like, Saturn ruling the 8th house of like, taxes placed in the 3rd house of communication as like, one of her most famous quotes.
CB: Yeah, that’s really good.
LS: Like, Saturn negating things.
CB: Yeah. It’s funny also because Virgo’s actually associated with like, little things.
LS: Oh yeah.
CB: Like, small things.
LS: Yes. True.
CB: All right. So moving on. The last example in this section is Joe Biden, who famously – so he has the 3rd house – he has Sagittarius rising, the 3rd house is Aquarius, and the ruler of the 3rd house of travel is Saturn, which is placed in the 7th house of marriage and relationships, and Saturn is conjunct Uranus. And Biden famously when he first was elected to public office during his Saturn return, his wife died in a car accident like, right after he was elected basically. And it was like, one of the greatest tragedies of his life, but it was involving his wife passing away in a car accident which unexpectedly and, yeah, so it was symbolized by this connection between the 3rd house of short distance travel and the 7th house of relationships, and then it was timed by Saturn actually going through that sign of Gemini.
LS: Right. Yeah. Really sad story. A very straightforward 3rd and 7th house connection.
CB: Yeah. And sometimes that can be part of what comes up there. I know there was one listener who sent in a story like that as well of somebody close to them that passed away in connection with a car crash, and we weren’t able to include that for time. But I know that’s just a theme that can sometimes come up when it comes to travel.
LS: For sure.
CB: Yeah. All right. So now we move onto the 8th house actually, speaking of that.
LS: Yes.
CB: All right, so one of my first examples – I wanted to have two positive ones of the 8th house, because the 8th house is not all negative. The 2nd house we talked about in the last episode is like, your money and finances, and the 8th house is other people’s money. And what’s interesting sometimes about positive 8th house placements is that sometimes it can indicate like, getting money from other people. And sometimes with the rulers of the houses, it explains like, what you’re getting money for or how other people’s money is wrapped up in your life. ‘
So this is the birth chart of Hasan Piker, who is a popular streamer at this point who live streams every day on YouTube and Twitch, and he b asically does commentary and reaction videos and especially like, political commentary. And in his birth chart, he has Capricorn rising, Pisces is the 3rd house of communication, and the ruler of the 3rd house of communication is Jupiter, which is located in Leo in the 8th house in a day chart along with the Sun and Mercury. And a lot of his income comes through people who watch his livestream every day and donate money to him, you know, because they like following him and they wanna support his work. And I thought that was really interesting in addition to the interactive nature of his streams, which has attracted a large audience and a dedicated audience of people that are willing to support him financially as well as the fact that he’s often doing commentaries on other videos on YouTube and like, reaction type videos, which I think is interesting because that’s kind of like, other people’s stuff as well. And it made me think of if the reaction video isn’t like a interesting archetype for the ruler of the 3rd house of communication in the 8th house of other people’s stuff.
LS: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve seen that before, I mean, both of those things definitely. Like, his 8th house is so positive with Jupiter not just in a day chart in the 8th, but copresent and, you know, having reception with its ruler, which is the Sun in its own of Leo. So like, yeah, really positive 8th house, unusually so. So yeah, people who crowdfund, you know, or get lots of like, scholarships or grants, that’s often like, an 8th house thing. And yeah, other people’s stuff – that can be tricky, because like, yeah. Sometimes you’re like, positively benefiting from like, something that otherwise kind of belongs to someone else. But he’s like, communicating about their things.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I’ve seen streamers that just have a knack for making a living because people just, like, throw money at them or just like, want to give them money. I saw a person with like, a stellium in the 8th house and with both benefics there that just, you know, people just want to give them money, and it’s almost like, miraculous how fortunate they are.
LS: Right.
CB: And then I knew another person like that that had a positive 8th house placement there but that they would get donations for people but then they sometimes like, would kind of abuse it so they weren’t like, very ethical surrounding it. So it can really vary, and there’s like, a wide variety of stuff. There’s also sometimes negative 8th house placements where somebody can misappropriate somebody’s stuff or like, rip off other people or plagiarize or other things like that.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah. So we will get to more of that when we do the 8th house episode at some point, which will be a fun episode I’m sure.
LS: Yes, I’m sure.
CB: All right, so speaking of that, I had one example that I threw in late recently. I was looking for translators and looking for people that spoke a lot of languages or had a facility with language and looking at their 3rd house placements. One of them that came up was my friend Levente Laszlo, who is a translator of ancient Greek astrological texts and who I mentioned early in this episode because he actually has – he’s like, crowdfunding the translation of a bunch of ancient Greek astrological texts from the Hellenistic and medieval traditions. And he said it was okay if I used his birth chart for this example where he has Taurus rising and he has Jupiter exalted in the 3rd house of communication in a day chart, and Jupiter is ruling the 11th house of friends and groups as well as the 8th house of other people’s money. And so the specific manifestation of that in his instance is that he’s good with languages, he’s a translator, and he’s now like, crowdfunding the translation of all these ancient astrological texts through the Horoi Project which I mentioned earlier.
LS: You know what I really love about this one? Well, besides that he contributed it; thank you. It’s a great example. The ruler of the 8th in the 3rd, but then it’s also the ruler of the 4th house in the 8th. That little loop in the 4th house being like, things from the past.
CB: Right, like ancient things.
LS: Yeah. And that’s like, what’s being crowdfunded around.
CB: Yeah. And it’s like, he also has – as he pointed out to me – like, Mercury is in a mutual reception with Saturn, and Mercury is in the 9th house, and so that kind of helps in terms of some of his skills with ancient languages as well. So as with all of these charts, there’s always gonna be like, multiple different things that are indicative or that can emphasize like, a certain outcome or placement in a person’s life, and we don’t always mention all of them, but —
LS: Sure.
CB: Yeah, he’s got a bunch of good ones there.
I reached out to one guy who was a polyglot who knows like, 20 different languages to see what his birth time was, but unfortunately I haven’t heard back yet. I’m still looking for if anybody knows a polyglot, which is somebody that knows lots and lots of different languages, especially like, a dozen languages or more. Let me know because I’m looking for birth times. I’ve only found one birth time so far for one. I reached out to another translator, but unfortunately his time was unknown and was like, speculative, so it wasn’t a good chart example to use for the purpose of this, but I’m still looking for more examples if anybody’s able to find one.
All right, so moving on. Other manifestations of the 8th house. Of course, the 8th house is also traditionally the primary house that’s associated with death and mortality. One of my most striking examples of this that I’ve always used is Ted Kennedy, who has a very strong mutual reception between the ruler of the 3rd house of siblings and the 8th house of death, and he experienced the death of at least four different siblings during the course of his life in really striking ways. So he had Capricorn rising, Pisces on the 3rd house, and the ruler of the 3rd house of siblings is Jupiter, which is placed in Leo in the 8th house of death. And the ruler of the 8th house of death is the Sun, which is placed in Pisces in the 3rd house of siblings. So this is actually one of the first charts where I really noticed this theme that oftentimes when there’s a mutual reception between two houses, there’s a very prominent connection between those topics somehow in the person’s life. And his was one of the first charts I noticed that in like, a decade ago that we’ve seen so prominently now throughout the course of this lecture, through this podcast. But you know, just to give you idea, it’s like, his older brother Joseph P. Kennedy Junior was killed in action during World War II. Then his sister Kathleen Kennedy died in a plane crash. Then his brother John F. Kennedy was assassinated famously in 1963. And then his other brother Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. There was also other assorted issues with siblings, but that’s just to give you an idea. Like, there was a strong connection between the topics of like, siblings and mortality in his life.
LS: Yeah, that’s really striking.
CB: Yeah. All right. So moving on – and actually one more like that. This is a callback to a previous chart. So this is the birth chart of Caroline Kennedy, who was the sister of Robert F. Kennedy – not Robert, of —
LS: John F. Kennedy.
CB: — John F. Kennedy, Junior, who’s the example that I used earlier in this talk who had the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd and died in a plane crash. This is the sister of that guy, and she has Sagittarius rising, Cancer on the 8th house of death and mortality, and the ruler of the 8th house of death and mortality is the Moon, which is placed in Aquarius in the 3rd house of siblings. So and she also unfortunately had that experience of losing a sibling.
LS: Right. And it’s like, square Mars in the 12th and opposite Uranus. It was like, a sudden, unexpected thing. And then the ruler of the 3rd itself is like, near her Ascendant in a night chart. So it’s like, emphasizing that she’s like, the sister of the famous brother who died.
CB: Yeah. And that’s the thing is that you only get the worst case scenarios and outcomes like this when there’s like, multiple heavy afflictions and other things that are reflecting that, which is the case in her chart or the case in Ted Kennedy’s chart. And it’s not always gonna work out like that, especially if there’s only just like, one of these indications. It can work out in other ways, but it’s sometimes when you see the same thing – like, when the chart is telling you the same thing multiple different ways, sometimes that’s when you know it’s gonna be a strong likelihood of something that may happen in a person’s life.
LS: Right. For sure.
CB: Yeah. Alright. So two more examples like that to round out the 8th house. A really famous one that everyone always cites and I’ve cited for like, 10 years now is Princess Diana, who famously died in a car accident in the 1990s. She had Sagittarius rising, Cancer on the 8th house of death, and the ruler of the 8th house of death was the Moon, which is placed in Aquarius in the 3rd house of short distance travel, and the Moon is applying to an out-of-sign opposition with Mars and Pluto in a day chart, so it’s also afflicted. And she tragically passed away in a car accident as she was being chased by paparazzi one night in Paris.
LS: Right. Yeah, unfortunately another very literal 8th house and 3rd house combo.
CB: Right. And then one more that I just found in researching this episode, and then we can move on from this house. This is the birth chart of John Connally, and John Connally was the governor of Texas. And he was actually riding in the same car as John F. Kennedy when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And John Connally who was riding in the front seat was also hit by a bullet and seriously injured so that he thought he was gonna die, but then he ended up actually surviving.
So his chart is interesting because he had Sagittarius rising, a Mercury-Uranus-Venus conjunction in Aquarius in the 3rd house, and the ruler of the 3rd house of short distance travel is Saturn, which is located in Cancer in the 8th house with the South Node and Pluto. And he was involved in this like, historic incident where the president was shot and assassinated and killed, and so it was one of the most famous assassinations of all time. It occurred in a car, in a moving vehicle, and this person, you know, happened to be in that vehicle at that time and was also almost like, mortally wounded at that time.
LS: Right. So you know, having kind of a near death experience as well as experiencing the topic of death while like, in a vehicle.
CB: Yeah, exactly. I do think that Venus in the 3rd house in a night chart is part of what sort of counteracted or saved him in some sense that there was some positive placements there. And it was also interesting – I looked up the transits and the eclipses, of course, and there was a preceding solar eclipse that was in his 8th house that occurred months earlier. So I suspect that there was probably something important that fell into place around that time, either regarding like, Oswald or Connally or Kennedy or like, multiple things falling into place.
LS: Right.
CB: And it was also interesting because he had some close transits that day that sort of indicated it, but one of them was Neptune in his 12th house of enemies squaring his Mercury in the 3rd house of travel. And of course, you know, there was all the sort of like, mystery and intrigue and theories surrounding Oswald and whether it was more than one shooter and all sorts of things like that.
LS: Right. He had some serious mitigations going on, not just Venus in the 3rd, but like, Venus is in a close overcoming square to an exalted Moon, which is the ruler of the 8th. And then his Saturn, which is the ruler of the 3rd in the 8th, is like, ruled by that exalted Moon and has reception – like, applying reception. It’s just like, interesting, yeah, several different mitigations going on there in terms of why he didn’t die at that time.
CB: Yeah. Well, and Venus itself is also like, the ruler of the 6th house of injury, so it’s like, he was seriously injured in a car at one point in his life in this freak accident.
LS: Right.
CB: And witnessed the death of somebody else, but you know, luckily escaped death himself.
LS: Yeah, exactly.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that is the 8th house. Let’s move onto the 9th house, which is the place of foreign travel, interaction with people from foreign countries. It can also represent higher education, religion and spirituality, and all sorts of things like that. So you found our first example for this one, I believe, right?
LS: Yeah, and I kind of went down a little rabbit hole reading about it; there were just so many interesting ways it was playing out. So this is the chart of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine. He’s got Gemini rising. His 3rd house has Mars, the Moon, and Saturn as well as the IC in Leo. And the ruler of the 3rd house is the Sun in Aquarius in the 9th house, closely conjunct Venus – he kind of has a Venus cazimi – and they are the Saturn in Leo and the Sun in Aquarius are in mutual reception. So it’s really heightening the connection between the 3rd and the 9th houses in his chart. And the first thing I immediately thought of when I saw his chart before like, researching further was like, oh, okay – obviously, like, conflict with neighbors in like, a big picture sense, right? Because there’s a thing that’s said sometimes where the chart of a president or a leader of a country can sometimes kind of temporarily act like the chart for the country because everything that affects them personally like, tends to affect, you know, the country itself. So anyway, that’s like, writ large, the neighbors are like, another country, which is the ruler of the 3rd in the 9th, and Mars and Saturn being both malefics placed in the 3rd house of neighbors. So I thought that was just like, super striking even before going further, right?
CB: Yeah, for sure. Especially as like, a president of the country and how sometimes the president’s chart takes on this role almost as like, the national horoscope for your country in general. And so —
LS: Right.
CB: — when you start thinking of it in that sense, like, the 3rd house then is sort of like, the neighbor of the country.
LS: Exactly. And it’s just like, again, so literal. I love literal astrology. But then I started digging further about it into his background and growing up years, and one of the things it said was when I was reading for five years as a child, he lived in a Mongolian frontier town newly established around a copper mine due to his father’s new job. And there’s a quote that said,
“It forced the family to endure the pollution around the mines and the hardships of life in a frontier town. The food was bland and unfamiliar. Fermented horse milk was a local staple, and the family’s diet was heavy on mutton, which the occasional summer watermelon for which Zelenskyy and his mother had to stand in line for hours.”
So that was just like, malefics copresent with the IC in the 3rd, and then the ruler of the 3rd in the 9th – it’s not that those things were like, inherently negative per se. It was that they were unfamiliar. They were like, a different country’s or a different culture’s like, familiar things which were unfamiliar to him, right? So I just like the IC in there like, is doing a lot of work in terms of like, being copresent with that and then ruled by like, you know, he was literally in another country.
And then he wrote about the town that he grew up in, which I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing correctly, but something like Kryvyi Rih that he grew up in before and after, and said,
“Few if any places in Ukraine had a worse reputation in those years for violence and urban decay. The main employer in the city was the metallurgical plant, whose gargantuan blast furnaces churned out more hot steel than any other facility in the Soviet Union.”
Which I thought was like, just really funny. I know this isn’t the Mars section, but like, that’s a very like, Mars in a day chart in the 3rd house with the IC, you know?
CB: Yeah, that’s incredible.
LS: Like, what the city was known for – like, hot steel. That’s like, very Mars. And then it said by the late 1980s, the city devolved into what Zelenskyy would later describe as a city of bandits. Lots of teenage gangs in a city during the time that he was growing up; it was like, an actual thing that’s written up when you look up his city. And his wife who grew up in the same city, she was born two weeks apart from him, said,
“Every neighborhood was in on it. When kids from a certain age wandered in the wrong neighborhood, they could run up against a question: What part of town are you from? And then the problems could start.”
And it was just like, so striking again, right? Like, the malefics there and the neighborhood aspect.
Anyway, then later he was a performer in a comedy group earlier in his life starting in his teenage years, and it was really comprised of friends who initially met at his local school. And there’s just like, really funny thing again where it’s like, the opposition from the 3rd to the 9th and like, the Sun being in Aquarius which is sometimes like, an outsider type of, you know, placement. It said,
“Around their neighborhood in the 1990s, Zelenskyy’s crew stood out from the start. Instead of the track pants and leather jackets that local hoodlums wore to school, their look was a kind of ‘50s retro – plaid blazers and polka dot ties, slacks with suspenders, pressed white shirts, and long hair slicked back with too much gel. To them this felt like a form of rebellion, mostly because it was their own. Nobody acted like that in their city, and it didn’t always go over well.”
Which I thought was like, again, really funny, right? Like, what he was trying to do was like, get as far as possible – like into the 9th house – with like, the local customs of the 3rd.
CB: Right.
LS: Then it said he was later said to have spent lots of time touring and not at home, which again is like, the IC in the 3rd ruled by the Sun in the 9th is like, lots of movement instead of being at home. Founded a media – this is the most interesting part – he founded a media production company in his 20s, and probably a lot of people know he ended up playing the role of a president of Ukraine on a TV show and it was produced by his media company, which is like, 3rd house. But the topic was politics, which is often 9th house. So this again, a media company is 3rd house, right – we saw that with say like, Ted Turner and other media people. But it’s ruled by, you know, the Sun in the 9th and there’s the politics topic. And —
CB: Yeah. And I think that’s important because we know… Like, astrologers often associate the 9th house, it’s been traditionally associated with religion and more broadly with like, beliefs and one’s beliefs. But I’ve really come to understand over the past several years how politics is also a major 9th house topic because it is a belief and it is tied in with your beliefs.
LS: Yeah. And sometimes you can literally see people’s politics changing when there’s timing going on with their 9th house or to the ruler of their 9th or to planets in the 9th.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah, because it is – it’s a worldview. Anyway, this is the best part. So that part was already great. In December 2017, a political party formed the prior year was renamed after the name of the show where Zelenskyy played the president. And so like, his media company show turned into like, actual politics in the real world, because then he ran under like, that political party’s name. And the first leader of the party was even the CEO of the media company, who was a childhood friend of Zelenskyy’s and a former head of their previous local comedy troupe. So it was just like, all these 3rd house significations like, going into the 9th house with the ruler there, which —
CB: Yeah.
LS: — is just amazing.
CB: Yeah, and that’s a really good demonstration of like, the friends you grew up with theme really coming from the 3rd house.
LS: Yeah. This was actually the example that like, won me over a little bit to that because it was just standing out so strikingly. And then when that happened, this was amidst the eclipse series in his 3rd and 9th with his Midheaven in the 9th house. And then eventually —
CB: What part?
LS: When the political party was named for that TV show.
CB: Okay.
LS: And so it was like, it was just like, engaging that 3rd-9th house connection that’s already there natally.
CB: Right.
LS: Like, his TV show, media company piece turned into politics for real in the real world. And then he eventually of course famously won the 2019 election for president as that party’s candidate. So I was just like, very excited about this example because there were just so many fun things, you know, playing out when you dug into his biography.
CB: Yeah, for sure. It’s a good example of how sometimes the more you dig into a chart, the more you see how the placements are woven throughout a person’s life, even if you’re not immediately familiar with their biography. But once you start looking into it, you realize that those placements really are important and telling you something very crucial about the structure of a person’s life.
LS: And like, all of it was interesting to me, but especially that piece where it was like, all those early childhood 3rd house things ended up like, following him into the political arena.
CB: Right. Definitely.
LS: Yeah. So that’s that one.
CB: All right. Yeah. And I think that’s a good example because also for me it just illustrates because it’s like, malefics there in the 3rd, and there’s that close connection between the mutual reception between the 3rd and the 9th houses, it’s like, he’s now the primary thing of his life at this point is that he’s in a war with a neighboring country and where there’s real issues about the topic of neighbors and about, yeah, like, what’s gonna happen with that and that’s clearly like, the most central thing that his life is about at this point. And interestingly, to like, kind of confirm our interpretation of that because you might like, almost wonder – I could hear somebody being like, asking themself if that’s a stretch. But here’s the next chart example, which I think demonstrates that to some extent as well, which is Abraham Lincoln.
So the birth time on him is a little bit iffy, but he’s said to have born at sun-up, and that seems to be relatively reliable. And if that’s true, that means he was born with Aquarius rising and the 3rd house is Aries, which is ruled by Mars in a day chart in the 9th house of like, foreign countries and the ruler of the 9th house of foreign countries is Venus, which is in the 3rd house of neighbors. And of course, you know, his thing was that during his presidency, like pretty much immediately upon assuming his presidency of the United States in the middle of the 1800s, the southern states in the United States seceded and tried to set up a foreign country, basically, and tried to break away from the United States and create their own country. So it sort of like, created a foreign country even though it was like, of brothers essentially. And you actually – that’s the famous thing about the Civil War in the United States is they said sometimes you would have like, brothers fighting brothers —
LS: Right.
CB: — because of how those lines got divided up basically between some of the southern and northern states. So I think this is interesting because I think you’re seeing like, a parallel thing here between Zelenskyy and Lincoln’s charts in terms of the secession of different parts of a country seceding and coming into conflict with each other, but also that thing between like, in this instance, the interrelationship between like, what is a neighboring state or a sibling state versus what is like, a foreign country.
LS: Yeah. It’s fascinating that this works out pretty much the same way. And I’m sure this is acting like a day chart because the Sun’s so close to the Ascendant.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s why that Mars is even more problematic in terms of some of the worst case scenarios there, especially in the sense of like, you know, literally the southern states like, breaking away or like, severing their relationship with the northern states.
LS: Yeah, definitely.
CB: And then the central focus, you know, like with Zelenskyy, the central focus of Abraham Lincoln’s life then became his attempt to keep the Union together, to reunite, to win the war basically and then reunite the southern states with the northern states.
LS: Right, which is so interesting given like, the Venus there. Right? But it’s like, Venus in Aries, so it was a not easy reunification.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right so that is that. And then we have just a few more examples of 9th house stuff switching to some other topics.
So one of them I exchanged emails this week with my friend Aaron Cheak, and he said I could use his chart. So Aaron’s chart’s interesting because he has Scorpio rising, he has Capricorn on the 3rd house, and the ruler is a pretty well-placed Saturn by aspect which is in Cancer in a day chart in the 9th house copresent with the Midheaven and Venus and having a very strong positive superior trine from Jupiter in Pisces over Saturn. And the thing about Aaron is that he’s become the editor and publisher of esoteric works through his company Rubedo Press, which includes publishing alchemical as well as astrological texts. And he actually edited and designed and published Demetra’s now legendary two volume series Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice that I recommended earlier in this talk; he was the one that actually published that. So I think that’s interesting in terms of the ruler of the 3rd house of communication and writing in the 9th house of like, esoteric subjects. And Aaron also edited my book; he helped me edit my book. Even though I self-published it, I hired Aaron at the time to help me do conceptual edits during the course of the year that I was writing the book. So he gave me a lot of really helpful feedback on that, and he also helped me with some of the Greek and other things like that. So yeah, I thought he was a good example of that.
LS: Definitely. Pretty straightforward.
CB: All right. And then there’s other manifestations of the 3rd house and 9th house and divinatory stuff with a couple examples, right?
LS: Yeah. We have two people actually in our astrological community who contributed charts. So the first one is Joy Vernon, who is a tarot reader and astrologer. And she’s got, let’s see, she has Cancer rising, and she has the ruler – so 3rd house is Virgo, the ruler is Mercury placed in Pisces in the 9th house closely conjunct an exalted Venus in Pisces. And so this is another ruler of the 3rd in the 9th. Now, the 3rd house can be divination I think on its own, but you especially strengthen that topic I think, or at least have the potential to if someone’s interested in those topics, when the ruler of the 3rd is in the 9th. Because of course astrology traditionally goes in the 9th, Mercury is also the general significator of astrology, which Mercury here is the ruler of the 3rd. So yeah. And she was originally a tarot reader and then got into astrology as well. But just like that moment of divination being really important to 3rd house and 9th house things I think is what we’re seeing here.
