Ep. 442 Transcript: The Rulers of the Houses in Astrology

The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 442, titled:

The Rulers of the Houses in Astrology

With Chris Brennan and Sam Ogden

Episode originally released on April 9, 2024

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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com

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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo

Transcription released April 23, 2024

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Sam Ogden, and we’re gonna be talking about the rulers of the houses in astrology. Hey Sam – welcome back!

SAM OGDEN: Hey! Thanks so much for having me back.

CB: Yes, we’re doing a second episode already this month after just doing the antikythera mechanism episode, which was a little bit more historical. And I thought it would be good to put a more practical episode here at this point in the series on a episode I’ve been meaning to do for quite a long time now, which is a very important sort of intermediate astrological technique in looking at the rulers of the houses and where they’re located in different parts of the chart. So this is a pretty important concept, I think, for natal interpretation, right?

SO: Oh, I completely agree. I think it’s one of the most fundamental pieces of the astrological science, so I think it’s really not to be underestimated, a really powerful technique.

CB: For sure. So this is an important but it’s an often overlooked element of chart delineation. At least, when I was learning modern astrology something like, what? Around 1999, 2000. You know, usually you learn planets, signs, houses, aspects. The next step after that, though, once you get to the intermediate stage, is to learn about the rulers of the houses, because this is where you start learning chart synthesis and how to put the different pieces of the chart together and seeing how it all works together to create a sort of consistent whole, and this is basically the first step towards chart synthesis.

SO: Yeah.

CB: Yeah. So synthesizing the chart and – that’s something probably, I think, new learners of astrology struggle with a little bit the most, right? Is learning how to synthesize things?

SO: Yeah. You know, I’ve found that, because I also teach astrology a little bit, that – or, you know, just little workshops here and there – I’ve found that the planets, the signs, and the aspects sometimes are the easier things to understand, and the houses for some reason people seem to really struggle with. But they’re, you know, they’re not too difficult to understand; they’re pretty straightforward. You know, they’re areas of life, essentially, so.

CB: Right.

SO: Yeah.

CB: Yeah. So in terms of the origins of this technique, in 2009, the astrologer and historian James Holden translated an ancient text from Rhetorius of Egypt from about the 6th or 7th century in Greek, and Rhetorius has a very long chapter where he gives delineations or interpretations of what it means when the ruler of one house is in another house in the chart. And this is really important in terms of giving us some of the earliest perspective on this technique which then became a very major technique over the course of the rest of the astrological tradition. So recently, Levente László has been retranslating this passage, this chapter, from Rhetorius through his translation project, which is the HOROIProject.com, which is like a sort of – he’s crowdfunding, basically, the translation of a bunch of ancient Greek astrological texts. So he just did Rhetorius’s treatment of the 12th house and he’s gonna go through each of the next houses over the course of the next month or two, so that’s a really exciting one if you wanna see some of the ancient delineations for the rulers of the houses.

SO: Nice.

CB: Yeah, that material’s kind of exciting, and you’re also —

SO: Yeah.

CB: — pretty into a lot of the revival of Hellenistic astrology and some of these ancient techniques, right?

SO: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, first of all, I love what Levente László’s doing, and his project is absolutely worth supporting, and people should definitely go out there and support that. Yeah, for me, I’m you know, kind of working toward a little bit where Levente László is now, and I’m working on a degree in classical studies; I’ve been studying Latin and Greek for a few years, and you know, I’d love to be able to spread that to the astrological community in whatever way I can. So you know, I think more of us are hopefully moving a little bit in that direction, too.

CB: Yeah. That’s exciting. There’s more people that are learning these language skills and are able, then, to take part in part of the translation movement to recover a lot of these ancient doctrines.

SO: Yeah.

CB: Yeah.

SO: Yeah, I was just gonna say, too, that studying classics is – while initially it may not, for some people, it may not sound very appetizing, it actually really deepens your understanding of the ancient world in a way that just helps to round out your astrological understanding. And it’s been incredibly useful, so yeah.