CB: Yeah. And Joy is – it’s like we’re looking and trying to investigate this topic of divination in the 3rd or 9th, and one of the things that was insightful about Joy’s chart example is that this is like, her primary job is seeing clients on a daily basis and talking with them. And that’s something that really comes up when you go to especially see somebody that does divination in person is that it’s a conversation where it’s not just you, the client, trying to use divination to like, speak to the cosmos and get an answer about the future or about whatever you’re inquiring about. But you also – there’s an active interpretation on the part of the diviner, and there’s a conversation between the client and the diviner as well so that there’s a heavy like, communication and daily component to it.
LS: Absolutely. And strengthening it further in this chart is the Ascendant ruler is the Moon in later Cancer in the first, and it’s applying by trine to that Mercury-Venus in the 9th, which Mercury ruling the 3rd, so. It’s just like, this person’s identity is also like, connected with those topics.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So yes, Joy is awesome. She has lots of experience in both tarot and astrology, so you can search for her name in order to get a consultation with her if you would like, and I would definitely recommend it.
All right. So another example – I reached out to Rob Bailey who is my friend who is primarily an astrologer that practices horary astrology, which is like, the most clear form of astrology that’s clearly a form of divination. And Rob has Aries rising and the Moon is in the 3rd house in Gemini, and the 3rd house itself is ruled by Mercury, which is located in the 9th house conjunct the Sun and copresent with Neptune and Uranus. And like I said, Rob’s primarily a horary astrologer; I’m actually developing a course on horary astrology, and him and I are like, three-quarters of the way through finishing that right now.
LS: That’s great.
CB: Yeah. He famously – he’s answered a lot of horary questions for you; he’s usually your go-to horary astrologer, right?
LS: He answered a very important one for me when I was trying to decide whether to quit my day job at long last and only do astrology for income, and I consulted with him.
CB: Yeah. And the horary chart – we actually used that example in our class in just the last recording we did a few weeks ago, because the chart was like, strikingly positive for you doing that.
LS: Right. He was like, I don’t wanna overstate this, but this is just unusually positive. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And that ended up being successful and it ended up being like, you ended up quitting your day job and starting to do astrology full time like, a year or something – like, not too long before the pandemic so that basically by the time the pandemic hit, you had switched to working from home.
LS: Which was perfect, and otherwise I was working in a very public place – the public library – so it ended up working out perfectly.
CB: Right. And just in terms of your pre-existing health issues, it would have been a lot harder if you had had to do that.
LS: Right. I think I would have had to quit my job with, you know, and so it was better that I actually quit my job in like, a positive, proactive way rather than a reactive way.
CB: Yeah. So anyway, so that’s divination and how it’s sometimes useful, and Rob is also available for consultation. So you can search his name – Rob Bailey, astrologer – and you will find that as well as the horary course that him and I are developing and teaching at TheAstrologySchool.com.
All right, and then lastly in this section, just we wanted to mention that we’re gonna use William Lilly’s chart later in the planets section where he actually has a stellium in the 3rd house, and he’s like the archetypal horary astrologer, so we’ll return to this topic.
LS: Right.
CB: All right. So shall we transition to the 10th house?
LS: Yes, we shall.
CB: All right, here we go —
LS: The 10th house was like, chock full of charts. We’ve tried to narrow it down a little bit, but it makes sense that 3rd house combinations with the first and 10th stand out the most when you’re looking for charts because they’re the most prominently placed in the chart where like, it’s visible to the world that you’re doing a thing.
CB: Yeah, especially for celebrities and like, eminent people, their 10th house placements show up more prominently. And you know, one of the structurings so much so that I almost structured this so that we did like, the ruler of the Ascendant and then the ruler of the 10th house in the 3rd first. We didn’t end up doing that because it didn’t make as much sense in terms of, you know, doing all the houses. But that’s why we’re gonna see so many notable charts in this 10th house section just because next to the ruler of the Ascendant, the ruler of the 10th is a very powerful planet in the chart.
LS: Right.
CB: All right. So the first one is actually just a callback to a story that we already did, but for the 10th house, remember Queen Elizabeth and how she had Libra on the 10th house with the Lot of Fortune there, and the ruler of the 10th house was Venus, which is in the 3rd house of siblings and extended family and how her uncle abdicated the throne, which then made Elizabeth’s father king and then Elizabeth herself became queen once her father died as a result of that. So pretty straightforward example of the ruler of the 10th in the 3rd, so —
LS: Yes.
CB: — moving on. The next example is Oprah Winfrey. And the time on this is a little bit dicey because it’s a 4:30 time, which comes directly from her and a time that she gave to an astrologer. But obviously it’s a rounded time, and the Ascendant’s at 29 degrees of Sagittarius, so it could be Sagittarius or Capricorn rising. We think that it’s Sagittarius rising for a number of different reasons that we don’t have to get into. But if we’re correct that it’s Sagittarius rising, then that means she has a stellium of three planets in the 3rd house which is a Sun-Venus almost exact cazimi or conjunction of the Sun and Venus at eight degrees of Aquarius, and then Mercury is also in the 3rd house of communication in Aquarius as well, and Mercury is actually the ruler of the 10th house of career. So she has the 10th house of career, reputation, social standing in the 3rd house of communication, and she’s of course a famous television show host and media personality and essentially like, media mogul or proprietor at this point, right?
LS: Yeah, I think so. And it’s interesting actually in this chart too, it’s not just the ruler of the 10th whole sign house is there; the ruler of the degree Midheaven, Venus, is also in the 3rd. So it’s really just point, you know, all eyes point to the 3rd house here for career.
CB: Yeah, totally. That’s really cool, having both rulers in the same house really showing that emphasis. And you know, for those that don’t know, she was a talk show host, and she hosted The Oprah Winfrey Show for 25 years from like, 1986 to 2011, but also has published like, a magazine. She’s written books and just done tons and tons of other stuff all connected to communication and talking and the 3rd house.
LS: And what she’s really known for, I think it’s not as remarkable now that there have been so many talk shows, but when she started especially what she’s known for is just like, being willing to talk about anything. You know? It’s not that she was like, explicitly trying to push controversial topics, but she would talk about anything even if it was sensitive. And she’d just like, yeah, let’s talk about it, you know? Which, again, you know, doesn’t stand out as much in these days, but it did then when she started.
CB: Yeah, like a willingness to talk about difficult topics and maybe that’s, you know, partially the connection with having the ruler of the 3rd in the 12th house.
LS: Right. That Saturn in Scorpio.
CB: Right. Yeah. So that is our second example. Moving on. Another example that I found is the birth chart of Anne Frank.
So Anne Frank, again, this is like, a rounded time of 7:30 AM, which gives zero Leo rising but for different reasons I feel pretty confident that it’s Leo rising rather than Cancer rising. If that’s the case, then we see that the 3rd house is Libra, and we find the Lot of Fortune as well as the degree of the IC in Libra in the 3rd house. And the ruler of the 3rd house of communication and writing is Venus, which is in Taurus in the 10th house of career and reputation and social standing.
And of course, Anne Frank is famous for The Diaries of Anne Frank, which documents her experiences as a young Jewish girl who went into hiding with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, and then she ended up actually dying in the Holocaust. And after the war, her father was the only member of her immediate family that survived, and when he came back to – because originally they were hiding from the Nazis, but then the Nazis found them and then sent them all to concentration camps. He came back; he found out that his entire family had been killed. But one of the things that happened when he came back is that one of the helpers had taken Anne’s diaries and had preserved them, and she gave the diaries to Anne’s father when he came back. And what happened then is over the next several months, he started reading the diaries and he decided eventually to publish them. So then he went through this process of publishing the diaries, and what was interesting is I was looking at her transits, and I believe what was happening is that Jupiter transited through her 3rd house, through Anne’s 3rd house, as her father was reading and started editing and putting the diaries together for publication. She was having a Jupiter transit through her 3rd house. And then eventually when the diaries were finally published, Jupiter went into her 4th house when her father published her diaries.
LS: Yeah. That’s pretty amazing.
CB: Yeah. And so apparently she had actually intended to publish the diaries at some point. Like, she initially got them on her birthday and started writing for herself. But then later at some point there was a radio broadcast saying that encouraging people to preserve their diaries because some of it could be published afterwards to document the war. So she started like, a second recension of her diaries for publication. So she did have some intention to do that. And let’s see, one of the things I noticed is just when the diaries were eventually published and translated into different languages, there was some major transits to her charts at different points during some of those key turning points, I think especially when the English translation was published, because at that point they sort of exploded in popularity around the world.
LS: Yeah, for sure. It’s just so striking that the ruler of the 3rd and the 10th are the same planet, and that’s Venus in its own sign of Taurus in the 10th. And then it’s like, again, it’s one of those wide copresences, but it’s widely copresent with Jupiter, which in a day chart is like, you know, she has both benefics in the 10th house. So I think that’s a very strong argument for this being the correct rising sign, because she’s just been remembered for so many decades even though she died as a teenager, right? And she’s remembered for her diaries. And Jupiter is ruling the 8th house as well as the 5th house of creative output but also the 8th house of death placed in the 10th. And so it’s like, she’s famous for her diaries because she died in the Holocaust.
CB: Right. Yeah. And also just I was struck by, you know, we always talk about the IC importing 4th house significations into whatever whole sign house it falls and just the fact that her IC was in her 3rd house of communication, and it was her father that ended up publishing her diaries I think is a really striking demonstration of that principle we always talk about abstractly, but in very concrete terms.
LS: For sure.
CB: Yeah. And there was eclipses and all sorts of transit stuff; there was an eclipse… Yeah, there were a lot of eclipses actually during the course of the publication and different things. I’ll put that in the notes, since I know we need to move on.
LS: Sounds good.
CB: All right. So moving on. Another example that I found is a more contemporary example. So this is birth chart of Alex Cooper, who is the host of the Call Her Daddy podcast which is actually one of the most popular and successful podcasts in the world today. And in some stats, like I think on Spotify, I think it’s like, the second most popular podcast after Joe Rogan’s podcast, which has been the most popular podcast for the past several years.
So it’s kind of like, a candid and often explicit show about conversations about like, sex and relationships and female empowerment. But lately over the past few years, she’s been doing more interview style ones of like, interviewing really prominent women and really prominent people so that it’s become just this wildly successful podcast, and she’s signed a number of like, really major contracts. Like in 2021, there was a 60 million dollar deal with Spotify, and then recently in 2024, she signed 125 million dollar deal with SiriusXM to go from Spotify to Sirius. So it’s just a wildly successful podcast, and it’s an example of somebody that has – she has Leo rising, Taurus on the 10th house, and the ruler of the 10th house is Venus, which is in Libra in the 3rd whole sign house in the place of communication and in its own sign. And this is one of the best, one of those really good examples of somebody that has the planet in its own sign and is successful and like, talented and fortunate in that area both communication as well as career.
LS: Right. Yeah. It’s Venus in its own sign, and you know, probably acting as a night chart; the Sun is, I think, far enough away from the Ascendant to pretty much say that. So it’s like, the best planet in its own sign in the 3rd house.
CB: Right. Yeah. So there’s lots of other things of backstory we could go into there that are interesting in terms of transits and other things with some of the history of the podcast, but we will save it for another time.
LS: Sounds good.
CB: Alright. So if that example wasn’t good enough, wasn’t great enough with like, one of the most famous and successful podcasts in the world, let’s transition into one of the most successful writers in the world, which is Stephen King, who was also born – again, this is… The time we have for him is 1:31 – it’s actually 1:30 AM, so it’s another rounded time, and his Ascendant could be Cancer; it could be Leo. Very strongly feel that it’s Leo for reasons that I don’t have to go into. Actually, maybe I’ll mention one or two in a minute. But one of the things that’s compelling about the Leo rising chart, which I am almost certain that it is, is that then he has Leo rising, and then he has a stellium of three planets in the 3rd house of communication, including Venus, Neptune, and Mercury. And Venus is the ruler of his 10th house, which includes the Lot of Fortune and the North Node, which are in Taurus, and then Venus is in its own domicile in Libra in the 3rd house. And Stephen King has written well over 300 books in his career, and he’s one of the most prolific and successful authors of our time basically, with over 65 novels, over 200 short stories, several nonfiction books including a book on writing – just literally On Writing – and a bunch of his movies also of course have been adapted into screenplays and into like, major motion pictures.
LS: Yep. I think that’s compelling.
CB: I think it’s pretty good, pretty compelling.
LS: I am convinced.
CB: And his is another example – I had a quote for this at one point, but he has that Pluto-Saturn conjunction in the first house in a night chart. And one of the things that’s really interesting about that is that he does, he’s primarily known for, you know, horror basically or like, scary books and scary stories of that —
LS: Right.
CB: What’s that genre called?
LS: It’s horror, I think.
CB: Like, horror? Okay. But also like, suspense and like, crime.
LS: Oh, sure.
CB: Mystery. But he’s called actually, he used to be called like, “the king of horror” for his contributions to that genre. I had a quote from him, but it doesn’t look like I saved it, but just like, he’s one of those examples of like, somebody where instead of like… Instead of manifesting some of those placements negatively, it comes out in his creative works. So it’s like, he writes about let’s say horrific things happening or people being murdered, but he is himself not a murderer.
LS: Right. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, it’s kind of like the actors. Like, some of it can play out in fictional ways, and it works just the same in your chart astrologically.
CB: Yeah. It’s like it gives an outlet for the archetype. But it’s really important, because it’s a core principle, but it’s also a very mysterious principle of astrology. But we see it come up a lot, and yeah, that’s something I wanna revisit at some point.
LS: For sure. Yeah, it’s a good topic.
CB: All right. So moving on. Oh yeah, last thing – actually, I have to mention this really quickly. He’s famous for his disciplined writing routine where he aims to write every single day, typically for a few hours in the morning, and he sets a daily goal of around 2,000 words and tries to maintain this consistency even when he’s not working on a specific project. So —
LS: Pretty admirable discipline there.
CB: Yeah, I have no idea – that’s pretty crazy. Pretty impressive. But that’s what you get sometimes when you have a very strong 3rd house.
LS: Right. Yeah, for sure.
CB: All right. So you have the next example.
LS: Yes. So the next example is a set of octuplets; it’s actually the first known surviving set of octuplets past infancy. So I don’t know if you all remember the story some years back – actually about 15 years back now – in 2009, she was being dubbed “Octomom.” Her actual name was Nadya Suleman; she goes now by Natalie Suleman I think. Anyway, all eight of them were born within five minutes because they were, of course, born by C-section given how delicate it was with eight babies in there. And so at least seven, if not all eight, were born with Aries rising; it was like, the very end of Aries rising. Mars in the 10th in Capricorn conjunct to the degree Mercury, which is the ruler of the 3rd house. And I thought this was like, fascinating, because – so this is a ruler of the 3rd in the 10th example. They’re publicly known for having lots of siblings. There were already six siblings even before that; there were six prior children that she had. And then there were eight more born all at once. And so especially with Mars being the Ascendant ruler also placed in the 10th, they were like, known for having lots of siblings. That’s like, how they were known, and they grew up in the public eye being known for that. So I thought that was —
CB: Right.
LS: — just like, really funny. Yeah. Like, a funny —
CB: Like, imagine if like, a client comes in and you look at their chart and you’re like, all right, the ruler of the 3rd house of siblings is in the 10th house of career and reputation, and you say, you give the most general delineation you can archetypally and you’re like, “Is there some way in which your siblings are tied in with your career or your reputation in some way?” And the person would look at you and would be like, “Well, yes, actually.”
LS: Yeah. Right! They were like, literally known for having lots of siblings and they were publicly known for it. This was not a private matter.
CB: She did like – was she doing like, a reality television show or something?
LS: Yeah, she did a bunch of stuff after that to kind of like, try to make money to support her family, you know. So yeah, there was a reality – there were things like that. So anyway, I also thought this was just a fascinating example of sometimes when the Ascendant – there’s a thing where like, sometimes if the Ascendant ruler is the malefic contrary to sect, so in this case Mars in a day chart, there’s like, something about the challenge is like, coming from you. And that doesn’t mean volitionally. It can mean volitionally, but in this case, it was their literal existence that was like, provoking public outrage for a while when they were first born. People got really mad about it, some people did. And I thought that was just like, again, another literal thing of like, your existence is the first house and your Ascendant ruler; it’s like, your life, you know? And yeah, that’s Mars in the 10th and then conjunct – the outrage was because of all of the siblings.
CB: Yeah. Could you expand on why? It’s because she used like, in vitro —
LS: Yeah —
CB: — fertilization in order to like, make this happen, but then people saw it as like, being excessive or something?
LS: Excessive, selfish, she already had six kids before that, she was not employed. So they were like, what are you doing? Like, you can’t have like, that many kids on your own like, purposely and you know, not even have a way to support them.
CB: But then it was like, it seemed like the goal, I wasn’t sure… I wasn’t clear, but it almost seemed like I had the impression at the time that the goal was then to like, to become famous or to do a reality show based on that, that it was like, tied in with that somehow, I think.
LS: I don’t know if she did an actual reality show. I mean, she was sort of like, famous in tabloid ways for a little bit. But that was just like, her – I mean, this is not her chart, of course, but like, she just wanted to have lots of kids. And so the outrage was also just like, that’s not safe, that’s not healthy to have like, eight babies at once. Like, that was irresponsible on the doctor’s part. There were just like, lots of different little pieces of the outrage.
CB: Okay.
LS: Yeah.
CB: I guess I was just thinking – I was looking it up. There was a TV movie documenting her life that she was involved in and signed a deal for a reality series but it was never picked up by a network.
LS: And then she eventually like, went back to school for counseling and became a counselor.
CB: Got it. Okay.
LS: So anyway, but this was just like, you know, the ruler of the 3rd in the 10th conjunct the Ascendant ruler is like, you are known for having lots of siblings, and you are publicly known for that.
CB: Yeah. All right. That’s good. That’s pretty straightforward.
LS: Yep.
CB: All right. Moving on. One of my best and favorite examples actually of this entire episode is this one, is Billie Eilish that we have a timed chart for, who has Aries rising and has a mutual reception between the rulers of the 3rd house of siblings and the 10th house of career and work and reputation where Billie Eilish’s 3rd house is Gemini, and the ruler is Mercury, which is placed in Capricorn in the 10th house conjunct the degree of the Midheaven. And then the ruler of the 10th house of career and reputation is Saturn, which is placed in Gemini in the 3rd house of siblings. And she famously, she has a brother – I think he’s an older brother – and they famously are a duo where he writes and produces her music, or writes and does the songs or especially the instruments, and then she writes and does the vocals so that they’re like, a team basically. And they’ll go to award shows together and are like a very prominent, probably one of the most prominent like, sibling duo examples I think in contemporary times.
LS: Yeah. It’s like, a really strikingly, yeah, like, notable example.
CB: Yeah. So and they, you know, have won then awards together at this point I think. Like, last year I think they wrote or composed one of the main songs in the Barbie movie and so ended up winning. I think that was one of the few awards, actually, that the Barbie movie actually won at the Academy Awards earlier this year was for that song of Billie Eilish at the very end of the movie that was like, so moving and like, touching.
LS: “What Was I Made For,” I think.
CB: Yeah. So unfortunately, her brother’s name is Finneas O’Connell, and unfortunately I don’t know his birth time or rising sign, and I’m really curious. So this is a funny like, reverse scenario where we have Billie’s birth time but we don’t have Finneas’s birth time, so if anybody knows it or if anyone gets the chance to ask him, I would be very curious just because I’d like to see what it looks like from the perspective of his chart in terms of having like, you know, Billie Eilish as his sibling.
LS: Right, definitely.
CB: Yeah. All right. Moving on, the next example is you.
LS: So Ronan Farrow. So he, his chart, has Jupiter in Aries in the 3rd house in a day chart. It’s ruling the 2nd house, Midheaven, 11th, and a whole big Sag stellium in the 11th house. And the ruler of that 3rd house and Jupiter is Mars in Scorpio in the 10th conjunct Pluto. It looks like we don’t have a chart yet.
CB: Oh.
LS: Yeah. Do you have the chart?
CB: Yeah, sorry about that.
LS: That’s okay.
CB: There we go.
LS: Yeah. So Aquarius rising, Jupiter in the 3rd in a day chart, but it’s ruled by Mars in a day chart – that Mars is placed in the 10th house in its own sign of Scorpio conjunct Pluto. And he is like, an award – at this point is an award-winning American investigative journalist. He’s like, broken a bunch of sex scandal type things, like sexual abuse scandal things. So I think the Jupiter part is like, the award-winning, like doing a really good job with 3rd house topics. But then the ruler is showing kind of like the tenor of the writing or the subject that he investigates and writes about, which are often like, kind of murky, like, unpleasant things, you know, in an effort to kind of dig up the truth of the matter. And it’s interesting also that the ruler – in a couple of different ways interesting that the ruler of the 3rd is in the 10th and it’s that Mars conjunct Scorpio, because what he’s often done is like, expose sordid things about important powerful people who, you know, don’t want those things exposed.
CB: Right. He did a lot of stuff during the Me Too movement.
LS: Right, exactly. And was like, very, you know, praised for that because it was like, very successful and effective. And then also, you know, on a less Jupiterian note but more of the ruler of the 3rd in the 10th, you know, being that Mars in a day chart conjunct Pluto, he’s also kind of wellknown for like, the sexual abuse controversy surrounding his siblings. He’s the son of Woody Allen, and his siblings have like, sort of famously talked about that.
CB: Right, and he’s defended them.
LS: Yes.
CB: Okay. All right. Yeah, that’s a really good archetype of like, the investigative reporter with the ruler of the 3rd house of communication especially conjunct Pluto.
LS: Yeah. And I don’t think it would so successful without the Jupiter in the 3rd there. So it’s like, the topic is, you know, because it’s the Mars, so.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. You know, that comes up though as something we talked about on the forecast a lot like, earlier this year with like, Mercury-Pluto conjunctions and like, the investigator or the private eye. And I was looking up examples of that, and I just found a new one that I didn’t know about where the creator of Sherlock Holmes has a Mercury-Pluto conjunction with Mercury ruling his Ascendant. So it’s kind of evocative of this, and you get a similar thing here with the ruler of the 3rd conjunct Pluto.
LS: Yeah, definitely.
CB: Yeah. All right. So let’s see; moving on. The next chart I have is Orville Wright. This is a birth time thing again where the father says he was born in the morning; this gives us maybe a speculative like, Sunrise-ish chart where Leo was rising in the morning around Sunrise especially. So you have to take this with a grain of salt, because it could be another rising sign, but I think this rising sign would make sense. So those provisos out of the way, if hypothetically he had was born anywhere in this two hour timespan with Leo rising, then he would have a Moon-Venus conjunction in the 3rd house and Venus ruling the 10th house of career. And Orville Wright famously with his brother created the first airplane, and they did a coin toss when they built it about who would be the first to fly. And the owner of this chart, Orville, was the one that won the coin toss. So as a result of that, he was the first person to fly an airplane basically for whatever it was; it was like, a minute or something like that, but it was still symbolically significant as the first flight.
LS: Yeah. I’m actually —
CB: So —
LS: — noticing – oh, go ahead.
CB: Go ahead.
LS: I just wanted to back up in case anyone’s uncomfortable with the speculative timing of it, because I don’t personally love using speculative times. But I just noticed that we’re pretty much covered any time he was born in the morning because if he was born a little earlier with Cancer rising, he would have Mercury in its own sign of Virgo in the 3rd. Of course with Leo rising, he’s got the Moon-Venus in the 3rd. If he was born with Virgo rising, he’d have Mars in its own sign in the 3rd.
CB: Right.
LS: And then finally if he was born with Libra rising, I don’t know if it’s still morning by that point – he would have an exalted Jupiter in a day chart ruling the 3rd, conjunct Uranus, so like, we’re covered. It’s like —
CB: Yeah.
LS: — a positive 3rd house no matter what some time that morning.
CB: For sure. Yeah. There’s a lot of – that’s a crazy amount of dignified planets. It’s all like —
LS: Yeah, it is.
CB: — just fanning out of like, first exalted Jupiter in Cancer, Sun in Leo, Mercury in Virgo, Venus in Libra, Mars in Scorpio. Even like, Saturn’s in Capricorn —
LS: Yeah!
CB: — so it’s like, you’ve almost got like, a full Thema Mundi there in terms of dignified planets.
LS: Yeah, it is striking.
CB: Wild. And it was like, one way or another, the person born that day was the first human to fly.
LS: Right. Yeah.
CB: Nice. Good times. All right. Just a few more examples. Richard Petty – this is his birth chart. Leo rising, Venus in Taurus in the 10th house with the Midheaven and Uranus, and Venus is ruling the 3rd house of short distance travel. Richard Petty is one of the most eminent American race car drivers. He’s nicknamed “the king,” and he’s won a ton of NASCAR championship records a record of seven times, and he won a record of 200 races during the course of his career. He also won the Daytona 500 a record of seven times, and won a record of 10 consecutive races in the 1967 season.
So they say that statistically, he’s still one of the most accomplished drivers in the history of NASCAR and that he remains one of the most respected figures in all of motorsports. So I thought that was good to like, throw in there a prominent, you know, 10th house 3rd house example of another race car driver.
LS: Very good.
CB: All right. My last two examples in this section are like, a funny pair. The first one is Jennifer Aniston, and I wanna give a shout out to Nick Dagan Best because he actually found this example.
So this is the birth chart of Jenneifer Aniston who has Libra rising, Cancer on the 10th house and the degree of the Midheaven is also in Cancer, and the ruler of the 10th house of career is the Moon, which is placed in Sagittarius in the 3rd whole sign house very closely conjunct the degree of the Lot of Fortune.
So this is a funny example because Jennifer Aniston is most well known for and most famous for her role as Rachel on the hit 1990s television show Friends, which is funny because it was a very 3rd house kind of show about young people who are friends and neighbors that are living in the big city of like, New York City at the time and navigating their 20s and 30s essentially. But that’s literally like, the focus of the show is that they’re friends that live nearby each other or with each other.
LS: Right. Yeah, I remember seeing a funny thing on social media once that said like, the TV shows I watched growing up definitely gave me a false sense of what my 20s would be like where my friends would just stop by my apartment all of the time and we would just hang out at each other’s, you know, places.
CB: Right. Yeah. I think a lot of people are disappointed in that as well as disappointed in like, how large of like, an apartment you can get in New York for certain prices, because —
LS: For sure.
CB: — they had this like, huge, like… I grew up watching that show and that gave me my love to some extent of like, coffee shops because they would hang out in this coffee shop and I always wanted to do that. So that’s one of the reasons I moved and I eventually did grow up to a place with a nice coffee shop, and that’s where I wrote my book, so.
LS: Well, you know, that is also a good ruler of a 10th in the 3rd aspect here as well.
CB: Right. Yeah.
LS: Not just the neighbors —
CB: Coffee shops.
LS: — yeah, like, not just the neighbors stopping by or neighbor-friends stopping by, but also like, that 3rd place of the 3rd house.
CB: The 3rd place and then it’s like, the Moon and they would sit in a comfy couch.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Couches are a very Moon thing. Funny timing thing – she was cast sometime in early 1994, and there was a lunar eclipse in Sagittarius in her 3rd house in May of 1994. So —
LS: Nice.
CB: — that’s pretty amazing, both confirming the 3rd house thing but also because it’s the ruler of her 10th, of course, that’s there in the 3rd.
LS: Yeah, so many of these charts that we found, just like, eclipses happening in the 3rd like, when something important about that placement rulership combination like, stands out. It just really did confirm the significations.
CB: For sure. And this wasn’t just like, a show or a television show; this is like, one of the television shows in 1990s and early 2000s, so much so that Aniston herself became the highest paid television actress of all time at the time with one million dollars per episode paycheck during the final season of Friends. So with that Moon conjunct the Lot of Fortune, it was like, very successful and she was basically one of the leading actresses on television at the time playing this central role in this television show about friends.
LS: That’s good. She also has the ruler of the 3rd in the first to add to that.
CB: That’s true. Good point. So if that wasn’t enough, I found a lovely complimentary example, which is the birth chart of Julia Louis-Dreyfus who interestingly also has Libra rising and has Cancer on the 10th house and the ruler is the Moon, which is also in Sagittarius in the 3rd house of neighbors and friends. And Julia Louis-Dreyfus famously played Elaine Benes on the hit 1990s television series Seinfeld, which is really funny if you grew up around that time because Seinfeld was like, the other competing sitcom that was like, vying for the number one position with Friends for most of the 1990s. And Julia Louis-Dreyfus was essentially playing the parallel role in Seinfeld that Jennifer Anisoton was playing in Friends of like, in that instance, because Seinfeld was primarily a male cast of like, three male friends. Julia Louis-Dreyfus played the role of Elaine, which was like, the one core female friend of the group in Seinfeld essentially.
LS: And also very famously and similarly to Friends, it was like, you know, these friends that happen to live really close by and just could like, pop into each other’s apartments at any moment. That was like —
CB: Right.
LS: — the premise of the show.
CB: Yeah, and did, and would just like, slide into each other’s apartments and show up and then like, sit on the couch in like, the middle and joke and everything else, and that being like, the centerpoint of the entire sitcom essentially is like, the apartment and the city and the goings-on that happen around it.
LS: Exactly.
CB: Anyway. So I thought that was a funny example to have those two examples side by side with the similar placement doing similar things, almost like competing roles in competing sitcoms at the same time. Like, vastly different characters, of course, but just like, archetypally seeing an echo of a certain similarity that shows up in the birth chart.
LS: Yeah. That is really funny and like, a great find.
CB: Yeah. And Seinfeld was similarly like, the most famous show in the 1990s, and they were paid a lot towards the end of the seasons, the final seasons, as well. So very similar things.
All right, so that, my friend, is the end of the 10th house somehow.
LS: Yes.
CB: All right, so now we’re gonna move onto the 11th house, which is the place that has to do with friends and groups and alliances. So my very first example of this is one of my favorite and like, funniest examples of this entire talk, which is Fred Rogers, who’s better known as Mr. Rogers from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, has Taurus rising, and the ruler of the 3rd house of neighbors in the 11th house of friends. So Cancer on the 3rd house with the IC there, and the ruler is the Moon, which is up in Pisces conjunct Venus and Mercury and the Sun in the 11th house of friends. And anybody that grew up in like, the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, maybe even the 2000s, will know his iconic opening song for his show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, which is titled, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” which perfectly captured the warm and inviting atmosphere of the show as well as Rogers’ genuine desire to connect with his young viewers.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So should I read the lyrics to this?
LS: You should; it’s like, perfect.
CB: You wanna sing? I don’t know if I can —
LS: Wanna sing it! I don’t know the melody anymore, but I could read it.
CB: Okay, well, you’re the singer between the two of us.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So okay. Here’s – I will just share this on the screen. So it’s titled, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” He says,
“It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine? Could you be mine? It’s a neighborly day in this beauty-wood, a neighborly day for beauty. Would you be mine?”
He goes on, and the part that’s important is towards the end he says,
“Neighbors are people who are close to us, and friends are people who are close to our hearts. I like to think of you as my neighbor and my friend.”
What do you think?
LS: That’s amazing. No, I remember when you first found that and I was just like, laughing on a walk looking at this on my screen, and I was just like, that is hilariously perfect.
CB: Yeah. Everybody should like, especially if you haven’t heard it before – like, if you heard it, if you grew up with that because it was a very popular like, kids’ show for many people growing up, then you immediately know. But if you don’t, then you should pause and search it on YouTube, and it’s pretty amazing, especially because he has like, a Pisces stellium. He’s such a like, soft caring character, but just like, look up that song in his opening, and it’s pretty striking.
LS: Right. And it’s like, that Venus is his Ascendant ruler. And so it’s like, copresent, kind of conjunct the ruler of the 3rd like, in the 11th.
CB: Right.
LS: And it’s, yeah, he was known for being just like, very inclusive and inviting.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
LS: And it was kind of not quite the same as those sitcoms, but kind of like, oh, these neighbors are stopping by today – let’s greet them, you know? Like, there was some of that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And also just it also draws out, even though here it’s an explicit connection with the 3rd and the 11th, but it also draws out a little bit I felt like of the friend component potentially of the 3rd house as well. Like, there’s something core here where he says like, “Neighbors are people that are close to us, and friends are people who are close to our hearts; I like to think of you as my neighbor and my friend.” Like, I think that’s actually kind of insightful about the nature of the 3rd house and the angle of like, friendship that the ancient astrologers had that is actually still relevant today even if the 11th house itself is the primary house of friends.
LS: For sure. And then didn’t you have something about the phrase like, “upon the heart” that kind of comes out there?
CB: Yeah. It’s like, in Vettius Valens, he gives a list of the significations of the 3rd house at one point, and he says the 3rd house signifies siblings, living abroad, queen, authority, friends, relatives, and then he uses this Greek word that’s kind of obscure that says epi kardia, and literally it means something like “upon the heart,” but the translators – it’s not a well-documented term, so it’s like, not really clear what it means. Demetra translated it as “those close to the heart,” and so there’s this question of like, does that mean loved ones? Which would like, kind of make sense because it comes right after friends and relatives. I was talking to Levente about it earlier today or yesterday and asking his opinion, and he said he thinks that because of the grammar that it doesn’t refer to a person but to like, a thing, and he said it should mean like, “things kept in the heart” or possibly “things on the mind,” because in Stoicism and in ancient philosophy, sometimes the heart was viewed as the center of the mind. So it’s a little tricky because it’s like, all of those could be relevant in some way and we actually truly don’t know what Valens was trying to convey, because on the one hand, it could actually be related to the heart or to loved ones, and then the Mr. Rogers thing kind of like, sounds weirdly useful or relevant. But then Levente saying “things kept in the heart” or “things on the mind” could also be relevant, because that could be why we get some of these significations of like, knowledge and other things that come up later in the tradition. So we don’t know. But it’s kind of interesting.
LS: The wording just really evoked that for me. It like, sounds very similar.
CB: Right. For sure. For sure. All right, I guess that’s it for that example, right?
LS: Yes. I think so.
CB: Okay. So let’s move into our next example, which is Toni Morrison.
LS: So Lindsay submitted this example as well. Toni Morrison was an American novelist and editor; she’s the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature. She was for a while a senior editor at Random House, the publishing house, and was also the first Black woman senior editor in their fiction division. So she has Taurus rising with Jupiter, Pluto, and Mars in the 3rd house by day, and she won a bunch of awards for her writing – the exalted Jupiter there – so the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved, her novel Beloved. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 from Barack Obama. Nobel Prize for literature for Beloved as well. But what I really noticed here is she’s got the ruler – she’s actually got an amazing mutual reception going on between the 11th house and 3rd house. So she’s got Jupiter exalted in Cancer in the 3rd house; it’s ruled by Moon in Pisces in Jupiter’s sign in the 11th house. So and they’re in a really close aspect by degree as well. So it’s a like, true mutual reception and very close. And I was like, what’s going on with her 11th house there? You know, because we could talk about her 3rd house stuff from different angles, and there’s different aspects around it. But one thing I noticed when I was digging into her biography is as an editor, it wasn’t just that she was like, you know, editing people’s work that got put on her desk. She actively curated and collected works by Black authors in order to bring them to greater prominence and to a mainstream audience. And I thought, I was like, oh, there’s the 11th house, because it was almost like a community of – it was a community of like, other writers, other Black writers in particular that she was like, trying to help bring their work out. And so the 11th house is like, friends, groups, social alliances and so forth. And I found this interesting quote in a New York Times article about her. The person who wrote the article said,
“She told me that the books she edited and wrote were her contribution to the civil rights movement. By publishing black geniuses, she was also forcing the ranks of the big publishing houses and the industry to become more hospitable to her point of view, to the idea that a black writer could write for a black audience first and still write literature.”
So it was like, the ruler of the 3rd in the 11th and vice versa was like, you know, the writing and the publishing of books was like, for a larger societal goal, which I thought was like, a really amazing connection between those houses.
CB: Yeah, definitely.
LS: Yeah. So it was kind – it was kind of like a social movement because she was connected with and influenced by the Black Arts movement, so it was like a collective of Black writers and intellectuals who like, specifically sought to promote a distinct Black literary tradition. And so again, collectives are like, the 11th house.
And then Lindsey found this really great transit example activating that Moon-Jupiter. It says Morrison was snubbed for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and 48 of her peers signed a letter of public protest published in The New York Times in 1988. Morrison’s 3rd house ruler is the Moon, situated in the 11th house of friends and allies. The day the letter was published, transiting Venus conjoined Toni’s natal Moon. So it was like, activating that – it was like, her allies coming to her defense basically.
CB: Yeah. That’s absolutely incredible.
LS: Yeah. That was a great transit catch.
CB: I like how the Moon is actually enclosed, because the Moon is at 11 degrees of Pisces and it’s separating from a trine with Jupiter at 10 Cancer and then it’s applying to a sextile with Venus at 12 Capricorn.
LS: Yeah, that’s really good too.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah. And Venus is her Ascendant ruler.
CB: Well, because it’s like, sometimes the interpretation of that, of an enclosure when you’re like, surrounded by the positive rays of benefics is like, you’re being protected. And in that instance, she was protected by her friends and allies.
LS: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Yeah.
LS: And she pretty soon after that, maybe a couple months later or so, did win a big award. Yeah. And I think, you know, she’s got Mars-Pluto in the 3rd as well, and I think part of why she’s such a successful author and like, book publisher, book editor, you know, was just due to those positive things we were just talking about connected with her 3rd house. And so even though this is a day chart, the Mars-Pluto comes out more in her subject matter of some of her books. Like, in Beloved, it’s about a Black woman who is haunted by the ghost of her child she has killed rather than have her be enslaved. Or in The Bluest Eye where she discusses a child or you know, has a child character who’s impregnated by her father, as well as the violence overall that racism can do to people. So while the Mars was definitely like, almost certainly also editing as I think you noted at some point… Yeah, it seems like it’s the positive factors that are connected with her 3rd house that made the Mars-Pluto play out more in her like, subject matter. Kind of like in the Stephen King example as well.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, my comment was like, Mars can be really good for editors in terms of like, knowing what to cut and sometimes like, cutting stuff not viciously but like, you know, unrelentingly. Like, knowing what needs to be cut versus what needs to be kept.
LS: Right. For like, cutting for a purpose.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah. So anyway, that’s, you know, an interesting thing there as well with her 3rd house. But the thing that I wanted to put her in this section for was just like, that amazing connection between the 3rd and the 11th and like, her writing and her book publishing like, serving a larger social goal.
CB: Yeah. That’s excellent. Yeah, and shout out to Lindsey Turner for writing up that example. Cool. All right, so two more 11th house examples. One of them is Paris Hilton who has Sagittarius rising and a stellium of planets in the 3rd house, which is Venus, Sun, Mercury. And then the ruler of the 3rd house is Saturn, which is actually in the 11th house with her other stellium of planets, which is the Midheaven, Saturn, Jupiter, and Pluto. And she became famous and like, rose to prominence early on, especially in the 2000s, for doing a reality television show with the friend that she grew up with from her neighborhood which was Nicole Richie, and the two of them were like, socialites that grew up together and then they did this sort of fish-out-of-water television show where they traveled around the country and like, tried roughing it a little bit or something like that, and it brought them both to prominence at that time. But it was partially like, a display of their childhood friendship.
So additionally, Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, their friendship also goes back to their childhoods to some extent because their mothers were friends, which led to them knowing each other very young and even attending preschool together. And then Kim Kardashian first appeared on Paris Hilton’s reality television show and then later Kim Kardashian herself became famous by then starting her own reality television show. So it’s kind of interesting how that early childhood friend connection, you know, turned into larger things in terms of the lives of those different people.
LS: Right. Yeah. It’s funny with the exalted Saturn like, ruling the 3rd – like, famous childhood friends.
CB: Right, exactly. And then the mutual reception. So again, it’s like, a strong, you know, connection or a strong like, prominent example of that.
LS: Yeah. For sure.
CB: All right. And then my last example here I found was Clay Aiken, who has Libra rising, a 3rd house stellium of the Moon, Sun, Neptune, Mercury, and Mars all in the 3rd house in Sagittarius, and they’re ruled by Jupiter, which is in Leo in the 11th whole sign house. So there’s a mutual reception between the 11th house of friends and alliances and the 3rd house of communication, and Clay Aiken was famously a singer who was in a singing competition on the popular 2000s show American Idol, which is like, a singing competition, and he ended up coming in second. But what’s interesting about that show is that American Idol was partially based on fans voting, so there’s actually an 11th house component because the 11th house is traditionally allies, but allies in a modern context can sometimes mean like, your fans, especially in terms of like, social media and other things like that. And them voting for him and supporting him was like, a crucial part of his success, both on the show itself in terms of voting for him but also then later from like, album sales, concert attendance, as well as like, subsequent things that he did where he wrote a bestselling memoir and then released some successful albums subsequently. But it really started with developing that fanbase through the reality show American Idol.
LS: Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, I see fans come up a lot with the 11th house, I mean, especially if there’s like, positive stuff going on there.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, so that is the 11th house of friends, groups, and alliances. So now we move on to the 12th house.
So the 12th house is kind of tricky. It can have to do with subjects like loss. It can have to do with subjects like hospitals and places of isolation, I think, right?
LS: Yeah, seclusion for whatever reason, whether like, proactive or reactive. So like, retreat centers are gonna be more positive seclusion, working on your own, but also like, prisons, hospitals where you’re not choosing to be secluded from society.
CB: Right. So my first example is Randy Travis. So let me share the chart. So here’s Randy Travis. Randy Travis was a famous American country and gospel music singer and songwriter, and he had recorded over 20 studio albums and charted over 50 singles during the course of his career, including 16 that reached the number one position. And I should say his placements; he has Taurus rising, Cancer on the 3rd house and Mars is placed there in a day chart. And the ruler of the 3rd house of communication is the Moon, which is in Aries in the 12th house. So it’s kind of a challenging placement there for him.
So he had a lot of success as a singer, but then in 2013, he lost the ability to communicate significantly after a stroke. So he had a stroke; it put him in the hospital, and he was unable because I think it also ended up with aphasia, similar to Bruce Willis, which was really causing issues in terms of him being able to communicate. So interestingly, though, he came up in the news earlier this year in May where there was a headline where it said, “With help from artificial intelligence, Randy Travis got his voice back. Here’s how his first song post-stroke came to be.” So what happened basically is like, he’s using AI to produce music again using his voice and using an imitation of it, but it’s allowing him to have a creative output again. And what’s crazy in terms of the transits is that when the stroke first happened in July of 2013, Mercury was retrograde in his 3rd house, and it stationed direct exactly on his Mars in the 3rd. And then at the same time, transiting Mars ingressed into his 3rd house while Uranus – transiting Uranus – was stationing in his 12th house squaring his Mars and being copresent with his Moon and Mercury. So there’s all sorts of like, crazy transits going on, but it’s like, Mars ingressing into his 3rd house was like, his voice was tragically, you know, pretty much like, removed from him at that time with that stroke, hitting his 3rd house of communication and activating that natal Mars placement. But then this year when they released that new album using his AI version of his voice, they released it on his solar return, which is May 4th. And transiting Mercury had just stationed direct on his natal Mercury in the 12th house only a week earlier, which is interesting because it gave almost exact parallel for when he lost his voice when Mercury stationed on his Mars in July of 2013.
Additionally, he has late Taurus rising, so the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction had just taken place near his Ascendant. And the solar eclipse that occurred in Aries in April of 2024 was very close to his Mercury in the 12th house as well as his Lot of Fortune. So there’s all sorts of different like, transiting things going on, but it was a really interesting example of somebody who on the one hand had a difficult placement that got activated in a difficult way and lost the ability to speak, but then later on with the help of technology was able to be creative again and sort of in some ways have his voice restored to some extent using advances in technology.
LS: Yeah. That’s really remarkable. Yeah, I remember reading about different people, yeah, having that experience – not so much singers, but – so it’s even more incredible that a singer would be able to do that. I was thinking that Uranus had to be close to his Ascendant, like, with it going on, right? Because it’s just like, revolutionizing something he could do again and also like, something obviously notable with technology.
CB: Yeah, totally. His Ascendant is at 26 Taurus, so it’s like, that Jupiter-Uranus conjunction was very, very close to it.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So sometimes difficult house placements like the 6th or 8th or 12th can be stories of major obstacles or major tragedies or sometimes major losses in a person’s life. But sometimes later a person can overcome some of those obstacles or they can become almost like, triumphs where a person overcomes great obstacles in their life and becomes like, a comeback story or a success story or different versions of that. And I think that’s kind of important as we talk about some of the difficult examples sometimes.
LS: Yeah. And he had a very incredibly successful career for quite a while before that happened, so.
CB: Right. Yeah.
LS: You know, it’s important to, again, kind of like with the Bruce Willis one, it doesn’t mean that this is gonna be the story for your entire life. Like, sort of the worst case scenario around that placement.
CB: All right, so my next example is Ringo Starr, who’s famously the drummer for the Beatles. So at one point in time, he was basically like, the most famous drummer in the world, and he’s still kind of like, one of the most legendary drummers in the world even today. So here is his chart.
He has Pisces rising and the ruler is Jupiter, which is placed in Taurus in the 3rd house. So he’s actually an example of the ruler of the Ascendant in the 3rd, and he’s like, one of the most famous drummers of all time. So Jupiter’s in the 3rd house along with Saturn and Uranus, and it’s a night chart, so Saturn is actually the most difficult planet in his chart, bringing some obstacles. And additionally, Saturn is the ruler of the 11th house as well as the 12th house especially in this chart, and it’s placed in the 3rd.
So what happened with him – and I wanted to give a shout out because Orla found this example and it’s one of my favorite – so what happened is that when he was young, he got sick, and he ended up having to spend a lot of time, like a couple of years, in a hospital. But while he was in the hospital, there was somebody that would come through each week and hand out instruments, and as a result of this essentially while he was in this hospital, he started playing the drums basically at this time as a result of, you know, being sick and struggling with tuberculosis as a child and having that have side effects and like, negative things in terms of his health. But as a result of it, this is how he ended up becoming a drummer. So it says on Wikipedia,
“During his stay the medical staff made an effort to stimulate motor activity and relieve boredom by encouraging their patients to join the hospital band, leading to his first exposure to a percussion instrument.” So a makeshift mallet was “made from a cotton bobbin that he used to strike the cabinets next to his bed.”