CB: Yeah. For sure. So this technique is one of the techniques, then, that’s been recovered from ancient astrology, and this talk – we’re gonna present it in two parts, basically. In the first half of this, we’re gonna focus on learning how to interpret what it means when the ruler of one house in a chart is located in another house. Like, for example, when the ruler of the 10th house of career is in the 4th house of the home and living situation, or when the ruler of the 7th house of relationships is in the 10th house of career, what does that mean and how does it tie together different parts of the chart? So that’s gonna be the first part of this discussion is just learning how to interpret the rulers of the houses. Then in the second part of this, we’re gonna get a little bit more advanced and we’re gonna talk about how to determine and how to time the activation of the rulers of the houses using an ancient timing technique known as annual profections.

So I have a more extensive version of this lecture in my Hellenistic course where I go through each of the houses much more systematically and give a lot more example charts, but I’ve been meaning to do a smaller version of that here on the podcast because I’m trying to set things up for a new series where I go through each of the 12 houses and do like, one full episode on the first house, one full episode on the second house and so on and so forth just like I did for the signs last year. But in order to do that, one precursor I needed is I need to introduce the concept of the rulers of the houses, so that’s what we’re doing here today.

SO: Nice. That’s awesome.

CB: Yeah. All right. So let’s introduce some basic concepts. So basic concept number one is we’re gonna be using the traditional rulership scheme. So this is a system for assigning each of the seven traditional “planets” to one or two of the signs of the zodiac. So this is a symmetrical system where you basically assign the two luminaries, the two celestial bodies that give light, to the two signs of the zodiac that follow the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere, which is during the hottest and brightest part of the year. So the Moon is assigned to Cancer, and the Sun is assigned to Leo. After that, you then assign each of the visible planets based on their relative speed and distance from the Sun. So Mercury, which never gets more than one sign away from the Sun, is assigned to Virgo and Gemini, the two signs adjacent to the luminaries. Then Venus, which never gets more than two signs away from the Sun before turning retrograde, is assigned to Taurus and Libra. Then Mars, which is the next furthest and slowest visible planet, is assigned to Scorpio and Aries. Then Jupiter is the next planet out, and it’s assigned to Sagittarius and Pisces. And then finally, Saturn is the furthest and slowest of the visible planets, and it’s assigned to the two signs opposite the two luminaries, which is Capricorn and Aquarius. So it creates this nice little symmetrical system which is the basis of all ancient rulership schemes, and this is known as the domiciles of the planets because these signs were said to be where each of the planets has their home or their dwelling place.

SO: Nice. I think this’ll be my next tattoo.

CB: Yeah, that would be a pretty rad tattoo, actually.

SO: Yeah.

CB: If anybody already has a tattoo of that, like, send it in because I’d like to see different designs.

All right. So that’s concept number one. Other concept number two that we need to use as a precursor is for the purpose of this talk, we’re gonna be using whole sign houses, which is the earliest and probably the most prevalent form of house division in Hellenistic astrology and in ancient Greek astrology, where all you have to do is determine what sign the Ascendant is located in, and whatever sign that is, the entirety of that sign becomes the first house. And then the entirety of the next sign becomes the second house; the entirety of the sign after that becomes the third house, and so on and so forth. So there end up being 12 signs and 12 houses, and this is probably the reason that we have 12 houses in the first place because they were originally meant to coincide with the signs. It doesn’t matter how early or late the Ascendant is located in your rising sign, but whatever sign it’s located in, the entirety of that sign becomes the first house. So pretty simple and straightforward. I used to have to like, explain this point or like, belabor it, because it was like a foreign concept to people that I’m realizing that probably doesn’t require as much belaboring at this point in like, 2024, right?

SO: Well, you know, you would think so, and I think maybe our bias is that we talk to astrologers a lot who, you know, there’s actually a professor at my school who’s very interested in the history of science, and he loves astrology. He doesn’t really give any weight to it, but we talk about it a lot, and he – I actually wrote a whole paper for him, pretty much for him, just about house divisions and how all of that works because he had the hardest time trying to figure out, you know, how the whole sign house system actually works. And so, I don’t know, for some people I guess it’s a concept to understand once you’ve been maybe used to other kinds of house systems.

CB: Sure. Yeah. Well, I think for the purpose of this, you know, we’re gonna be using that system. It’s a simple system, but many of the principles can be applied to whatever system of house division a person uses or prefers to use.

All right. So here is the basic concept that we need to introduce first off – and I’m gonna show some bullet points here for those watching the video version. This is gonna be kind of a visual episode for the most part, although you may be able to listen to just the audio version, but yeah.