So basically what happened is that Ringo Starr, the most famous drummer in the world at one time, became a drummer initially after getting sick and because he was in a hospital for like, a long period of time as a child.
LS: Yeah. That’s like, the positive version of like, that connection between the 12th and the 3rd is like, the hardship came first but then it led him to what he became famous for and like, enjoyed.
CB: Yeah, exactly. It’s like, sometimes our greatest hardships are the things that can force us in a direction that we wouldn’t have gone otherwise but that ultimately becomes fruitful and almost necessary in order to live out our life story in order to achieve our destiny.
LS: Yeah. And I wouldn’t say it always goes that way, but like, yeah, I remember other stories reading like, Dan Rather had that too with his reporting where there was like, basically it sort of forced, you know, immobility and then you have to like, turn to something during that time to do to occupy yourself with to become interested in and so forth.
CB: Right, yeah.
LS: Where like, you wouldn’t maybe do that if you were like, just going to school and doing everyday things.
CB: Right. Yeah. And there’s all sorts of interesting like, transits that go along with that and all sorts of other interesting things. But I think for our purposes, that’s just a good example because I wanted to have a somewhat positive and like, inspiring one, because sometimes that’s how things work out. And I know other stories like that as well, like, I know Robert Zoller had a similar story like that in terms of his history as an astrologer.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. I think we have made it to the end of the houses section.
LS: That’s incredible.
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 are back for the third riveting and final act of our long series on the 3rd house where we’re gonna talk about the planets in the 3rd house and what it looks like by going through each of the planets in order and giving some examples of very striking instances of celebrity charts where a celebrity had a planet in the 3rd house and the archetype of the planet manifested in that context.
So shall we?
LS: Yes. Let’s.
CB: All right. So here is our first example chart. Our first example chart was actually found… Let me share it for those of you watching the video version. So this is the birth chart of Tony Hawk, and shout out to Patrick Watson for this example. So Tony Hawk is a professional skateboarder. He’s probably one of if not the most famous professional skateboarder in the world. And he has Pisces rising with the Sun and Venus in the 3rd house of movement and short distance travel, and it turns out that one of the forms of short distance travel evidently is riding skateboards, of course. And he has Venus there in a night chart in its own domicile so that this is actually an excellent example of somebody who has the ruler of the 3rd house in its own sign and excels at some 3rd house topic. In this instance, he is a leading skateboarder and an innovator in that entire tradition.
So interestingly, what I found is that he actually became a professional skateboarder at the age of 14, which – surprise, surprise – is a 3rd house profection year. Is that impressive?
LS: That’s amazing. I mean, mostly the skateboard part, but you know, it is another one of those timing things yet again that shows that this is in fact like, showing the 3rd house placements and that that is where that’s coming from. But yeah, I had never thought about skateboards being a 3rd house thing, but they definitely are. They’re on wheels like bikes, cars.
CB: They have wheels.
LS: Yeah!
CB: Anything that has wheels – 3rd house topic. I’ll put that out there. So —
LS: Yeah.
CB: Widely regarded as one of the most influential and successful skateboarders of all time. What I think about this example is that with the Sun here, his identity is really wrapped up in the profession and, you know, to the extent that like, his name has become synonymous with skateboarding for many people, both like, due to him actually being a successful skateboarder but also due to his licensing of like, his name. For example, like, Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game, which is like, one of the most successful skateboarding video games over the past like, 20 or 30 years for example.
So he revolutionized vertical skateboarding and pushed the boundaries of the sport by inspiring countless others to take up the board. And he’s done a lot of really positive things, but one of the things that’s cool is that Venus is also ruling his 8th house of other people’s money, and he’s been not just a successful entrepreneur where he created his own skateboard line, basically – like, line of skateboards – that was very successful, but he was also a philanthropist. And he would, through philanthropy, he would donate money through his foundation to help build skate parks in underserved communities. So I thought that was really interesting how that’s tied in, but yeah. So this is an example of the Sun in the 3rd house and like, the identity really being wrapped up in this profession related to the 3rd house.
LS: Yeah, and it’s something you can see, like, even if it’s a night chart like it is here. The Sun placed in a certain house like, still does mean that something that’s like, core to that person’s identity revolves around one of the topics of that house.
CB: For sure. All right, so moving on. My next example is Mario Andretti, who is a famous – he’s one of the most famous – racecar drivers of all time. And shout out to Orla, who is the one who found this one.
So he’s one of only three drivers to have won races in F1, NASCAR, IndyCar, and World Sportscar categories. So he’s widely regarded as one of the most successful drivers in the history of the sport, and I think this is another really good example of the Sun as people who stand out and excel at their field. With the Sun, you get these ideas of like, centrality of like, being the single or the number one at something, sort of like we saw with Tony Hawk. And this is something I was trying to describe in the first house episode when we talked about the Sun, but I think I was, it was like, my weakest sort of attempt in that one. But here I think that principle of like, centrality and being number one is much more clear with these two examples.
LS: Yeah, for sure.
CB: So this one’s also important – this one’s also interesting with him having the Sun and Mercury in the 3rd house. I guess I didn’t say that for the audio listeners. He has Capricorn rising and the Sun and Mercury in Pisces in the 3rd house, and he’s like, one of the most famous racecar drivers of all time. Interestingly, he was also a twin, and his twin was born – it provides an interesting alternative example, because his twin Aldo was born several hours off on the same day. So usually for twins, it’s like, you get two charts that are pretty similar or occasionally like, you’ll get lucky and the Ascendant will switch signs so that the chart houses are different. In this instance, it’s like, you know, the last chart was Capricorn rising, but his brother is Gemini rising. So the Sun-Mercury conjunction moves to the 10th house; instead, he has Pluto in the 3rd house. And the Moon moves from the 11th house to the 6th house in the brother’s chart. So interestingly, the twin brother also tried to race when he was younger, but he suffered a few racing accidents and had to stop.
So Mario is the one that went on to become the racing legend, the twin that was born with the Sun-Mercury in the 3rd house, but Aldo went on to focus on business and was still a successful businessman, but just different in another area basically.
LS: Well, and it’s funny too in this one – it’s like, the ruler of the 3rd signifying his brother is in the 10th house. Yeah, so like, really shining out in career.
CB: Right, exactly. And it’s like, Aldo ended up… What was it? It was like, entering the world of business and doing investments and different ventures. But one of the things he did was he co-owned and managed a tire business and an auto supply business. So it’s kind of funny that like, the topic is still there, but it’s not him driving. It’s like, him excelling in the area of business.
LS: That’s so funny. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So thanks to Orla for that example. Moving on. The next example is Billie Holiday, who has Aquarius rising with the Sun in Aries in the 3rd house along with the Lot of Fortune.
So this is an example that Nick Dagan Best found, and Billie Holiday was a legendary New York City nightclub singer. And even though she would become world famous eventually in her career, she was still very much a local New York performer. So there was a major like, 3rd house component of her sort of standing out within the context of her local neighborhood and her local city as a performer.
So one of her most well known and impactful songs is a song titled “Strange Fruit.” And it was essentially the equivalent of like, a top 20 hit in the 1930s, and her popularity increased after she first performed it and then recorded it. So what happened is that transiting Saturn was going through her 3rd house and approaching a conjunction with her natal Sun in Aries in the 3rd house when she first performed the song at a nightclub. And part of the story is that she performed it at the nightclub, but she had a lot of trepidation going into it because she feared retaliation because it was a song about lynching that became famous, you know, during a time period in which that was still very much happening.
So she had trepidation about retaliation, but also she would later describe the song and say that the imagery of the song actually reminded her of her father’s death, and that this played in a role in her resistance to performing it because her father was denied medical treatment for a lung disorder because of racial prejudice and that he ended up dying as a result of that, essentially as a result of prejudice. And so for her it was like, very personal singing this song, and she had some resistance initially to singing it because of that memory of her father, but then it became very much wrapped up in it for her as she’s having this Saturn transit over the degree of her Sun.
LS: With the Sun sometimes symbolizing the father in the chart.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So she ends up performing it, though, and it’s like, wildly successful. And in terms of the transits, transiting Mercury was exactly trining her Sun from the 11th house that night. The Moon was transiting through her 3rd house, Saturn was approaching a conjunction with her Sun, Venus was right on the degree of her MC in the 10th house, Neptune was opposite her Mars – the ruler of her 3rd house, and then Uranus in the 4th was squaring her Uranus. So she had a lot of major transits that night; she records it, it’s successful even though she has this trepidation and this, you know, memory of her father surrounding it. And then I think what happened later is that when she recorded it and then it entered the charts in 1939, transiting Jupiter was then going through her 3rd house and approaching a conjunction with her Sun. So there’s this interesting… Yeah, just things surrounding it in terms of the connection it had with her father, which is the Sun, the feelings of trepidation of fear as well as memory of what happened to her father when Saturn was transiting through there, and then later with Jupiter transiting through there the song becomes like, wildly popular to the public.
LS: And there was this quote from her autobiography that really speaks to that. She wrote,
“It reminds me of how Pop died, but I have to keep singing it, not only because people ask for it, but because 20 years after Pop died the things that killed him are still happening in the South.”
And yeah, that really speaks to, I think, not just the imagery of the father with the Saturn going over the Sun and like, singing something, you know, expressing something that’s like, hard to do at the time but then Jupiter coming in later and making that like, more successful. But it’s, yeah, sometimes it’s like, you know, even if it wasn’t speaking to the topic of her father, though it does double as that, it’s like, sometimes Saturn hitting the Sun is like, doing something that feels really hard to do at the time or you’re not sure you want to, but then becomes like, really important in your life story.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Something you have to do that’s hard, but that ultimately is about you kind of like, shining and putting your light out there into the world, like, whatever that is.
LS: Yeah.
CB: For her it was her voice.
LS: Yeah, exactly.
CB: Yeah. So if people are not familiar with that, you can do a Google search and like, listen to the song. That’s something I would have recommended like, throughout this episode is just every time we’re mentioning somebody, if you’re not familiar with them, see if you can Google them, pull up a video. And that’s one of the things about doing these episodes; it’s one of the reasons why we pack so much into it is because once you start learning about these people’s lives, when you expose yourself to their music or their movies or writings or whatever it is, you get this really intimate connection with the chart and it really speaks to you and comes alive when you actually experience what the person put out there into the world. And we do our best to try to summarize and convey the key points of that during the course of these presentations, but sometimes it really takes like, going out and like, listening to it and then having like, a really moving experience of what that song for example actually sounds like and then truly understanding the example that we’re trying to convey at a much deeper level.
LS: Definitely. It’s like, a more visceral understanding and not just like, head understanding.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right. So let’s move onto the next example.
LS: Okay. It is Wendell Berry. This is one I found, and I was so excited to find it. I thought to look it up. So Wendell Berry has the Sun in Leo in the 3rd house. He’s Gemini rising, Sun in Leo in the 3rd house conjunct the IC within a few degrees, and he’s basically like a farmer, author, activist – his whole world is about like, the importance of small communities and the importance of place. So his families of both of his parents had farmed in the same community that he lives in for at least five generations back, which I think really speaks to like, the Sun in its own sign on the IC in the 3rd house, because it’s like, a home thing, but it’s also like a “you’re an important family” kind of like the Sun in Leo, you know? It’s like an important lineage with that next to the IC there and in the 3rd house of like, local community.
He grew up there, moved out, moved elsewhere for a while, and then purposely moved back. So he’s written a bunch of works, mostly on the themes like the importance of place, especially rural communities and their connection to the land, environmental conservation and sustainable agriculture, the importance of strong local communities – as you can see really like, 3rd house Sun in its own sign there – the negative impacts of industrialization and globalization for losing human connection, which I thought was especially evocative not just of the 3rd house but of like, Saturn in a night chart in the 9th house, right? He’s like, he’s not into the whole, you know, globalization thing. Like, yeah, and importance of art and artists that are rooted in place and community, and the benefits of local economies and supporting local businesses. So like, everything he’s written about is like, all about the 3rd house, but also the 3rd house and the IC together. It’s really amazing, and that’s why the Sun is there. Like, that’s literally his entire identity is like, about small local communities. And I actually knew about this because for a few months after college, I interned at a place, a little like, nonprofit that was about the importance of small local communities, and so I saw a bunch of his books there, and that’s why I knew about him.
CB: Nice. It’s nice that he’s got that supportive sextile from Jupiter happening at the same time where the Sun’s applying to a sextile with Jupiter.
LS: Definitely.
CB: It’s very like, affirming of local communities.
LS: Yes. It is affirming of —
CB: As opposed —
LS: — yeah, go ahead.
CB: As opposed to, let’s say, it’s like, Saturn or something and he’s like, rejecting of local communities. Like —
LS: Right.
CB: — he’s like, “Down with local communities!”
LS: Right! I could see that happening if it was the reverse in his chart, because it’s so funny that that’s opposed Saturn in a night chart in the 9th. I mean, it’s in its sign and all, but – which is I think why he, yeah, like, had some academia stuff. But…
CB: Well, because also it’s the reverse of sometimes people are like, they grow up in a small town and then they get the hell out of there and they like, move to the big city and never go back or something like that, versus for him it was really like, the reverse.
LS: Exactly. Exactly. It was like, very purposefully moving back, and that being like, a central place for his whole family lineage, and then him just being like, this is actually a really important area of life that people are like, underappreciating, and I need to spend my entire career telling people about this.
CB: I mean, honestly, that probably is partially the Saturn in the 9th house is he’s like —
LS: I know.
CB: — no, like, things far away bad! Like —
LS: Exactly!
CB: — local stuff good. But also I can see that he was born just, what, a few days – five days – before a solar eclipse in Leo in his 3rd whole sign house. And he was born in that period in between two eclipses, so before he was born, a little over a week before, there was an eclipse in Aquarius in his 9th house.
LS: Good call. Yeah. So just like, that tension of things far away and cross-cultural, versus like, things that are local and community-oriented.
CB: Yeah. I wonder – it’d be interesting to follow his story and like, do the dates and just like, if he had a bad experience like, when he was away for example.
LS: Right, yeah. That’s true. I don’t know that much about the transition point, but you know, his works are actually really evocative if you need to be convinced of like, the importance of small local communities and being rooted, like, read his books.
CB: Okay. I will get on that. All right. Shall we move on?
LS: Yes.
CB: All right. So the next example – this is one I found – this is one of my favorite Moon examples, because when I was doing the research, I like, immediately recognized it. So this is the birth chart of an astrologer who passed away several years ago, but her name was Frances McEvoy, and I knew her because she was an avid data collector. She would collect birth charts of famous people, and she would submit them to Astro DataBank. And she was especially important because she lived in a state that was an open state; I forget what state that was. Do you know what —
LS: Massachusetts?
CB: Yeah, Massachusetts. So Massachusetts is an open state where, if you want to, all you have to do is like, go down in person to like, the local government authority, and you can request a copy of the birth certificate and they’ll give it to you. So even today if you go through Astro DataBank, occasionally you’ll come across all these birth times – pretty much any time there’s like, a birth time from Massachusetts, if you look at the sources, it’ll say like, “Frances McEvoy, birth certificate in hand,” and it’s because – I can tell what she was doing is like, any time somebody was in the news locally, she would go down and get their birth time because she was just an avid collector and had, you know, this curiosity.
So she had Aries rising and Mercury in Gemini in its own sign in the 3rd house, but she also had the Moon in the 3rd house. And I guess I forgot to say we’re moving onto the Moon section at this point; we are talking about the Moon. One of the things that we really saw in the 2nd house episode is the basic signification of the Moon to collect things, and we had that like, amazing example of King Farouk of Egypt who had the Moon in the 2nd house, and he just like, collected stuff. And when he was deposed and stopped being king, he just had the largest collections of like, all sorts of things in the world that ended up getting like, sold off at that point.
But I saw a really close parallel here with Frances McEvoy where she had the Moon in the 3rd house, and she collected birth data. The Moon in Gemini in the 3rd house, and I thought that was such an amazing manifestation of that.
LS: Yeah, of the collecting. It’s like the collecting aspect, it’s the Moon in Gemini, so it’s collecting information or data. And it’s ruled by Mercury in its own sign of Gemini in the 3rd house, so it’s not really pointing to another area of life; it’s just like, here, information – like, collecting information.
CB: Yeah.
LS: And also collecting information from the local community, right? From your local place.
CB: Exactly. That it’s like, the local – you know, her city or that she would go down to the local, like, I forget whatever the name is of what the building is that has the birth data that you have to go to, but the fact that she was like, going there in person in her city, and that therefore there’s a huge… Not disparity, but the opposite of that, where there’s like, a surprisingly large number of pieces of birth data that are from Massachusetts as a result of her. Like, when I was researching the 2nd house episode, I was looking for lottery winners, and I kept pulling up timed charts, and they were people from Massachusetts because she would like, see that somebody won the lottery on the news and she would go down and like, get their birth certificate to see what their chart looked like to try to figure out what it looked like when somebody won the lottery in terms of their birth chart. And I just thought that was fascinating.
LS: Yeah, it’s great, because it’s like the collection piece and also the curiosity piece.
CB: Yeah, definitely. All right. So that is Frances McEvoy.
The next example is not the chart of a person but it’s the chart of an entity or a place, and this is the chart of literally the birth of the United Nations. And the birth data’s October 24th, 1945, at 4:45 PM in Washington, DC, and the data is from Nick Campion’s book of world horoscopes. He has the exact time for the birth of the United Nations. And I thought it was incredibly fascinating because the chart has Aries rising, and it has the Moon and Uranus in the 3rd house in Gemini. And my immediate thing that that evoked in me is just thinking of like, that big room in the United Nations where it collects together all of the like, representatives from all of the different countries together in one room, and then all of them have that like, earpiece on where they’re speaking to each other and it’s being like, translated instantly into their own native language so that they can communicate through the international sort of barriers that are otherwise between them or the spoken barriers, but those barriers are being broken down there through technology and through the collection or bringing of people together essentially.
LS: Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. Just the whole communicative piece of the 3rd house and the languages, and then the Uranus being not just the technology piece but like, the quickness, the instantaneousness of the translation.
CB: Yeah. For sure. So it also has some nice trines from like, a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Libra in the 7th house, although there’s also some notable tensions in the chart with a Mars-Saturn conjunction in the first, and that Mars is ruling the Ascendant. So it’s interesting seeing, you know, the positive things and the advantages or just good things that it does for the world but also some of the challenges as well.
LS: Yeah, for sure.
CB: Yeah. All right. The next one I have is James Holden. So this is another astrologer, and he had Pisces rising and Mars and the Moon in the 3rd house in Taurus. And I just thought that was really interesting because it was very evocative of his writing style where, for example, there was this book that was published either in the last few years of his life or it might have been published not long after he died, but it’s this huge, thick book called A Biographical Dictionary of Western Astrologers, I believe, is the title. And it’s like, this huge book where you can tell that over the course of just years and years, maybe over the course of most of his adult life, he had just collected facts and stories about different astrologers that existed down through history, from ancient times all the way up into the present. And he must have just continually like, added these little biographical notes and facts about all of these like, thousands of astrologers or hundreds of astrologers throughout the course of his life before this book was published. And I think there’s something there again about the Moon and its collective function in his style of writing and how he went about writing that’s descriptive there about this placement.
LS: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, like, especially collecting biographies about different people.
CB: Right, yeah. So that is my example there. So moving on. Our next chart example is Maya Angelou.
LS: And Lindsay Turner submitted this one, so thank you Lindsay. Maya Angelou has Leo rising; she’s got a full Moon in Libra in the 3rd house with the Sun in Aries with Jupiter and Uranus up in the 9th house. And it looks like also Maria from Twitter also submitted the same; thank you. So —
CB: Yeah, like, a bunch of people – everybody pointed out Maya Angelou has a full Moon in the 3rd house.
LS: Yeah. Nice. So Maya Angelou had a really rich life. Memoirist, poet, civil rights activist, dancer, singer, and scholar. She wrote, for our purposes that we’re gonna focus on here with the Moon there, she wrote a series of seven autobiographies, starting with her most famous work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1969. And her memoirs explored themes of race, identity, trauma, and resilience. But she was known to have a remarkable memory for details, which she used in her memoirs. And I found this quote that like, wasn’t about her memoirs but is very much about the Moon, and she’s famous for this quote too. She said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” And it’s just like, the emotional impact of communication, like, is really shining out there.
CB: Yeah, that’s incredible. That’s such a famous quote of hers, and that makes so much sense in terms of the Moon in the 3rd house.
LS: I know; I was so pleased to remember that that existed.
CB: And it’s also funny because in the first house episode, that was actually a big breakthrough. I didn’t feel like we had a great handle on the Sun, but the Moon I felt like we learned a lot of stuff, and one of the things I realized in the first house episode was the Moon and its connection with memory was coming through very strong in the first house episode.
LS: Yeah. And I think that’s what’s going on there a lot, too, in terms of her autobiographies. And she actually wrote how she did her memoirs; she would – it’s not the typical one, like writing at the kitchen table. She said she would check into a hotel room – she had a ritual – she would check into a hotel room, and then she would just like, kind of commune with her memory until it just like, hit that magical moment where it just started flowing, and then she would write the rest of the day. And I was like, that’s so fascinating, because not only the hotel with like, the travel piece – even though I don’t think she was going far, but hotels are like, about travel, you know, with the 3rd house – but it was like, a very much going to be in solitude kind of situation with the Moon ruling the 12th placed in the 3rd. So she would like, purposely go somewhere to be by herself, like, not even like, at home, and then she would write.
CB: Okay. Nice.
LS: Which is fascinating. I don’t know if she did that her whole life, but she at least did it to note about it.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
CB: I know that’s one of your major like, favorite significations of the 12th house is just solitude.
LS: Seclusion, yeah, you know, for good or hard. But yeah, solitude is definitely a 12th house thing.
So let’s see. Lindsay noted that Maya was given her name by her older brother, and went to live with her paternal grandmother at a young age. So other like, you know, siblings and other relatives of the 3rd house. And she also at one point with the 12th house Moon ruler, she at one point isolated herself and became mute for several years, and that was because of the ruler of her 3rd. So she told her brother that her mother’s boyfriend had raped her; her brother told the rest of her family. The guy was jailed, but only for like, a day, and then four days after release he was murdered, possibly by her relatives. And she became mute for almost five years because she believed she caused his death. And there’s a really amazing quote about that saying,
“I thought my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone.”
But it said because of that period of silence and solitude, she developed her extraordinary memory during that period or at least one of her biographers, you know, was claiming this that she developed her memory, her love for books and literature, and her ability to listen and observe the world around her, which makes a lot of sense with the Moon ruling the 12th, right?
CB: Yeah, like, that and also like, the Moon itself is like, listening and observing, and sometimes things we think of as more receptive but is important. And then of course, you know, the ruler of the 3rd house itself is in the 8th house of mortality and death, but it’s also exalted in the sign of its exaltation and conjunct Mercury.
LS: Exactly. So there was like, some trauma around her speaking up initially, but then there was still like, really positive 3rd house communicative things that came later. But that quote definitely spoke to the ruler of the 3rd in the 8th.
CB: Yeah, as well as like, the Moon is squaring Pluto pretty closely as well.
LS: Yeah, for sure.
CB: Pluto in the 12th.
LS: Right. There were a couple other interesting things. As a teenager, she became the first Black female streetcar conductor of San Francisco, and her mother referred to it as her “dream job” because she just kept like, talking it up of all the different things about their outfits and stuff, and I just thought that was funny with the ruler of the 2nd house of your means of income conjunct the ruler of the 3rd. Right? Because, you know, writing and communication became like, her means of livelihood, but before that, like, it was the transportation thing at one point. Anyway —
CB: That’s incredible. Like —
LS: I know!
CB: — literally like, the first Black female streetcar conductor in that city and having just the Moon in the 3rd house, a full Moon in the 3rd house.
LS: Exactly. And the 3rd house, it’s not just transportation, but the Moon is things that like, go back and forth, right? That keep moving? And —
CB: Right.
LS: She actually in 2014 because of this, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conference of Minority Transportation Officials as part of a session billed “Women Who Move the Nation.” I just was like, in love with that.
CB: Nice. That’s pretty incredible. And it’s also cool because any time you see like, a first of something, because things always become commonplace and then sometimes we become kind of like, blase about them, but it’s one of the reasons why in some of these writeups I always note when somebody’s like, the first at something or the number one or something, because especially at the time when that person subjectively experiences that in their life, at the time, it’s like, a major accomplishment. It’s a major thing.
LS: Absolutely.
CB: And then that’s why it gets reflected in the chart here in the 3rd house.
LS: For sure. So just a couple last things about that placement – before she was known as a writer, she was a professional dancer and singer, so more like, expression of the 3rd house. She’d traveled widely dancing, and she made a point to teach herself the language of every country she visited. Because of this, she became proficient in many languages, which is again amazing, right, with the Moon in the 3rd but also yeah, the Ascendant – or, sorry, the 3rd house ruler being like, conjunct that exalted Venus. Like, Mercury-Venus is often like, good with language.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
LS: And then the last thing that also I loved was beginning in the 1990s, Angelou actively participated in the lecture circuit in a customized tour bus, something she continued into her 80s. And —
CB: Nice.
LS: — I thought that was amazing, both the touring and the traveling, right, which yeah, is probably more of the 3rd house than the 9th there. And yeah, just the customized tour bus piece.
CB: Yeah. That’s really good. That’s a great example I like. Thanks to Lindsay for that, and then also for you for some of those additional facts that you researched and found. Yeah, and it’s cool. It’s just interesting also that it’s a full Moon chart and sometimes how that can accentuate things as well.
LS: Right. Yeah, for sure.
CB: Alright. So moving on. This next one is one that I originally had in the ruler of the Ascendant section, because this is the birth chart of John Travolta, who has Cancer rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant is the Moon, which is in Virgo in the 3rd house. And at first, I wasn’t like, super sure what to make of this aside from, you know, he’s obviously a famous actor and like Rami Malek and some of those other people, like, communications are important and yadda yadda. But then at one point I like, had this realization that John Travolta, like, one of the things that he’s the most famous for or the most iconic for is actually like, dancing, if you think about it, with the Moon representing the body and the 3rd house representing movement. One of his early roles was Saturday Night Fever, and also the movie Grease, which really like, showcased his impressive dance skills, and those movies kind of solidified him as this charismatic and talented performer. So that’s true and even gets extended into some of his later roles, like in Pulp Fiction for example where there’s this famous dance scene with him and Uma Thurman that is like, probably one of the most iconic and like, imitated scenes from the movie.
So that is my example for him because there’s something about like, dancing and movement that’s actually a really important thing in his life, and that’s not necessarily true for everybody. But I think it’s coming through in a very simple placement of the Moon representing the body in the 3rd house of movement, and the role that that played in helping to catapult him to fame.
LS: Yeah, that makes sense.
CB: Yeah. So and to sort of confirm that, I actually have another famous dancer, who is Bob Fosse. And he had Aquarius rising, the Moon in Aries in the 3rd house along with the Lot of Fortune, Uranus, and Jupiter. So he’s got a whole stellium there, and this guy actually was – he’s usually referred to as like, a revolutionary – which is very Uranian – American dancer, choreographer, and director who was known for his very distinctive and influential style in the world of musical theater and film. And one of the things I know him for and that I always think of is there’s these comparisons that you can find on YouTube where if you search for like, “Bob Fosse Michael Jackson,” you’ll see this early video of Bob Fosse, and he’s doing the same dances that Michael Jackson would later imitate and the sort of like, movements that would become iconic Michael Jackson dances that Michael really like was influenced by Bob Fosse in a very significant way. And it was like, open and like, lots of people know that it; it wasn’t – I don’t think it was something that was like, hidden or something like that, but it’s just something that’s not as well known because Michael became this iconic performer that everybody’s seen dance and do, you know, dances like the moonwalk and stuff like that, whereas Bob Fosse – especially for like, later generations – has become a little bit more obscure just because he’s not like, you know, obviously Michael Jackson.
LS: Yeah, that’s amazing. Because I didn’t, before you told me about that example, I din’t know that. But yeah, Bob Fosse was kind of like, even though he’s not as contemporary now, he was like, a huge, huge figure in dance.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So especially the – you can look it up; it’s the “Snake in the Grass” dance sequence from that film which bears just this striking resemblance to some of Michael Jackson’s iconic moves, including even down to some of the like, hat adjustments and isolations you’ll see him doing it. So it’s pretty impressive. So to me, this helps to like, confirm like, if you’re a little unsure about the John Travolta thing, that the Moon being in the 3rd house and just having a fluidity with bodily movement and having like, a skill or a knack for that can really be a factor in a person’s life.
LS: Definitely. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So let’s move to the next example, which is one of yours.
LS: Yes. So Andrea Gibson. Andrea Gibson is a famous spoken word artist or slam poet, as the case may be. The birth time did not used to be out there; we still don’t have an exact birth time, but someone collected it on Astro.com after Andrea tweeted their Sun, Moon, and rising, which is Virgo rising with the Sun in Leo in the 12th and the Moon in Scorpio in the 3rd. And I’m trying to describe this; it’s hard to describe sometimes like, the Moon in Scorpio in terms of its impact, because so much of it is about the emotional impact. And that is definitely —
CB: So really quickly, though – so this is just an approximate eight AM time —
LS: Yes.
CB: — just to give the middle of Virgo rising. But people should otherwise not take this as if this is an exact birth time or —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — even super approximate, because we just know it’s roughly within like, a one or two hour time frame.
LS: Yeah. We just know it’s Virgo rising, so it could be anywhere in there. Yeah, so don’t rely on this specific birth time. But even so, even without that, we know the basic house placements. And why I really wanted to highlight their Moon in Scorpio in the 3rd is because their content, their spoken word performance, is just super emotionally impactful. So I used to – Andrea actually lives in Boulder, Colorado, or close to. At this point, I forget if it’s actually in city proper, but I was in Boulder for five years before I moved to Denver, and I used to watch Andrea’s performances locally before they, you know, kind of blew up nationally and internationally and started touring everywhere. But they used to do performances at like, the local places I would go to in Boulder and Denver, actually at the Mercury Cafe too where we’ve held astrology meetings. So they used to perform with a social change political performance group, Vox Feminista, and I used to go to their performances. Anyway, so the point of this one with the Moon in Scorpio in the 3rd is that there’s a major focus with that being the sect light there on communication, which is like, obvious for a spoken word artist. But all of the content is like, really raw; it’s like, the subject matters are really raw, sometimes intense subject matters. And the manner of delivery – this is definitely another one where I wanna say, if you haven’t heard Andrea’s poems, pause this right now, go listen to some on YouTube; there’s tons of them on there, and then you’ll know what I’m talking about if you actually listen to a few. I’m not gonna list out all the subject matters because they’re all basically really intense and hard, but that’s the point of talking about it as a Moon in Scorpio in the 3rd example. And it would be really cathartic. It wasn’t just that it was hard subject matter. It would be emotionally cathartic, so you would see sometimes like, people in the audience cry because it resonated so much. But it was also like, really powerful. It wasn’t about dwelling in the hard part, but about like, getting through it to the other side. So go listen to some of their poems. But this is a really great Moon in the 3rd. And then I just wanted to note briefly that that Moon is also the ruler of the 11th house in the 3rd, and that is not only about the performance group that Andrea used to be a part of, but also like, so many of their poems are about social change issues. And so I think that’s why that’s going on there.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, as I was thinking when you mentioned that with the 11th house rulership.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Nice. All right. Let’s see, so moving on. Our next example… I think that’s it for the Moon. We had a lot there just because there’s a lot of really good examples. So the next example, we’re gonna move into the planet Mercury, which is the planet of communication also and like, writing especially. And one of my favorite examples for this is Lilly Wachowski, who has the Sun and Mercury in the 3rd house of siblings, and they were famously writing partners with their sibling Lana. So the two of them, the Wachowskis, are legends in Hollywood because they are the sibling duo that wrote The Matrix together that came out in 1999 and was such a huge hit. And then they went on to do a number of other movies together so that their identity was very much sort of tied into them being sibling directors and cowriters of the films that they did together.
LS: That’s perfect.
CB: Yeah. So pretty good example. We have a birth time for Lilly, but we don’t have a birth time for Lana, unfortunately, so I hope, you know, somebody’s able to get that or I hope we found out someday, because I would love to see Lana’s chart.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Because that was one thing that happened like, a few years ago is I believe Lana was the one that went on and did the most recent Matrix movie, but Lilly decided not to if I’m remembering correctly. So it was interesting that they did it sort of separately for the first time.
LS: Yeah. It’s so funny when people combine multiple topics of the same house, or at least it’s still funny to me. Because this is like, if you just like, tossed up all of the topics in a hat and like, pulled two out, like, writing with siblings, right? Like, Mercury in the 3rd is like, oh, but that actually happens!
CB: Right. Yeah. Exactly. And I forgot to mention the placements; it’s Scorpio rising with the Sun and Mercury very closely conjunct, actually – it’s cazimi within a degree in Capricorn at six and seven degrees of Capricorn, so it’s not just Mercury as the writer but also the Sun and the sense of identity and like, really being identified as like, a sibling duo.
LS: Yeah. Definitely.
CB: All right. So moving onto our next example is William Lilly, who is supposed to have Pisces rising with a stellium of planets in the 3rd house, which as we talked about earlier in some of the ancient Hellenistic authors like Rhetorius, he would talk about the 3rd house as being associated with divination. So I thought this was a super interesting placement, then, with Mercury, Uranus, Venus, and the Sun all in Taurus with Venus in its own domicile cazimi in the 3rd house, and William Lilly wrote the most famous horary astrology textbook of all time, which is titled Christian Astrology, in 1647, I believe. And it’s still the main textbook that continues to influence people to this day.
LS: Yeah. I think this is a super persuasive one in terms of the focus of the divination piece, because he is known more for horary and his 3rd house is much, much stronger than his 9th house.
CB: Yeah. And the other thing is like, he would see lots of clients throughout the course of his life, and he would like, set up shop and people would come in regularly to get these horary readings with him. So you know, he became in some sense like, a local fixture, and there was other things that happened in his life as well, like, two of his most famous predictions were actually about his home city, which is the city of London. So he predicted both the Great Plague of 1665 as well as the Great Fire of London in 1666. And the predictions were in the form of like, cryptic hieroglyphs, but the accuracy of the predictions – particularly the fire, which happened 15 years after his book was published – really significantly enhanced his reputation and the belief in astrology at the time.
LS: It’s actually really funny in a couple ways. I mean, one obviously with the city focus, you know, with the 3rd house stellium, but also like, with Saturn in the 9th and his like, two most famous predictions being like, terrible, terrible things.
CB: Right. Yeah, that’s true. Good point. So and again, this is another example of like, Venus – the ruler of the 3rd – is in its own sign, and the person is like, good at something or this is an area where they’re fortunate.
LS: Right.
CB: All right. Two more examples in this section. The next one is Rupert Murdoch, who is a famous like, media mogul and the founder of Fox News and all sorts of other not-super-great things, not gonna lie, but has Capricorn rising and the Sun and Mercury in Pisces with the Lot of Fortune in the 3rd whole sign house. And so again, it’s like, being the singular like, not just founder but person behind some of these different companies I think is pretty incredible.
LS: Right, for sure. Like, 3rd house focus. And something funny I found while I was looking him up and Ted Turner is that it was written that he and Ted Turner had an animosity for a while. But what started it was not their media companies, but it was initiated by the fact that they both had, they both were like, driving a yacht, and their yachts collided. And I was like, I don’t know if this story is like, true, but I could see it symbolically working there because each of them have like, Jupiter either in or ruling the 3rd house, and I just thought that was like, really funny with, you know, in part symbolizing large transportation vehicles.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That’s incredible. It’s a good thing to watch out for – like, don’t crash your yacht into another person’s yacht.
LS: It’s just not done! It’s taboo.
CB: Right. And then one last one that came up in my searches was just Tom Brokaw as a famous news anchor who had Sagittarius rising and the Sun and Mercury in the 3rd house, and yeah, was a famous broadcaster.
LS: Yeah. That’s a good one. Conveying the news.
CB: Yeah. All right. So let’s transition at this point to talking about the planet Venus, and I believe you have the first example here to share.
LS: I do. So the first example is Diane Arbus. Diane Arbus was a photographer with Venus and the Moon in the 3rd house in Aquarius; Sagittarius rising chart. And one of the things she was particularly noted for was being – people often described her as being a photographer of people on the edges of society, and I thought that was really interesting with the Aquarius piece there, because Aquarius is more the periphery rather than the center or the diffuse, you know, mass of social realm rather than like, central figure with Leo. Anyway, so she has Venus there in the 3rd house, and the Moon, and I found a lot of artistic expression people with Venus in the 3rd. You were the one that noted photography as a potential like, Moon in the 3rd as well, so she kind of has a blend of these two going on – like, artistic photography – because the Moon reflects. And not just – how would you describe what you were talking about? The process of the photography?
CB: Just that like, with photography, it’s like, you have the piece of paper that can receive light, and then the light makes an impression on it, and then the paper holds it basically, vaguely, let’s say, especially like, early photography when people were developing it on their own in like, a dark room or something like that. So that notion of just like, how the Moon in ancient astrology, Valens and the other Hellenistic astrologers talked about the Moon receiving the light of the Sun, and so there’s this notion of this receptive quality of the Moon that then holds things. And I think there’s just something symbolically similar there in terms of photography. And I had a friend who was a photographer that has the ruler of the 10th as the Moon in the 3rd house, and that’s one of the reasons I started paying attention to that.
LS: Yeah. Well, and I started thinking about that too, beyond the, you know, processes of doing the photography, but like, the Moon also just like, reflecting back the people or the landscapes or what have you that’s in front of the photographer. If they’re not like, creating something new, they’re like, reflecting what’s there. Anyways, we —
CB: Right.
LS: — could have also put her —
CB: Well, it’s like, a memory as well. It’s like —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — capturing a memory of a scene in the same way that people maybe up until that point, the only way you could capture those things with your memory or maybe somebody draws a painting or something, which is again a way of capturing a memory or an image of something. But here with photography, it’s like, another, a new way of capturing images or memories of something.
LS: Right. Exactly. So we could have also alternately put her in the Moon in the 3rd category, but put her in Venus in the 3rd because, you know, essentially it’s a way of expressing oneself artistically, and there’s a lot of artists I found that had Venus in the 3rd. And another just additional funny wrinkle on that story is that one of her – I found out like, late in the game that one of her most famous photographs is actually of identical twin girls, which was just like, another funny 3rd house thing.
CB: That’s amazing. I bet —
LS: Yes.
CB: — if you looked up the transits to that, you would see something hitting her 3rd house placements.
LS: Probably. Yeah, I did not check the timing on this one. But anyway. Yeah, Venus in the 3rd – I found lots of artists, singers, composers seem to have Venus in the 3rd because their manner of expression or vehicle of expression is artistic. So some of the other ones just to list off briefly are Pablo Picasso the painter, Renoir – also painter, Ansel Adams that we talked about earlier was a photographer. Andrew Wyeth was a painter, Camille Claudel’s French sculptor, Johannes Brahms – composer. Tom Waits – singer-songwriter and composer, which I think is really funny because his Venus is in the 3rd but it’s ruled by Saturn conjunct Mars in the 10th, and he’s known for having a really gravelly voice, like a really kind of rough voice, but like, nonetheless it’s still a Venus expression. Annie Lennox – singer-songwriter. And this last one I found was really funny – Louis Vuitton, who was like, the original designer of the Louis Vuitton bags, and that, you know, started that whole company. He’s a designer, which is like, an artistic expression, but it was also like, luggage and handbags, right? It actually started with more like, luggage trunks that were more a thing back in the day, and then you know turned into like, now Louis Vuitton is famous for like, handbags, which I think is funny because you would like, take them around town, right? It’s like, something you take from your home when you’re like, going into town.
CB: Yeah, that’s incredible. Don’t bag on designer trunks. You know, those are coming back in my opinion one of these days.
LS: Are they coming back?
CB: Trunks.
LS: I mean, well, it was actually funny, you know, because it was like, an artisan thing back then, and it was something really well respected. It was like, a craft, which he has like, Venus in Virgo, right? It’s like, a useful designer thing. But then he put like, little artistic things on it, like made them like, rounded corners instead of straight – apparently this was a big deal back then!
CB: It is still respected, so watch your – check yourself here in terms of your trunk disrespect.
LS: Oh no. No, I love it. It was like, a perfect like, Venus in the 3rd.
CB: I didn’t know we had a birth time for them, so that’s actually really cool. There’s the chart, I guess if this is correct, with like Cancer rising and Venus in Virgo. Oh, that’s great – it’s actually in Virgo.
LS: Right, exactly. It’s like, it’s an artisan thing. It was like, an artistic but useful craft.
CB: Yeah.
LS: And it was for, I mean, it was explicitly for the purpose of travel.
CB: I love that.
LS: Yeah.
CB: All right. Good find.
LS: Thank you.
CB: All right. Where are we at?
LS: Back in Venus.
CB: Oh yeah, this is my example. I really like this one because it’s actually more of a transit example, but this is the birth chart of Dua Lipa, who is a famous singer at this point. But she has Cancer rising – or sorry, Gemini rising – and she has this very tight Sun-Venus conjunction at 28 degrees of Leo, so Venus is cazimi in the sign of the Sun. The Sun is in its own domicile. They’re also copresent with the degree of the IC and the Lot of Fortune that are also there. And last summer, you know, the Venus retrograde that happened in Leo, when Venus stationed retrograde at like, 28, 29 degrees of Leo and the Barbie movie came out, there was so much stuff happening, but we really noted that the Venus retrograde and the release of the Barbie movie was like, perfectly coinciding with the station of Venus at about 28 degrees of Leo. And Dua Lipa not only appeared in the movie as Mermaid Barbie, but she actually released the song “Dance the Night,” which was her song “Dance the Night” was featured very prominently in the movie in the dance sequence, and it was originally released as the soundtrack’s lead single basically, and eventually became one of her more successful songs. And I was just incredibly struck by the fact that that happened under that transit when transiting Venus was stationing there on top of her Sun-Venus conjunction in the 3rd house and it had to do with partially like, the release of this song, its prominence in the movie, and then the movie becoming wildly successful, including a brief appearance by her.
LS: Yeah. That’s a great timing example.
CB: Yeah. All right. So I think that’s it for the Venus section. Let’s move onto Mars where we actually have several examples. So my first example is one that I use all the time because it’s just one of my favorite examples that I’ve ever found, and it’s George Lucas, who was born with Taurus rising and Mars in Cancer in the 3rd house. And the story of George Lucas is that he grew up wanting to be a racecar driver, and when he was old enough to start driving cars, he would like, go to races and stuff and race around town. And he was planning on doing that professionally once he became an adult and once he graduated high school, but then what happened is that he was in like, the final days of high school basically, and he got in this horrific car accident where another person slammed into his car and his car was like, thrown in the air and smashed against a tree and like, crumpled up like a soda can. And he was miraculously thrown from the car right before it slammed into the tree, otherwise he would have died. And he had to spend a while recovering in the hospital after that, but he was so shook by it that he decided that he didn’t wanna be a racecar driver anymore, and instead he went to college. There he fell in love with filmmaking, and then he ended up making a bunch of famous movies such as Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and then eventually became like, went down as one of the most famous filmmakers in history.
LS: Yeah. That’s incredible.
CB: Yeah. So it all came down, though, to this one event. And what was so interesting about it is that he was 18 years old, so he was actually in a Mars profection year, so the profections were activating his natal Mars in the 3rd house. And he just had a ton of transits that day that were activating his 3rd house placements as well. I haven’t been doing this to save time, but I think this will be a rare example where I just wanna show the actual chart with the transits because it’s so incredibly striking.
Okay. So let me know if you can see this, okay?
LS: So on the left, George Lucas. On the right is the biwheel.
CB: Yeah. So the inside wheel on the right is his natal chart, and the outside wheel is his transits. And look at all of the incredibly close transits that are lined up over the course of the day. So the first thing is that Mars was the lord of the year, so that means we have to pay attention to what it was doing in the transits. In the day of his crash, Mars came up to 11 degrees of Taurus, so it was conjoining the exact degree of his Venus, which because he has Taurus rising Venus is the ruler of his Ascendant, so it represents his body and his physical vitality as well as just, you know, as the ruler of the Ascendant, his life direction since Venus as the ruler of the Ascendant is the captain of his ship. And all of a sudden, it’s just getting rocked by this really rough conjunction from Mars. At the same time, Mars is squaring the Moon. Why is that important? Because the Moon is actually the ruler of the 3rd house of short distance travel. So he’s simultaneously getting a Mars square to the Moon, the ruler of his 3rd house. Weirdly at the exact same time, transiting Saturn is also at 11 degrees of Aquarius conjoining his Moon on the same day. If that wasn’t enough, transiting Neptune is at 11 degrees of Scorpio squaring his Moon and opposing his Venus. The South Node is at 10 degrees of Aquarius, also conjoining his Moon, and basically those are all very, very rough transits. But then what’s weird about it is he had two positive transits that were protecting him at the same time. One of them is that on the same day that transiting Mars conjoined his Venus, transiting Venus in the sky came to 25 degrees of Cancer, which is the exact same degree as his Mars at 25 degrees of Cancer in the 3rd house. So I believe that this was actually a protective transit for him that was hitting that difficult Mars placement natally at this time. And then on top of that, transiting Jupiter came to 11 and 12 degrees of Pisces, so it was making a superior sextile to his Venus at 11 degrees of Taurus, which was helping to protect and offset that negative Mars transit.
LS: Yeah. That’s a lot going on. But yeah, if you’re worried about a transit coming up, usually like, the major life changing ones kind of look more or less like this, where there’s like, you know, it’s not just one thing.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So yeah. That is what was going on there in terms of George Lucas and having a famous crash, which was like, a negative event but it also changed his life positively as well.
LS: Right. Yeah. That’s amazing.
CB: All right. Another example very similar to that but somewhat more difficult is Frida Kahlo and the famous bus accident —
LS: Right.
CB: — that occurred for her.
LS: Right. And this came up because we were, yeah, I was looking for like, bus drivers one night for this, and I was not finding bus drivers. But in the course of that, I found like, a bus accident, and then you looked up the timing for this famous bus accident and were like, wait a minute – this is amazing. So —
CB: I mean, I said it a little bit more depressingly than that. I was like, this is amazing…
LS: You didn’t say it was amazing in a good way!
CB: Okay, I just wanna —
LS: I’m not trying to miss —
CB: — be clear.
LS: I’m not trying to misrepresent you here.
CB: I was not celebrating Frida Kahlo’s —
LS: No.
CB: — bus accident.
LS: You were not. It was just like, a striking Mars transit to the ruler of the 3rd, it turns out. So pictured is her birth chart on the left, which is Leo rising; Venus is the ruler of her 3rd house of transportation. Venus is in late Gemini in the 11th house, closely conjunct Pluto. And then the transits, the bus accident, was September 17th, 1925. And Venus – her natal Venus – was being afflicted by squares from both Mars and Uranus. So Mars was at 22, 23 Virgo square her Venus, and Uranus was at 23 Pisces, also square her Venus. So it was like, a transiting Mars-Uranus opposition, which is often involved in like, accidents, right? It’s like, sudden Mars things. But those two both happened to be like, exactly square the ruler of her 3rd house.
CB: Right. Yeah. That’s really tough, because it’s like, there’s already a little tricky combination there with Venus and Pluto conjunct, but then having a transiting Mars-Uranus opposition that’s very close and that is hitting Pluto and Venus around that time is a pretty explosive combination.
LS: Right.
CB: Like, essentially like, a freak accident, and part of what happened is she was partially like, impaled in this bus accident, right?
LS: Yeah. Like, it was like, she was impaled; it kind of like, went through her pelvis. It was like, major, major injury that kind of impacted her for the rest of her life. It was one of the things that, but kind of like George Lucas’s, you know, she would paint like, in bed and stuff like that too. Which was striking because the ruler of her 3rd is Venus conjunct Pluto, so there’s like, something Plutonian, life-altering that happens with regard to 3rd house things at some point in life. But it’s also like, very powerful artistic expression, right, with like, Venus-Pluto ruling the 3rd.
CB: Yeah. I mean, she would paint about and like, express a lot of the pain and suffering that she had about different things, but one of them was the things that resulted from and the lingering effects of her injuries.
LS: RIght. Because it did impact her for the rest of her life.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So and there’s like, obviously a bunch of other things going on at the same time —
LS: There were.
CB: — like, Pluto’s hitting her Sun, and Neptune’s on her Ascendant, and et cetera. But yeah, it was a rough Mars transit especially, and that’s sometimes what you see occasionally with Mars transits in connection with the 3rd house.
LS: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, there were a few like, auto accidents that we didn’t include that we could have with like, Mars in 3rd house.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: All right. Let’s move onto the next example, and this was a special study that you did.
LS: I just noticed, you know, I thought about like, local governance, and I was like, what about Harvey Milk? So Harvey Milk and – I don’t know if I’m gonna pronounce it right, but – George Moscone were sort of, they were… Harvey Milk was on the San Francisco Board of Directors. He was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. And George Moscone was at the same time the mayor of San Francisco.
So the first thing I wanted to say was just Mars in the 3rd house, but ruling the 10th house. And so his career was about like, local governance. You know, he did other things before that, but that’s eventually what he became known for. And yeah, it’s not – what impressed me the most about that, it wasn’t even just like, the city governance, which it was, but the structure of the San Francisco Board of Directors is such that it’s kind of like the US House of Representatives. You’re representing a geographical area within the city, so it’s literally like, your area neighborhoods, which I thought was perfect – the ruler of the 10th in the 3rd. And so why I was pointing out the Mars, though, is Mars is in its own sign in the 3rd house, and it’s got an overcoming square from Saturn in a night chart in this one. And then if you wanna show George Moscone’s, he had Sun, Mars, Saturn in Sagittarius in the 3rd. So they both had a Mars in the 3rd house, and they both had a Mars-Saturn thing going on in a night chart. So here Mars, Saturn are copresent; in the other one, Mars was in the 3rd with an overcoming sign-based square from Saturn. And so why I’m highlighting the Mars part is they were both kind of infamously murdered while in service to their community, basically. You know, because George Moscone was the mayor of the city, and Harvey was on the Board of Supervisors, and there was a very homophobic former representative on the board who was like, mad that he couldn’t get back on. And he came in and shot both of them, and yeah, it was really tragic.
CB: Yeah. That’s really, you know, that’s one of the things about Mars is that especially in some of the ancient significations is sometimes it’s associated with acts of violence. And in modern times, sometimes things like shootings can be part of that.
LS: Yeah, exactly. So it was super sad, but yeah, like, a very Mars example. So and you were noting, right, some of the transits.
CB: Yeah. So I looked up the transits, and Mars was transiting the 3rd house of George Moscone conjunct a retrograde Mercury when he died. So and then Nick Dagan Best pointed out that Mars was also transiting the 3rd house of the killer, Dan Brown. So it was weird that there was these transits that were simultaneously like, indicating the event for some of them in the area so that sometimes it’s that thing we’ve talked about in other episodes of like, sometimes there’s a natal signature, and sometimes that natal signature gets activated by the transits or profections or what have you.
LS: Absolutely.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah. So I mean, but on a sort of more, I don’t know, less tragic note – I mean, just the ruler of the 10th in the 3rd and just him being sort of forever intertwined with like, San Francisco. Like, he’s like, known for being a San Francisco person and representing the neighborhoods of San Francisco. There’s even – I’m forgetting the name of it right now, but I heard this amazing musical – oh, it’s called I Am Harvey Milk. I saw it performed some years ago; it was like, incredible and moving, and if you’re into his life at all, I recommend watching it or listening to the album, which you can listen to online. But one of the songs is like, “San Francisco, Be My Lover,” and it’s like, about his love for the city.
CB: That’s amazing.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And also there was that movie where Sean Penn played him, and I think it was just called Milk, right?
LS: Yeah. Right.
CB: Yeah. That’s really striking. And also, because he was one of the first openly gay people in a prominent role like, in the country, it also was sort of setting a trailblazing in that sense, and so it’s interesting seeing that as a major signature related to career in the chart as well.
LS: Right. For sure.
CB: Of like, talking about like, firsts again.
LS: Yeah.
CB: All right. So let’s see, let’s move onto the next example. This is the birth chart… Let me reshare it here. This is Zinedine Zidane, who is one of the most famous soccer players ever. He’s an iconic French soccer player and coach, and this example was actually sent into me by a listener and patron named Christine Bouton D’or Devin, which hopefully I’m pronouncing close enough to accurate, and Zidane an iconic soccer player, but this example’s really focused on an event that happened at the very end of his career as an actual player in the very final game of his career. On July 9th, 2006, towards the end of like, the final game of his career, he’s on the field – like, the teams are tied; I think they’re in overtime. So it’s really tense, and he’s walking by this other player on the field, and this other player reportedly insulted Zidane’s sister, so Zidane turned around and headbutted this guy just like, brutally in the chest and knocked him over. And after this happened, the referees pulled a red card and he got kicked out of the game, and it was the final game of his career, and then his team went on to like, lose the game in overtime in his absence.
So it was this incredibly publicized event, and it’s really striking in his birth chart because he has Taurus rising, and he has the Sun, Mercury, and Mars in the 3rd house, but especially that Mercury-Mars conjunction is very tight at 20 degrees of Cancer and 26 degrees of Cancer in his 3rd house. And it’s just striking that like, the motivation for the headbutt, the famous like, headbutt heard around the world, was his sister being insulted and therefore him, you know, lashing out as a result of that.
LS: Right. That’s pretty funny.
CB: And it’s like, he has the Sun in the 3rd house, so it’s like, part of his identity is probbelay very wrapped up in his siblings, and his siblings are probably really important to him. So it’s like, you know, if you know somebody with like, you know, important placements like the Sun in the 3rd house, then do not insult their siblings.
LS: Right. Well, it’s also like, Mars in Cancer, which is like, pretty famously known for like, you know, coming out the most when they feel like, protective of their loved ones.
CB: Right. Yeah, that’s actually a really good point, because that was something Austin and I were talking about in the recent episode about like, Kendrick Lamar who has a Mercury-Mars conjunction in Scorpio, and he was in that rap battle earlier this year with Drake. And it was like, kind of going back and forth and like, Drake was taking shots at Kendrick, but Kendrick wasn’t like, trying very hard, but he said in one of his songs like, he set a red line, and he said like, basically do not attack family and this won’t go too far. But then Drake crossed the line, and that was when Kendrick just like, you know, pulled out the big guns and just like, annihilated Drake with this song, this brutal song, that just like, also became the song of the summer that was just completely humiliating Drake, and that’s a really good point, because he was also, he has a Mars-Mercury conjunction in the 10th house of career. Here we see Mars-Mercury in the 3rd house of siblings.
LS: Right.
CB: All right, so yeah, I think that’s good. There’s like, some transit stuff with that one, but we can skip it for the purpose of this. The next Mars example that I noticed that was cool is the birth chart of Alan Turing, who had Gemini rising and Mars in the 3rd house. And I thought this was really interesting because one of the things Turing was the most legendary for was building code breaking machines during World War II, which were successful and allowed the Allies to break the German codes, the communication codes, so that they could access and see their communications and know and anticipate what they were gonna do. So there’s like, a lot of different things going on in his chart that explain his story and facility with like, mechanics and with communications things and all sorts of other things like that, but I’m just pointing out here there’s just an interesting piece of like, a positive manifestation of Mars in the 3rd house and like, breaking communications codes that was used effectively and like, productively to help the war effort during World War II.
LS: Right. And it’s interesting that that Mars in Leo in the 3rd is ruled by the Sun, which is in the 2nd house. So that was like, his employment at least for some amount of time.
CB: Right. Yeah. All right. Next example – the rapper Ice Cube has Mars in the 3rd house, and his chart is like, Libra rising with Mars retrograde in the 3rd house of communication opposite to Mercury in Gemini. And I thought this was a funny example just because he’s known for his sort of like, aggressive communication and like, rapping style, especially in his early days with NWA. But in particular in his early career, his lyrics often featured this really confrontational and like, explicit language and component to them. And they were often like, addressing social and political issues with this really raw and unapologetic tone. But it’s like, some of his most famous, most iconic NWA song is like, “Fuck the Police,” basicaly, and it’s hilarious that the guy who wrote that has like, Mars in the 3rd house.
LS: Right. In Sagittarius, which is just like, very straightforward about like, what they think usually.
CB: Yeah. And in a day chart.
LS: Yes, in a day chart, for sure.
CB: So anyway. That’s just a little example. All right, two more quick ones. Ryan Reynolds – this is a really recent one, and he has Virgo rising with a stellium of planets in Scorpio, including the Sun, North Node, Moon, Uranus, and Mars. I’m particularly focused on that Mars, though, because it’s in its domicile in Scorpio in a night chart. And what’s interesting about him over the past decade is Ryan Reynolds was the driving force behind creating the Deadpool movies where he took this old comic book character, like, superhero, and all of the superhero movies for like, the past two decades where there’s just been this crazy run on superhero movies from like, every possible past comic book for the most part because they’re comic book movies or superhero movies, they’re being marketed to kids so that they’re usually like, PG-13 or they’re like, PG or PG-13 at the most. But Ryan Reynolds was the driving force behind creating an R-rated superhero movie where instead of just being marketed to kids, it’s like, an adult movie basically that uses a lot of, you know, curse words and foul language, but also a lot of violence and gore and other things like that. And what happened is he released the movie, and it was like, wildly successful and made a ton of movie at the box office – a ton of money. And as a result of that, they’ve done two sequels already, and like, the third Deadpool movie just came out this summer.
LS: That’s very Mars.
CB: Yeah. So I wanted to use that as a, you know, good example of sometimes like, you know, using Mars-related things like bad language with Mars in the 3rd house, but having it in Scorpio and using it successfully for, you know, successful things.
LS: Right. Mars in its own sign in a night chart.
CB: Yeah, sort of in the same way that Richard Pryor did with Mercury conjunct Mars in Scorpio.
LS: Right.
CB: All right. And then the last example is just one I threw in really quickly where George Martin, the author of Game of Thrones… Just a few like, weeks ago, there’s been the second season of this series, House of the Dragon, just aired over the past few months, but it got panned critically for different reasons. Like, audiences didn’t like the later part of the season. And George R.R. Martin who wrote the book that the series was based on, earlier this month he just wrote an article on his blog criticizing the showrunners for deviating from his book and saying that his book like, had a good story, but they decided to change the story and it’s gonna mess up a bunch of plot points, making the show worse than it should be. And what was funny is he published this blog post on September 4th, which was the day that Mars ingressed into Cancer and went into his 3rd house, and he’s, you know, criticizing the people that are making the show that’s based on his book for not accurately reflecting his writing.
All right, so let’s transition into talking about the planet Jupiter at this point in the 3rd house. So the very first example chart I wanted to show is the birth chart of Henry Ford. And this is another one of those ones that you run into with like, older charts where it’s… I think it was actually given as like, seven AM, so it’s like, it could be late Leo rising; it could be early Virgo rising. And one of the things I tried to figure out is I did a search; I was like, did Henry Ford have a temper? And then the results that came up was it was like, yes, Henry Ford was very well-known for having a temper. And so I suspect that he had late Leo rising rather than Virgo rising.
So you know, that caveat out of the way in terms of using a slightly rectified chart, if he had this chart, then he was born with Leo rising and Saturn and Jupiter in Libra in the 3rd house in a day chart. And he was the founder of course of Ford, which is the car company, which ended up kind of revolutionizing and setting a new era for cars and for production by automating the car production process.
LS: Yeah. That’s really interesting with Saturn ruling the 6th house of like, labor in the 3rd house of transportation.
CB: Right. As well as, like, you pointed out when I brought up this example, just that it’s a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction and it’s like, we’re used to thinking of that as setting new eras in history and new like, epochs in history in mundane astrology. But it’s interesting to see that in a natal chart and having a single individual set a new epoch in terms of, you know, cars and motor vehicles in the 3rd house.
LS: Right, in terms of like, your ability to get around and how most people did that.
CB: Right. As well as like, how those cars were produced.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah. So that is pretty much it with that. The next example of Jupiter in the 3rd house is Emily Dickinson.
LS: So this one, Emily Dickinson – was this one of your examples?
CB: I guess so. I wasn’t sure if we —
LS: Okay.
CB: — split this one. I mean, the main thing with —
LS: I can read it, but I didn’t, no.
CB: Okay. Well, the main thing with Emily Dickinson that I thought was interesting was just that her sister published her poems after her death, which was very similar to like, Vincent Van Gogh, for example. But also the main thing was just that she was this super prolific writer, and even though her only publications in her actual lifetime were like, 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems and one letter, she wrote a ton of poems that were later published after her death by her sister. And I guess that was the main thing that I really wanted to convey with this is just that her sister was deeply involved in the publication of her poems after her death, but also that Emily Dickinson was a prolific writer and then eventually would come to be recognized as, you know, this major writer in history.
LS: Yeah, with Jupiter there in the 3rd. Also kind of a Mercury-Sun conjunction.
CB: Right, yeah. So —
LS: Yeah, because wherever Jupiter is, there’s often like, a lot of it, right? And that’s kind of what was going on there with like, a lot of writing.
CB: Yeah. It can be like, a lot. A lot of things, you know, going to extremes. I think we had another example of that with somebody else with the ruler of the 3rd in Sagittarius, and we saw like, a similar thing of being like, one of the most prolific writers.
LS: Right. Yeah.
CB: So and also I just like the example because her poetry, without her sister’s dedication and initiative to seeing it through, Emily Dickinson’s poetry may never have seen the light of day. But because of her sister’s efforts, she became – the talent of Emily Dickinson became widely recognized and celebrated, which made her sort of one of the great American poets in history. And I think that’s crucial because that just takes us back to like, why the 3rd house is sometimes important is like, siblings are not important in everyone’s life, but for some people, siblings can be really important in this instance and literally would not have been as widely recognized if not for her sibling.
LS: Yeah, for sure. Do you know if it’s a super rounded time, or if there’s any like, source notes, just out of curiosity? I mean, I know it’s on the hour.
CB: I don’t know; it’s just —
LS: Okay.
CB: — five o’clock; I don’t remember at the moment.
LS: Yeah. I was just curious because at least at that time, if it was close to exact, like, the Midheaven’s like, right next to the ruler of the 3rd, which would make a lot of sense with regard to like, only becoming known because of her sister.
CB: Right, yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, I am not sure. And the placement is, you know, Scorpio rising with Jupiter conjunct Neptune in Capricorn with the Lot of Fortune. Again, we’ve seen a lot of Lot of Fortune placements; I explored this in my episode on the Lot of Fortune earlier this year, but sometimes it’s just like, having fortunate circumstances that are outside of your control with respect to that topic. In this instance it’s like, she really lucked out that her sister like, got all of this together and published these poems for her so that she could be recognized after her life had ended.
LS: Right. And very similarly to how sometimes things only play out at certain time in one’s life and not like, all of the time. This is an even more extreme example of that, because you know, at least an aspect of the 3rd house only played out after she wasn’t around, but the chart was still working.
CB: Yeah, that’s one of the most fascinating things that I interestingly first encountered with Vincent Van Gogh, because he didn’t sell like, pretty much any of his paintings during his lifetime. It was only after he died that his brother, who had like, funded his career a lot, his brother and especially his brother’s wife ended up promoting like, getting possession of Vincent’s paintings and then promoting them. And that’s how he became a famous painter is because of that promotion after he died, and he had the ruler of the 3rd house of siblings in the 10th house of career.
LS: Yeah, that’s amazing.
CB: But that topic, that’s one of the first charts where I sort of glimpsed into that topic of what I call “post-mortem astrology” and just how our charts continue to live on after death. And you know, for some people that are famous after they died, it’s the activation of their chart later on that really signifies when they will become recognized.
LS: Yeah. Absolutely, I’ve seen a bunch of that too. That’s interesting with Van Gogh with the ruler of the 3rd in the 10th in terms of it being both his brother, you know, making him famous and also that being expression as, you know, his expression was like, his career.
CB: Yeah, totally. And I mean, even during his life, his brother funded and gave money to his brother a lot to help him.
LS: Right.
CB: So I didn’t use this example in this one; I think I cut it or I didn’t use it because I use it extensively in my course. There was actually a bunch of examples I use my course and my book that I didn’t wanna completely repeat here even though I repeated some of them, but there’s actually more in my course.
LS: Yeah.
CB: All right. So moving on. Let’s go to Saturn in the 3rd house.
LS: Okay.
CB: Let me pull up our first Saturn in the 3rd house example, which is Elvis Presley. And something I didn’t know about Elvis, you know, because I didn’t really grow up with Elvis; it was like, way before my era. But I did find at one point that we had a timed chart for Elvis, and I saw that he had Sagittarius rising and that he had Saturn in the 3rd house in a night chart. And I think I was just like, curious how that worked out, and I did a search one day like, “Does Elvis have siblings?” And it came back and the answer was like, he was actually a twin, but his brother died in birth, and that this actually really impacted Elvis when he grew up.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So yeah, he had an identical twin brother named Jesse who was stillborn that was delivered 35 minutes before Elvis. And I have some quotes from Elvis that are just really fascinating where he often seemed to like, reflect on his brother and how that like, altered his life trajectory. So he says,
“I suppose it might have been different if my brother had lived… But he didn’t live, and I grew up alone. I guess my mother – and my father, too, of course – were trying to make up for that by giving me enough love for both.”
So I was interested in just like, that he emphasized that he grew up alone. So he had this sense of like, loneliness, which is a very Saturn keyword or signification as a result of this like, loss of his, you know, that he would have had a brother.
LS: Right.
CB: Elsewhere, another quote he says, “I always felt alone, even in a crowd.” And even though it’s like, a separate quote, I sort of wonder if it harkens back to, you know, that previous quote about being alone because of like, not having his brother. Elsewhere he said, “I have a twin brother that died at birth, so I guess I’m two people.” Elsewhere he says, “When I was a child, ladies would come to the house and tell my mother how lucky she was to have me. She’d say, ‘Yes, but I had two sons and I lost one.’”
So it’s like, the death of the brother, you know, seriously impacted the mother and it was something that Elvis himself felt sort of like, emotionally through her.
LS: Yeah. Because not everyone would, like, if someone had the same circumstance but their parents didn’t maybe say something like that or really evoke the absence, it probably would have been different.
CB: Right. For sure. Elsewhere one more quote – he says, “I often think of what it would have been like to have a brother. Someone to share my life with, someone to lean on.” So it’s like, even as an adult, that was something he really reflected and felt strongly about in some way. And there’s like, some rumors – like, I don’t know – I was having a hard time verifying this, but some close friends and family members supposedly shared stories suggesting that Elvis believed that he could sense his brother’s presence or even communicate with him in some way. And I thought that was interesting even though I couldn’t find any explicit quotes from Elvis himself about that.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that is that. The Moon, we can see, is down there separating from a conjunction with Saturn, and I think that’s really interesting that that was like, the last aspect the Moon made. So there’s something important going on there.
LS: Yeah. I was thinking that close conjunction, too, even though they’re separating, especially with the Moon ruling the 8th house of death.
CB: Right. And like, Pluto in the 8th house. And it’s like, the Moon is in the 8th house of death and it’s in the 4th house of parents, and maybe it was partially like, his mom being so impacted by that.
LS: Yeah, right.
CB: If she’s saying stuff like that to visitors, like, you know. They’re like, congrats, you have a great kid, and she’s like, well, I used to have two.
LS: Right.
CB: I should have two – like, that’s kind of a bummer on Elvis’s part, and he’s kind of —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — feeling some of that or that’s impacting him in some way.
LS: Absolutely, yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So moving on. Another example of Saturn in the 3rd house that I found recently – this is the birth chart of Eddie Kidd, who has Scorpio rising and Saturn in Capricorn in the 3rd house along with the Moon.
So Eddie Kidd’s really interesting because he’s kind of like Evel Knievel in that he was a motorcycle stunt performer who was really prominent and became famous in the 1970s and 1980s with these really incredible motorcycle jumps and death-defying stunts, so that he became sort of like a household name. And he was frequently in a bunch of movies, including three James Bond films, including the film GoldenEye where he played a double for Pierce Brosnan doing some like, motorcycle jumps basically.
So he performed 12,000 jumps during the course of his career, jumping over cars and buses. He even jumped over the Great Wall of China on a motorcycle at one point. But then what happened is one day he did a jump, but he was injured. Like, he came down too hard and his head went down violently and slammed into the motorcycle, and it left him paralyzed and with brain damage so that he was unable to walk and unable to speak. And he was actually initially injured and left in a coma, but he only regained consciousness three months later after the accident and found that he was paralyzed and that he couldn’t speak the same way that he used to before.
LS: Yeah. That is really tragic.
CB: Yeah. So it’s very similar to, for example, the case with our earlier Saturn in the 3rd example of Christopher Reeve where the Saturn is indicating, you know, it’s saying “no” to like, both movement but also communication to some extent as well. And of course, when I looked up the transits and stuff, eclipses preceded the event by a few months in some like, notable sectors of the chart.
And then later on, though, he – in like, the 2010s, in 2011 and 2010 – he actually walked in the 2011 London Marathon, where he got out of his wheelchair at the start and he walked the rest of the way starting April 17th, 2011, and he walked the entire marathon, which took him four weeks to complete. But he called it his greatest stunt yet, and he eventually completed it on June 6th. And I thought this was amazing, because the day that he finished the marathon, the closest transit he was having was Uranus squaring his Saturn in the 3rd house. So Uranus – and Uranus was actually statinooning at that very degree over the course of that month. So it was really like he was rebelling against the limitations that his injury put on his movement and doing his best to like, break free of that.
LS: Yeah, that makes sense. And it makes sense both with you know, the Mars-Uranus is doing a lot in this chart. Like, you know, on top of the Saturn in the 3rd, like the Mars ruling the 6th house injuries and it being in a day chart, and like, closely conjunct Uranus and prominently placed in the 10th. So it’s like, his death-defying stunts, but also the injury. But yeah, and it’s interesting that this is then Saturn in a day chart, and Saturn in its own sign. And so it was the kind of thing where he could actually keep working on it later, you know, to regain some mobility. Yeah, that’s interesting.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Anyways. He also eventually in 2012 also carried the Olympic torch, so there was like, some hope and some like, fighting against things as well, and he’s been recognized since then as just a legendary stunt performer and somebody that was really influential in terms of that field.
LS: Yeah.
CB: All right. So that takes us to the next example. This is not the chart of a person; this is a chart of a business, but it’s just to show you the 3rd house component. So this is the birth chart of the Mercury Cafe, which is where we used to host our local astrology meetings, right?
LS: Yes. And they’re still being hosted, but not by us. And —
CB: Yeah. Shout out to Rosalie, who’s doing an amazing job running the Denver Astrology Group meetings, if anyone’s ever in town.
LS: So this is the chart of the moment that the business in that location opened. Marilyn, the owner, had a previous location, but anyway, she famously – if you’ve seen, if you’ve either been there or seen pictures from the outside – there’s a big wall painting of like, the birth chart of the opening of that location for the business. So this is a Scorpio rising chart, Uranus, Neptune, and Saturn in Capricorn in the 3rd house. And this was something we noticed, this is a transit example really – it was something we noticed, because Saturn and Pluto, Pluto went into Capricorn around 2008, and then Saturn around 2017. And what happened – that meant that there was a Saturn return going on in the 3rd house as well as Pluto going very slowly through the 3rd house, and then there being that transiting Saturn-Pluto conjunction at one point.
And what happened is the entire neighborhood changed around the business. It was so striking that we were like, repeatedly like, commenting on it when we would come there for meetings. And at first, there were new tent encampments by people who were unhoused kind of lining the entire block, which was new. Not that that hasn’t happened in lots of places, but you know, still, we had the chart of the business and that was representing the neighborhood.
CB: Well, and it’s like, initially the Mercury Cafe when it was started it was kind of on like, the outskirts of downtown Denver where there was just like, warehouses and it was sort of in the middle of nowhere. So there was nothing around it in terms of —
LS: Right.
CB: — other buildings, basically.
LS: Yeah. Exactly. Which I think speaks to the Saturn there natally. And then after that, then all of a sudden, all these major like, huge tall buildings and like, large condo buildings started being built, just like, entirely surrounding like that block. That neighborhood was suddenly like, construction everywhere, which I think is like the Saturn part of the Saturn return was like, there was like, lots of building going on. And eventually, by the end, it had changed the entire look and character of like, the immediate surrounding neighborhood. And the Mercury Cafe building was more standing out now that it was like, not a highrise.
CB: Yeah. So there was just all these huge buildings sprung up around it, and it’s just like, this little tiny building that’s sitting there. And then all of a sudden like, right next to it, there’s like, huge buildings and like, parking garages and skyscrapers and stuff, and then there’s other little local businesses that moved in across the street, so it starts like, becoming this flourishing sort of area across the street with all these businesses. But it was just such a rapid and dramatic change that took place over the course of this three year period where you could see the upwards construction of all of these buildings around it in the immediate vicinity of this building as Saturn was transiting through Capricorn and the 3rd house between 2017 and 2020.
LS: Yeah, for sure. And it was striking that it was a Saturn return in Capricorn in the 3rd, because I really think the tall buildings is part of the Capricorn part, right? Like, with the mountain goats kind of scaling the heights.
CB: Yeah, just the vertical like, upwards thing. It’s hard to —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — convey. It’s like, hard to convey unless you’re like, there and seeing it. But it was striking that the 3rd house can be neighborhoods not just for people but also for other entities that sometimes you have to think about, you know, what that looks like even in inception charts or electional charts.
LS: Exactly. And you know, the last thing I would say about the Capricorn is that it was just striking that it was all these, like, not just the tallness of the buildings, but they were kind of like, very formal. You know, before it was like, kind of small, different little buildings. This was very – it just felt very like, corporate, I guess.
CB: Yeah, like, two of them were like, corporate condo buildings – or actually three or four of them were like corporate condo buildings.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Anyway, so that is that, and then not too long after that time, it was actually sold and the original owner, who was also an astrologer, sold it to other people, and so it was weird that there was also a transition of ownership, which may have related to the Saturn also ruling like, the 4th house. Because I was thinking about what is the 4th house for, you know, a building? But it’s like, the parents – and like, what are the parents of a building? But it’s like, the owner, I think, to some extent.
LS: Yeah, it could be. Yeah. And it is now up for sale again.
CB: Right. Yeah, it’s already being sold a few years again later, and hopefully it continues to exist and it has good new owners. I’m kind of nervous about Mercury like, ingressing into that 4th house – or Pluto ingressing into that 4th house – but we’ll see how it goes.
LS: Yeah.
CB: All right. So let’s move onto Uranus in the 3rd house.
LS: For the purpose of this recording, I thought we didn’t believe in outer planets anymore.
CB: Yes. We could stop believing in the outer planets just to like, cut it off here and like, call it a night and go to bed. What was the data? I meant to mention the data of when we started. We are recording this on Monday, September 23rd, 2024, and we were supposed to start at like, what? Like, 12:10? But we started like, 30 minutes later with…
LS: It was Sag rising.
CB: Mercury coming just off of the Midheaven.
LS: Yes.
CB: Yeah. So the Midheaven had just passed Mercury, so if anyone wants to rectify that birth data, that is our chart with Sagittarius rising today.
All right. So we’re not gonna forget about the outer planets; we’re gonna power through like good astrological soldiers and finish out the outer planets for our modern astrology brethren who those are so important to, as they are to us, obviously.
LS: Yes.
CB: All right. Richard Pryor. So this is just a callback, because I just wanted to callback and make an easy one where people kept talking about how he revolutionized comedy with the use of profanity, with his openness, his talking about political things, talking about things that were dark and difficult. And there’s a lot of different things going on there in his chart, but I just – the use of terms like “revolutionary” often makes me think of Uranus, and I just think it’s so interesting how Uranus is there in his 3rd house in his chart.
LS: Right. Something different or something new going on in that area.
CB: Yeah, exactly. All right. The next chart is another inception chart; this is the birth chart of when the first website was launched by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. And it happened with Scorpio rising, and Uranus and Neptune were conjunct the North Node in Capricorn in the 3rd house of communication. And I just think it’s interesting how we have these like, Uranian themes in the 3rd house of, you know, revolutionary communication things, and this is, you know, what’s more revolutionary than that, than the start of the internet?
LS: Right. Right. And I don’t know if you wanted to skip or read any of the excerpt, but I had a funny thought in there.
CB: Sure, go ahead.
LS: Okay. Do you want me to read it?
CB: Like, the whole thing?
LS: Yeah, either or.
CB: Sure, if you’d like to.
LS: Okay. “Nobody was paying attention to Tim Berners-Lee and his pet idea. He was a young British scientist at CERN, a high-energy physics lab in Geneva, and he had a radical new way for scientists to share data by linking documents to one another over the Internet. He had kicked around a few different names for it, including the “Infomesh” and the “Information Mine.” But he wasn’t getting much interest from his bosses. His proposal came back with the words “vague but exciting” written across the cover,” which just made me laugh quite a lot with the Uranus-Neptune in the 3rd there. Right?
CB: Right.
LS: Like, that’s literal. “So Berners-Lee took his invention to the people. He posted a message to a newsgroup — a kind of electronic public-access bulletin board — announcing the existence of the “WorldWideWeb (WWW) project.” The message included instructions on how to download the very first Web browser from the very first website, info.cern.ch. Berners-Lee’s computer faithfully logged the exact second the site was launched,” which is great for us – “2:56:20 p.m., August 6th, 1991.
“He posted it, and we came. From that day forward traffic to info.cern.ch rose exponentially, from 10 hits a day to 100, 1,000 and beyond. Berners-Lee had no idea that he had fired the first shot in a revolution that would bring us home pages, search engines, Beanie Baby auctions and the dotcom bust, but he knew that something special had happened. “Of all the browsers people wrote,” Berners-Lee remembers, “and all the servers they put up, very few of them were done because a manager asked for them. They were done because somebody read one of these newsgroup messages and got that twinkle in their eye.”
And I like that like, “the first shot in a revolution” of like, a 3rd house thing.
CB: Yeah. I love that, that’s a great imagery symbolically for that placement, especially with Uranus.
LS: Yeah. Especially like the “vague but exciting” thing made me laugh a lot, but yeah, it’s like, an interesting Uranus-Neptune thing because it was like, revolutionary, but also very open to everyone.
CB: Brilliant. All right. And let’s see – moving on. I’m gonna skip one example, and I’ll just mention one I had, because this is one that you commonly commented on at the time was… All right, so this is my chart. I have Aquarius rising, my 3rd house is Aries. There it is. Aquarius rising, Aries in my 3rd house. So 2010, Uranus was making its way into my 3rd house, and it would go through like, a several year transit, a seven year transit there, all the way through 2018. And right at the beginning of that transit, I took over another podcast from another astrologer called Traditional Astrology Radio on my birthday in 2010. And then two years later, the domain name “The Astrology Podcast” just unexpectedly fell into my lap; I bought it, and then I launched this podcast during the course of that time. And over the course of that seven year period, I had to learn a lot about technology in order to build a successful podcast. I had to learn a lot of different things about like, microphones and audio editing and websites, and then eventually I started doing video in 2017 after my book came out and I had to learn about lighting and all this other stuff. So there was this huge technological component, but then there was also a component that had to do with my voice where my voice changed rapidly during the course of that, and I sort of like, found my voice. And that’s not all having to do with Uranus, but there was just a major component of like, revolutionary things happening in the way that I communicated, especially using technology through the podcast during the course of that transit. And it pretty closely aligned with Uranus going into my 3rd house. And then by the end of it, the podcast was successful and it was already on its way to becoming super successful. And in 2017 before Uranus departed from my 3rd house, I actually also finished writing my book after 10 years of working on it and published that in 2017.
LS: Yeah, it was really striking watching it from start to finish, just Uranus kind of activating all of those 3rd house topics.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So there’s a lot of other things related to that, but I think that’s it. It was just an interesting Uranus transit through my 3rd house, and a way that that can sometimes manifest in very interesting ways. Revolutions of communication, even within an individual life.
LS: Right. Yeah.
CB: All right. Let’s move into Neptune.
LS: Okay.
CB: This one’s tricky because it’s hard to get around this example, because it’s just like, the most obvious example. But the most obvious contemporary example of Neptune in the 3rd house is Donald Trump, who has Neptune stationing in Libra in the 3rd house of communication, and it’s also closely square Mercury in the 12th, Neptune being at five degrees and Mercury being at eight degrees. And you know, he’s just known for like, lying, like, a lot, basically, and that’s something with Neptune is that Neptune shows the part of our chart where there’s things that are detached from reality or things that are like, where you can’t tell the difference sometime between what’s real and what’s not. And sometimes that can be good for like, for example, like fantasy writers. If somebody is like, a fantasy writer and they have like, a prominent Neptune, then sometimes they’ll be really good because they have a really good ability to use like, immersion in order to immerse a person in like, a fantasy world. But for whatever reason, Trump has this like, special ability. And what’s interesting is that it’s copresent with Jupiter, and his Jupiter is like, stationing to the day in his 3rd house of communication in a day chart with a trine from Uranus.
So one of the things that’s crazy is he’s actually very successful as a communicator, and he’s come to, you know, rise to power in significant ways at this point in history and becoming president and other things like that because of his sort of like, facility with communication to some extent. But part of that also has to do with this Jupiter-Neptune conjunction and like, blurring the truth or sometimes he’ll lean on like, the Jupiter part and like, exaggerate things, and other times he’ll lean on the Neptune part and just sort of like, make stuff up so that it’s a very striking and characteristic thing for him with his 3rd house.
LS: Right. And you had included a quote from Trump’s former White House press secretary –
“He used to tell me, ‘It doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie — say it enough and people will believe you.’”
And that he like, kind of learned that as a sort of lifehack to people’s psychology at some point.
CB: Yeah. Like, I think that’s really important, because that’s like, a direct quote to somebody that worked for him. I think she was actually his White House press secretary, so it’s like, she was his mouthpiece for a period of time while he was president. And I think that’s a true quote because you can see that that’s kind of what he does is at like, at some point in his life, he just learned that if you say something with enough conviction so that it sounds like you’re being genuine, and if you repeat it and if you say it enough times, even if people don’t initially believe you or they think you’re wrong or something like that, it will subtly start influencing people’s reality and like, sort of bending things to some extent subtly to your desired outcome. And it’s like, some sort of like, weird jedi mind trick that he figured out at some point in his life that he uses really effectively. And what’s interesting is like, that doesn’t work for everybody. It’s like, people that don’t have this placement, sometimes if they say something that’s not true, they get called out for it, and then their career falls apart and like, you know, they have to start all over again or their life is over, what have you. But for some reason, for him, he’s sort of impervious to being pinned down when it comes to, you know, telling things that are untruths.
LS: Right. And you can see that sometimes with people like politicians who try to fashion themselves after him, but they don’t have his chart, you know? And so it’s like, why isn’t this working as well for me? And that’s why.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And I think just so much of it has to do with that Jupiter placement, and you know, Venus is also ruling his 3rd house of communication and his 10th house of career, and it’s over there in his 12th house of one them is like, enemies. And you know, one of the ways that he rose to power early on as a politician was by oftentimes like, attacking other people. Like, he initially attacked Obama with the birther controversy, and he like, claimed that Obama wasn’t born in the United States in Hawaii when he was and when it was documented that he was. Or when he came into the 2016 primary election, one of his main things is he first differentiated himself by, you know, attacking his enemies and making up these funny names for different Republican candidates that he was attacking. So it was interesting case there also with like, the ruler of the 3rd house of communication in the 12th house of enemies and just going on the atack with enemies being part of like, a general strategy that has worked for him.
LS: Right. For sure.
CB: Yeah. So the only other thing with that is I was watching an interview with him recently where he went on a podcast, and I wanted to watch it because I thought it was interesting to see him in a long-form comment and just what his like, what he was like talking, and if you could get any biographical details that would be interesting in terms of the astrology seeing him in that kind of format. So he went on a podcast with Theo Von, who’s a comedian, on August 20th of this year of 2024. One of the stories that he told that was actually very interesting is he said that he never drank or smoke because of his older brother who played a really positive influence in his life and who told him not to all of the time because his brother struggled with that. And his brother developed alcoholism, and it actually ended up killing him eventually. But what he said in this interview is that not only that he just, he’s never drank so that it didn’t end up having an impact on him because he was so moved by what happened with his brother, but that his brother himself actively encouraged him not to drink to try to save him, because he knew he was struggling with his own addiction issues.
So I think this is really important and really interesting, because then it means with Jupiter in the 3rd house for Trump, the other part of that is his brother actually played a positive influence in his life. And what’s interesting is his brother was actually a pilot who flew planes, and that’s actually one of the, that’s part of like, the family drama and history is that his brother was the older brother that was supposed to take over the family company, I think. But instead, he like, rebelled and went off and became a pilot so he could fly around the world. And therefore, Donald became his father’s favorite from that point forward or became kind of like, the heir. But then his brother struggled with those drinking issues that eventually really undermined his life so that he died very early and very prematurely or very young, I think in his 40s, and that also kind of shows up in Trump’s chart with that Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in the 3rd house.
LS: Right, with the Neptune like, stationary Neptune, being potentially at least part of the, you know, addiction showing up with the sibling. And then the ruler of the 3rd being in the 12th being like, a loss of a sibling, you know, as well as the other aspects you were talking about. But then the Jupiter stationary there as well being like, that this, you know, paradoxically played like, a positive role in telling him not, you know, his brother telling him not to go down the same road.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So I just thought that was so interesting, because it makes for a more interesting and complex character study than I think I’m sometimes used to thinking about with Trump in terms of some of the things in his background and how that like, may have influenced and shaped who he was. And there’s probably many other things that feed into some of those different things that are background things that we don’t know about, or that maybe somebody that knows his biography better could draw out further. But those are just some interesting things that I noticed lately.
LS: For sure.
CB: Yeah. All right. Moving on. Another one that’s actually very similar to that but that I just wanna share very briefly is the comedian Andy Kauffman. So Andy Kauffman also had Leo rising and Neptune in Libra in the 3rd house, and what brought this example on is I found this amazing quote from Roger Ebert, who was reviewing the movie that Jim Carrey made in the late ‘90s that was on Andy Kauffman where Jim Carrey played Andy Kauffman. And this was the review, and this is what he wrote. He said,
“What is most wonderful about the movie ‘Man on the Moon,’ a very good film, is that it remains true to Kaufman’s stubborn vision. Oh, it brightens things up a bit… But essentially it stays true to his persona: A guy who would test you, who would fool you, lie to you, deceive you and stage elaborate deceptions, put-ons and hoaxes.”
And what he’s talking about is that Andy Kauffman would do these comedy bits, but what he would do is he would set up these like, extreme situations that were fabricated but then he would play it totally straight so that the audience thought he was serious. So like, for example, one time he went on a talk show with like, David Letterman, and him and another wrestler were there. And on the show, he starts insulting the wrestler and saying negative things to him so that the wrestler, this like, huge lumbering guy, stands up and smacks Andy Kauffman and knocks him off of his feet onto the ground, and then Andy Kauffman like, yells obscenities to him and runs off saying that he’s gonna sue him. And it was like, this major event that like, shocked people in the audience and shocked people on TV. But then it turned out in retrospect that it was completely fabricated and they had both like, agreed on it and set it up ahead of time, and it was like, a funny joke on their part.
LS: Oh, okay.
CB: So Andy Kauffman’s like, entire career was doing stuff like that where he did stuff like that, but just like, played it totally straight. So it’s interesting, you know, that Ebert’s kind of picking up on that basically, and I think part of that is picking up on that Neptune placement in the 3rd house and him using, you know, deception in some form in his comedy. But he’s using it, you know, for comedic effect in his profession.
LS: Yeah. And that’s kind of like fiction writers who like, have similar placements who just make up an imaginative reality. But this would be like, making up an imaginative reality like, in person.
CB: Yeah, exactly. Like, George R.R. Martin has Mercury in the same sign as Neptune, and he’s written like, he didn’t just write a story, but he wrote this entire like, thousand year backstory for this entire fantasy world of like Game of Thrones where he went through and made like, genealogies of every family that’s ever existed in this entire fantasy world that doesn’t exist. And you can go out and buy like, entire books that tell the entire history and genealogy of this entire world. And now they’re making entire like, spinoff shows of different like, family lineages of this fantasy world, all because he like, came up with this elaborate, you know, world, and that’s really in the best case scenario sometimes like, the highest form of Neptune is creating these beautiful worlds that don’t exist that people can escape to and get lost in. And sometimes that can be really powerful and moving and amazing. But it really depends on what the person uses that gift for and how they use it in life.
LS: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Yeah. All right… Should I skip this example? Because I think that’s a good point.
LS: Yeah. Either or is good.
CB: All right. Well, the last example is just like, Harry Houdini. This time is a little iffy, because this is supposedly this time was given to Alan Leo, so I don’t know. That’s a pretty good source, but who knows if it’s fully correct, but it’s a four AM time, and if that’s true he had Aquarius rising, and he had the Sun and Venus and Neptune in the 3rd house of communication. And he was a famous illusionist, where he would use illusions as part of his performances basically – his performance art.
LS: Yeah. That’s good. That is similar but different.
CB: Yeah. So illusionist, escape artist, and stunt performer. Also aviator that was noted for his escape acts.
We are at the last planet.
LS: We are. We did not make any sections for Chiron or asteroids or anything. So this is the last —
CB: I mean, we could just keep going. If you want – if you’re not ready to turn it in, we could keep going all day, my friend. There’s a lot of asteroids out there.
LS: There are.
CB: The Lot of Eros. The Lot of Lentils in the 3rd house. That would be, that could be a whole episode.
LS: My favorite Lot.
CB: Yeah. All right, so I found this Pluto example in the 3rd house, but do you want to do this one?
LS: Yeah. I looked up more stuff about it.
CB: Right, you actually researched it beyond the initial thing I said, so this is —
LS: Yeah.
CB: Margaret Atwood’s chart.
LS: Yeah. It’s Margaret Atwood, who’s a Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic. She has Gemini rising, Pluto in Leo in the 3rd house fairly conjunct the IC – about fiveish, sixish degrees off. And she – and then the ruler of her 3rd is the Sun in Scorpio in the 6th house. And she’s the author of a bunch of stuff, but a couple of her more famous ones are The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake amongst others. And The Handmaid’s Tale in particular is a dystopian novel where the sole function of the heroine is to breed, and so that brings in the 6th house servitude aspect, which is the ruler of the 3rd.
And I was just looking up how does Pluto play out in her work beyond the obvious with The Handmaid’s Tale. So her work includes themes of authoritarianism, the dangers of unchecked power – which is very Plutonian, ecological disaster, the ways language can be used to manipulate or control as an instrument of oppression, and language also as a vital resource for empowering the individual. So there was a little bit of the positive; mostly, there was a lot of the, you know, sort of hard and dark Pluto things with the 3rd of, you know, even in Handmaid’s Tale it was like, obliterating even language, right? Like, the oppression was such that they couldn’t even use the language that they used to, and then part of their sort of personal attempts to fight back were like, storytelling. So you could see a couple different ways that the Pluto was playing out in the 3rd there.
CB: Yeah, totally. That’s really intense and powerful.
LS: Yeah. So it was just lots of like, Pluto stuff like devastation and you know, dystopian things of various sorts and like, a lot of it’s just like what happens when, you know, certain entities or people get too much power over others and kind of like, worst case scenarios around that.
CB: Yeah. Themes of power and control and manipulation and stuff are very Plutonian themes.
LS: Yes. Yeah. And that’s coming out in her writing, since it’s in the 3rd. Yeah. So the other interesting thing I found timing wise – Amazon apparently reported that The Handmaid’s Tale was their top selling fiction book sold in the US in 2017 in all but a few states, and this was both post the 2016 election as well as because of the first episodes of the TV series adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale airing that year. And I noticed that there were two eclipses in Leo in her 3rd house during the year 2017, so activating —
CB: Nice.
LS: — that placement.
CB: Yeah. That’s incredible.
LS: Yeah.
CB: I remember that —
LS: The eclipses —
CB: — Leo eclipse. Like, one of those was like, the Great American eclipse in the summer of 2017.
LS: Oh yeah. Right. Yeah. We watched that. Yeah. So those eclipses just keep like, activating placements.
CB: Right. Yeah. That is a throughline. I’m so glad I originally just got turned on to studying eclipses or started studying them a year ago, and it’s been really fruitful once I realized how powerful they were to track those as triggers for important things in a person’s life for major beginnings and major endings.
LS: Right. And you know, while it’s not the only thing timing wise certainly that one should watch, you really could just watch the eclipses in your chart and like, get a lot of like, what’s happening.
CB: Right. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, they’re very powerful.
all right, so next example – second to last example – this was sent in by Nick Dagan Best, and this is the birth chart of Thelonious Monk, who was an American jazz pianist and composer. And he had this really unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire. So he had Gemini rising with Jupiter in the first house in the rising sign, and he had a stellium of planets in Leo in the 3rd, including Neptune, Saturn, Mars, the Lot of Fortune, and the Moon all in the 3rd house, and with an opposition to Uranus at 19 degrees of Aquarius in the 9th house.
So the primary event for our purposes is Nick sent in this one incident that occurred where he was a few blocks from his own house – so just a few blocks from his home, and he was arrested while sitting in a car with friends. And what happened is that he was having a Pluto transit; it was transiting Sun and Pluto were conjoining his natal Moon in Leo in the 3rd house, so it was a Pluto transit to his Moon especially. And what happened is to protect his friend who was a fellow pianist who was once beaten on the head by Philadelphia police to protect Monk himself from a beating, in this incident, Monk claimed possession of drugs that were found that belonged to his friend even though they were not his. So he basically took the fall and got arrested on this drug charge to cover for his friend, and as a result of that, his New York City nightclub permit that allowed him to perform, you know, his music in nightclubs was revoked. And this resulted in him being unable to perform live in his own area and in his own city, and this impacted his income and career very negatively with really long standing consequences as a result of this Pluto transit that was hitting his Moon at the time. And his Moon, of course, as we can see in the chart is the ruler of the 2nd house of finances and income.
LS: That’s very good. I mean, not good, but you know, astrology good.
CB: Yeah. So and it’s like, in the 3rd house. They were in a car. They were in his neighborhood. He was covering for a close friend. And then it impacted his ability to perform in his local city.
LS: Yeah. That’s really incredible. And it’s a night chart and Mars is ruling the 11th house of friends and groups, conjunct Saturn —
CB: Right.
LS: — in the 3rd.
CB: Yeah. So that is a trickier Pluto transit and type of thing that can sometimes take place. All right. This brings us to our final example.
LS: Yes.
CB: So originally, we kind of like… The Thelonious Monk example was gonna be our last example; we didn’t have anything else. But last night, I was like, you know, that’s not – that’s kind of a downer example to end with, and it’s kind of hard to find a good, positive one, because we’re ending with Pluto.
LS: Right.
CB: And Pluto’s kind of a tough planet. But I was looking around at other people that have Pluto in the 3rd house, and I landed on this amazing example that made Leisa laugh immediately —
LS: Yes.
CB: — so that is why it’s our final example.
LS: Yes.
CB: All right, so this is the birth chart of the famous singer who is really one of the most famous singers, especially in the 1990s and early 2000s – this is the birth chart of Alanis Morissette. And Alanis Morissette was born with Leo rising and Pluto in Libra in the 3rd house, squaring pretty closely Mercury and Saturn, which are in early Cancer in the 12th house. And Saturn is actually the ruler of the 7th house of relationships. So it’s like, you get this interesting combination of like, Pluto in the 3rd house of communication, and it’s squaring the planet that rules relationships basically.
So I thought this was funny, because I immediately thought of her first really hit single that made her a global and international sensation was the first single that was released from her album in 1995 from Jagged Little Pill, which was titled “You Oughta Know.” And this was the lead single that they released when her album came out, and it helped to catapult her to international fame. But what’s funny about that song, and it’s actually kind of different compared to most of her entire like, catalog or discography, is that this song is like, this very powerful, cathartic kind of anthem that’s about a breakup. But it’s a very intense song that has very intense feelings of like, anger, betrayal, and heartbreak after a breakup with Alanis directly addressing her former lover, who’s like, run off with somebody else basically.
Does that, is that sort of start to convey —
LS: Yeah, it starts to. And part of the Pluto part is the – like, writing a song about betrayal, but also the bitingness. The biting tone. Because oftentimes with Pluto in the 3rd, especially if people don’t have a use for that, I guess, like, they can at least some of the time accidentally come off as more biting than they mean to, like, in casual conversation.
CB: Right.
LS: But this was like, purposeful.
CB: Yeah. So the lyrics are like, incredibly blunt and confessional. They’re filled with vivid imagery and explicit language. Just like, sort of like, painting this picture of like, a scorned woman seeking closure and expressing her lingering pain, which is like, a really good keyword for Pluto.
So she has written in like, interviews that she wrote it from a place of deep emotional turmoil and vulnerability following a breakup. And what’s funny is like, it was speculated for a long time about like, who is she writing this about? And one of the funniest things like, years later, is that it’s really widely believed that she wrote it about her relationship with the actor Dave Coulier, who later would become like, a famous actor on the TV show Full House, which was really funny because he was like, a very unassuming character on that television show that was a pretty clean television show. But like, ironically, there was this like, really intense song which became kind of one of the most notorious like, you know, “middle finger to your ex lover who cheated on you” song like, ever in the world, I think.
LS: Yeah, for sure. It’s very iconic.
CB: Yeah. And in terms of the timing, what’s amazing of course is that there were eclipses in Alanis Morissette’s 3rd house and 10th house in April right before the album came out in June. And then “You Oughta Know” was released as the first single in July.
LS: Nice.
CB: So she was actually having eclipses in her 3rd and 10th, and then, you know, she released that single and it became like, a smash hit. But then that was just like, the first of several singles from that album that just absolutely crushed it where that was one of the most famous and like, influential CDs of the 1990s. Like, if you remember anything about the mid- to late 1990s, like, Alanis Morissette was like, one of the top, top singers at the time. And that single, as well as a number of others, were everywhere. Although what’s funny is a lot of the other singles were much milder than this first one.
LS: Right. But this one was like, she became very known for.
CB: Yeah. Totally. So —
LS: And I have nominated – oh, go ahead.
CB: Right. Well, so we have the lyrics to the song to convey it, but I think everyone should just like, go and listen to the song now and look up the lyrics, because we can’t play it here otherwise this video will get taken down for copyright purposes. We could like, flip a coin to see like, which of us will read the lyrics, but I think you’re trying to nominate me.
LS: I was nominating you for having a more prominent Pluto between the two of us!
CB: Okay. I’m gonna – it’s like, Sung in a very passionate and like, interesting – and it’s also like, a catchy song, so I’m not gonna be able —
LS: Yeah.
CB: — to convey any of that. But I’m just gonna read it like, dryly. Because if you read the lyrics as it’s written on paper, it sounds even more biting than it actually does in the song in the actual the way she sings it.
LS: Well, that’s one of like, the reasons why it comes across as so very Plutonian. Because it’s almost like, someone like, is with a smile on their face, kind of like the way the song sounds is like someone with a smile on their face saying like, really like, Plutonian things.
CB: Right. Well, it’s kind of like, you know, Kendrick making this like, catchy song just demolishing Drake this summer and making it like, the song of the summer, if Drake was like, his former lover or something like that. That’s almost like the dynamic of this song.
LS: Right.
CB: All right. So she says, it’s like she’s written a letter to her ex lover, and she says,
“I want you to know that I’m happy for you. I wish nothing but the best for you both. An older version of me. Is she perverted like me? Would she go down on you in a theater? Does she speak eloquently? And would she have your baby? I’m sure she’d make a really excellent mother.”
Like, it’s just like, dripping with sarcasm, which is such a great Pluto thing.
LS: Yeah.
CB: She goes on, she says,
“Because the love that you gave, that we made, wasn’t able to make it enough for you to be open wide, no. And every time you speak her name, does she know how you told me you’d hold me until you died? ‘Til you die? But you’re still alive. And I’m here to remind you of the mess you left when you went away. It’s not fair to deny me of the cross I bear that you gave to me. You oughta know.
“You seem very well. Things look peaceful. I’m not quite as well; I thought you should know. Did you forget about me, Mr. Duplicity? I hate to bug you in the middle of dinner. It was a slap in the face how quickly I was replaced. Are you thinking of me when you fuck her? ‘Cause the love that you gave, that we made, wasn’t able to make it enough for you to be open wide, no. And every time you speak her name, does she know how you told me you’d hold me until you died? ‘Til you die? But you’re still alive.”
And then she gives the chorus again. And then she says,
“’Cause the joke that you laid in the bed that was me, and I’m not gonna fade as soon as you close your eyes (and you know it). And every time I scratch my nails down someone else’s back, I hope you feel it. Well, can you feel it?”
And then she goes on with the chorus, and then she repeats the chorus, and yeah. But it’s all like, set to this like, very catchy tune that’s like, a rock song. And it’s pretty amazing.
LS: Yeah, and it’s really that juxtaposition that really makes it, because then it’s like, even more biting somehow because you would expect those lyrics to go with a different tone. And so it’s like, even more sarcastic sounding.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. It’s incredible, and that is our number one, all-time like, Plutonian, you know, revenge song basically.
LS: Yes.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Right. So —
CB: So this is why you don’t piss off somebody with Pluto in the 3rd house, especially if it’s closely configured to Mercury, because they might write a song about you that becomes like, the most legendary song that immortalizes, you know, your breakup.
LS: Yeah. Can you imagine if you were that person?
CB: Yeah, that’s —
LS: And you just like, heard that song playing like, everywhere you go for like, a long time!
CB: Right! There’s like, little kids that are like, singing the song and like, dancing to it, and yeah. And then he’s been asked about it, because I think there’s interviews with him where he’s asked about it even like, years later. Like, was that you? Blah, blah blah. And I think he said in an interview once that I watched that they had talked and like, made up or something at one point and things are fine. So that’s actually the other thing that’s funny is even if the two of you at some point make up and like, everything’s okay interpersonally as much as it can be, the energy of that that was originally in the song from the initial breakup is still like, out there sort of permanently with its own life.
LS: Right. Totally.
CB: Yeah. So I don’t know if I can convey that, but people can go listen to the song and that’ll be a fitting like, outro song for the end of this episode.
LS: Yes. It’s too bad that we can’t actually make it the outro.
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. That is it for our extensive treatment of the 3rd house. If you’ve made it through to this point in the podcast episode, then you’re now a master of the 3rd house, and hopefully what you’ve learned at this point more than anything is not just the meaning of the 3rd house so that you’ve seen on a really tangible level what it signifies and what it means. But the other thing I really wanted to convey with this and that we wanted to convey is how to think and speak symbolically and archetypally, and how to combine the symbolism of different parts of the chart and to start to put things together to achieve chart synthesis. Because I think once you understand symbolism and you start putting it together, that’s when you can start really being able to delineate birth charts effectively, and to even make not just successful delineations but also successful predictions as well.
LS: And I think this also showed the value of, you know, doing deep chart research. Because sometimes even if you know the general meanings, even lots of topical meanings of like, a certain area of the chart – which certainly we started out with – there are still new facets or sort of like, things we weren’t absolutely sure about that then became more proven like, through looking at lots and lots of charts and seeing the different shades of like, how those played out.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I think this is very important and sometimes overlooked component of astrological research, which is not just like, looking to the symbolism and then trying to think about or sort of like, imagine what that should mean. But also sometimes like, doing extensive empirical research and historical research to look at the lives of actual people and see how those placements manifested. But sometimes in order to do that, you can’t just look at one chart; you have to look at multiple charts with the same placement. And it’s only then and when you start comparing people’s lives that you start to see the things that are similar that connect them due to the same placement. And then at that point, you start to truly understand what that placement means.
LS: Right. Like, for instance, in this particular episode, like, mobility just became really, really clear after a while, even though you could already say like, oh, cars go in the 3rd house or something. But just like, seeing all the different ways that mobility played out with 3rd house placements or rulerships was really striking, and then like, kind of provided new insights into like, yeah, this isn’t just transportation; it’s like, actual movement.
CB: Yeah, exactly. That like, accessing the broader, overarching archetype of like, what that is and what movement means and then how that can manifest in many different specific ways. But the closer you can get to the overarching archetype or like, the umbrella concept, the better you’ll be at actually understanding it and then being able to delineate the specifics. I think that’s really crucial.
LS: Right.
CB: So yeah. And that empirical tradition and seeing it across many different charts. You had said something else just now that jogged something in me, but I think I lost it.
LS: Just deep chart research?
CB: Deep chart research. Building up a database. Like, I think it’s really important for people to build up a database of charts so that you can do this type of research, especially timed charts. It also emphasizes as a 3rd house component the importance of the community efforts to collect accurate birth times and to store them on databases like AstroDataBank, but also even in smaller or personal databases like your own, you know, Solar Fire charts on your local machine where you can build up a database of private charts as well.
LS: For sure. Because that’s the only way you can do this kind of research, and yeah, that was like, something I was really thinking about in terms of like, what was available and what was not in terms of birth times as we did this.
CB: Yeah. For sure. And it’s like, what’s available to us and our generation is something that’s only become available in the past generation of astrologers, like the ability to build a database and then search through for certain placements within that database – that’s something we did with Solar Fire a lot that was super useful.
LS: Which is amazing just to have that ability to do, right?
CB: Yeah, it just didn’t exist like, literally for thousands of years prior to this time. You know, going back 3,000 years, 4,000 years at the start of our tradition, they were literally like, noticing an eclipse and then noticed that like, the king died, and then they would write that down and like, pass it along on little clay cuneiform tablets. And they built up large libraries of those, but you know, that’s one thing compared to what we’re able to do today. So I think an important thing of what we’re doing here is we’re showing how to leverage technology in order to advance our understanding of astrology. And that’s one of the things that’s exciting a little bit to me with the emergence of artificial intelligence and other technologies is that I’m sure there’s gonna be new innovations in the future that can help to push the boundaries of astrological research even further.
LS: Yeah. That very well could be.
CB: Yeah. So all right. Other things… If people find other compelling examples of 3rd house placements, then please let us know by posting a comment especially below this video on YouTube. If you found an interesting example of a 3rd house placement or a 3rd house transit, we’d love to hear from you, just because – but please post it in the YouTube comments; don’t email us, because we get too many emails when we’re, you know, not soliciting ones. But by posting comments, then it becomes, you know, something that’s helpful that other people can refer to in the comments below this video, and then it becomes part of the community effort to keep researching and seeing different ways that these planets can manifest so that we can understand the full spectrum of different positive and negative placements.
LS: Right.
CB: That was it, actually. That was what I was gonna mention is the concept of movement is one of the things that emerged, but what we saw is that it’s both movement as well as sometimes like, the absence of movement, and being able to identify that that’s kind of like, a spectrum that exists even in and of itself is something you may not initially think about if you just read like, the 3rd house signifies cars. And you realize that in terms of the lived human experience, what the 3rd house can actually be about and the concept of movement can be much deeper and more profound and more, you know, moving or impactful than it might seem at first.
LS: Yeah. And even like, the bodily movement. Like, I wouldn’t have thought about that before doing this.
CB: Right. Yeah. That really starts to get into some of the subtleties and nuances with astrology that you don’t realize until you start really looking into people’s lives as well that sometimes those subtleties and nuances are easy to overlook but they can be really important.
LS: And sometimes it takes looking at like, a lot of charts to like, come to those realizations.
CB: Yeah, exactly – to start seeing the parallels. Because it’s only after you’ve seen it like, a few different times that you catch on and realize that you’re seeing something that’s not an isolated incident, but it’s part of something that’s manifesting as a result of the archetype that’s behind the scenes.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah. All right. So I wanted to say thanks again to all the people that helped us with our research, especially all the patrons and the different people that sent in charts on social media when I was soliciting chart examples. But especially thanks to the people that helped out with chart research, including Nick Dagan Best, Orla on Twitter at OCAstrology, Melissa Marklin, and Lindsey Turner all contributed specific chart examples that we actually used in this episode, and that was super helpful.
LS: Yes. Thank you to all of you.
CB: Yeah. Other things… I’m gonna release the written notes from our document, which is like, we have at least 80 pages of notes that we wrote up for the outline, and I always release that as a bonus to patrons of The Astrology Podcast who sign up through my page on Patreon at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast. So that’s gonna contain a lot of additional info and even some examples that didn’t make it into this episode, or some details that we didn’t get into in individual ones for the sake of like, time restraints. So I may sell a PDF of the show notes, so we’ll have to see how that goes. But whatever I end up doing, I’ll put a link to it, whatever’s available, whether it’s something you can access through Patreon or whether it’s something you can actually buy as a separate PDF. I’ll put a link to it in the description below this video on YouTube or as a link on the podcast website for the entry for this episode.
LS: Sounds good.
CB: I’m also thinking about releasing a file that contains the chart data of all the charts in Solar Fire. So if I do that, that’ll be attached to the same PDF report essentially.
All right. Special thanks and shout out to all the patrons who supported this work, because this is pretty much what made it possible to take all this time to do the research that was necessary is we have an awesome group of fans of the show who sign up to donate money each month to support our work and our research and our efforts, which allows us to do episodes like this one where we just put this content out into the world for free. So patrons get early access to new episodes; they also get access to the show notes and other behind-the-scenes content. So if you’d like to both support this research as well as get early access to new episodes as well as bonus content in this series, then you can sign up to become a patron through our page on Patreon.com.
One of the things that I’m doing is to complement some of these episodes is live chart readings with patrons where we sit down and I read some patrons’ charts and they share stories of their placements. So the one that we did recently was a live chart reading session with patrons about their 2nd house and 3rd house placements, and it was actually a really deep and profound and moving chart reading session where we got to some really interesting stuff using the charts of like, normal people who are not celebrities, which allows us to access another layer of things that’s even deeper than what we were able to get to here in this episode where we focused on celebrity charts. So people can check those episodes out, and I’ll be doing more of those on other houses as I progress through this series. But it’s something that only patrons will get access to in terms of being able to actually attend those and share their charts live with me.
All right. Other than that, there’s a bunch of chart examples that we cut from this episode; I may do a followup episode for The Secret Astrology podcast, which is a podcast series that’s only available to patrons. So if you’d like to get access to that, you can sign up there and I’ll probably release that at some point before too long once I’ve taken a little bit of a nap, little bit of a break before recording another little recording on the 3rd house.
LS: You would not think that we had cut charts from this, but we did.
CB: You would not think that. But there were a lot of charts that were left on the editing, the cutting room floor so to speak, so we’ll have to see what I end up repurposing those for in another recording.
All right. Last things – you know, if you wanna learn more about all of this, I have lectures in my course on Hellenistic astrology where I go into the houses, the rulers of the houses, the ruler of the Ascendant, the ways of determining planetary condition and determining if a planet’s well-placed or poorly placed in a chart, which is very crucial for this work, as well as timing techniques in order to know not just what a chart indicates with certain placements but when that will be activated is something I go into a lot in the Hellenistic astrology course. So you can find out more information about that at TheAstrologySchool.com.
And also again shout out to Demetra’s book as a great research for learning about the significations of the houses and comparing them not just in the ancient tradition, but also in the medieval and modern ones. So the title of that book is Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice: Volume II, and I would definitely recommend checking it out.
All right. What about you? What do you have going on? What do you have coming up? Where can people find out more information about your work?
LS: Well, one of the ways you can find me is through the electional astrology podcast, which we both do together every month for patrons, yeah, at – I don’t know how you say it now that it’s like, a monthly thing, but at one of the tiers and above. So we go through all of the best elections of the month, the best dates and times to start new ventures or take important actions for, you know, boosting the odds of successful outcomes. So that’s one of the ways you can find me.
My website is – part of my website at least is back up, hallelujah. It’s been down for a while, and you can find me at LeisaSchaim.com – shout out to Melissa Marklin who is working on my website. I am sincerely grateful; she’s been doing some great work on that. There should be some more pages coming up as well if you look at it now, so check back later.
CB: Yeah, and pretty soon you’ll have some of your lectures for sale where you go through and teach different timing techniques and other things like that and show different example charts.
LS: Yes. If you look right now, it’s not quite back up; that’ll be the last thing that we rebuild. But I will have a store of like, lots of past lectures and workshops that I’ve done.
CB: Yeah. I’m just thinking of somebody listening to this lecture like, a year from now.
LS: Yeah. That’s why I’m trying to distinguish right this very moment if you look, it’s not back up, but in the future it will be. So I have lectures on timing techniques, lectures on relationship timing – lots of timing things, really. Yeah.
CB: Nice. All right. So people should check out your website – LeisaSchaimAstrologer.com. I’ll put a link to it —
LS: LeisaSchaim.com.
CB: Oh, just Schaim – no astrologer.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Because it’s Patrick —
LS: No, just me!
CB: — who lost his main domain and has to put “astrologer” on it.
LS: Oh, yeah.
CB: Yeah. That’s bad times. All right. Well, I’ll put a link to your website in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website in the entry for this episode.
Thank you so much for doing this with me, especially the research portion of this, which even though this was the theoretically like, toughest part, just like, doing the recording over the course of today now that we’re wrapping it up in like, the middle of the night. But doing the research part of this with you was incredibly fun and enlivening and enriching and just like, interesting over the past few weeks, and I’m so glad that we got to do it together. So thanks for taking so much time to collaborate with me to create and to bring this work to completion like this; I really appreciate it, and it’s been, yeah, an honor to do this with you.
LS: You’re quite welcome, thank you. You too. Yeah, it was really fun and you kind of don’t see a lot of the behind-the-scenes of what leads up to this if you’re just listening to the episode, but – right, not at all! But yeah, it was a lot of research process and a lot of talking through like, what do you think of this example and how this is playing out and where should we put it and what section does it go best in? All of these things.
CB: And a lot of like, excitedly calling each other at like, midnight to excitedly talk about a new example that we found and how amazing —
LS: Right.
CB: — it is and how an eclipse like, falls in the 3rd house and isn’t that incredible as an astrologer.
LS: Right.
CB: As well as a lot of like, intense discussions about trying to take out stuff and trying to like, remove some examples and winnow it down until we got to the final form that we ended up recording today.
LS: Yes. Some intense discussions of editing.
CB: Yeah. It was a process. There were some victories and some not-victories in terms of the editorial process, but it’s an ongoing thing. We’ll keep working on it. But this was fun. So thanks a lot for doing this with me.
Thanks to everyone for listening who made it through to the end of this lecture. We appreciate you. We hope you learned something. Thanks for your support, and I think that’s it, yeah?
LS: Yeah, I think so! I think we made it to the end.
CB: All right. Cool! Well, have a good night. Thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
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.
Special thanks to patrons on our Producers tier, including Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jeanne Marie Kaplan, Melissa DeLano, Sonny Bazbaz, Kwatsi Alibaruho, and Annie Newman.
If you’re looking for an astrological consultation, then we have a new list of recommended astrologers on the podcast website. These astrologers offer birth chart readings, synastry, rectification, electional astrology, horary questions, and more. Go to TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations.
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.
If you’d like to learn more about my approach to astrology, then you should get a copy of my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, which is available in both print and now ebook forms where I’ve started selling a PDF copy of the book through my website at HellenisticAstrology.com/Book.
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.