So point number one – here’s the first basic principle of this concept, which is that each planet is said to rule, or to be in charge of, the house that coincides with the zodiac sign that is its domicile. So I kept writing and like, rewriting that this morning to try to distill that principle, but what I mean by that and how that works in practice is that, for example, if the zodiac sign Gemini is on the cusp or the beginning of the 5th house in a chart, then it means that Mercury – the ruler of that sign – becomes also the ruler of the 5th house in that particular chart. So whatever sign of the zodiac coincides with a house, the planet that rules that sign then becomes the representative for that house in the birth chart.

So to give a couple of examples, for example, if the Ascendant is in Leo, if Leo’s rising and therefore Aquarius is on the 7th house or the cusp or beginning of the 7th house, then that means the traditional ruler of that sign, which is Saturn, becomes the ruler of the 7th house of relationships. Or to give another example, if Taurus is rising, then Gemini will coincide with the second whole sign house since it’s the second sign from the rising sign, and therefore the ruler or the domicile lord of that sign, which is Mercury, of Gemini, becomes the ruler of the second house of finances.

So that’s the initial technical concept, but what goes along with that as a corollary rule or secondary rule is then that the ruler of a house becomes the primary representative for the significations associated with that house in a birth chart. And this sets it up so that sometimes it can give planets additional significations in a particular chart that they would not otherwise have generally. So for example, if Aquarius is on the cusp of the 7th house, then that means Saturn will take on the role of representing marriage and relationships, which are 7th house topics, in this particular person’s birth chart even though Saturn is not naturally, in terms of its general significations, a planet that’s associated with the topic of marriage. Does that make sense?

SO: Yeah, definitely. So it’s like, they’re representing, they’re like, the indicator of that house, like indicating what that house, you know, is somewhere else in the chart. So you have to find that sign, whatever sign, you can look at any sign in the chart and say, “Okay, what’s the planet that rules that, and then where is that planet?” And that planet will like, be responsible, I guess is what you’re saying, for that area that it’s coming from, that it rules?

CB: Yeah, it’s gonna be responsible for the topics of the house that it’s in charge of. So if a planet rules a house, then it becomes the primary planet and representative of that house in a specific birth chart.

SO: Yeah, that makes sense.

CB: All right. So this brings up a number of other points when you’re looking at the rulers of the different houses in a birth chart. So when you wanna study a specific house topic, and by that I mean, like, let’s say you wanna study relationships, so you would look to the 7th house. One of the things that you should do as part of that process is you should look to see where the ruler of that house is placed in the chart, because when a planet is placed in a house other than the one that it owns, it imports the topics of that house – the house that it rules – into the house that it is actually located in in a chart. So what I mean by that is, going back to our examples with for example a chart with Leo rising, Aquarius is on the cusp of the 7th house of relationships, so the ruler of that house, if you wanted to study relationships, you would look and see that because Aquarius is on the cusp of the 7th house, that that means Saturn is the ruler of the 7th house of relationships, therefore it’s not just in charge of the topic of relationships in the birth chart but also you wanna see what house Saturn then is located in. In this instance, Saturn is in Taurus, so it’s in the 10th whole sign house, which is the place that has to do with career, and what that means then is it’s going to import significations from the 7th house, which Saturn rules, into the 10th house, which Saturn is actually located in. And it’s gonna create a linkage, then, between what each of those houses or sectors of the chart mean. In this instance, it’s gonna create a link between relationships, which is the 7th house, and career, which is the 10th house.

SO: Yeah. And – go ahead.

CB: Does that make sense?

SO: Yeah, and I was just gonna say one thing that I remember hearing one time, and it makes perfect sense, is that like, anyone who has Leo rising will have Aquarius at their 7th house, so anyone who has Leo rising, Saturn [is] their indicator for marriage, for relationships. But where that is in the chart, you know, may be different [depending on when] you’re born.

CB: Yeah, for sure, where it’s located as well as what the condition of that planet is. Like, what the condition of Saturn is. So to give another example, if Taurus is rising, and we wanna study the person’s finances, we would look to their second house of money and possessions. We find the sign Gemini in this instance, which is ruled by Mercury, and in this chart, let’s say Mercury is in the 8th house of inheritance. So that means that there’s a connection, then, between the native’s personal finances and the topic of inheritance in this person’s life. And I think we’ll see some examples of that later on.

So that’s the basic premise, that it creates a linkage between two houses in a chart when the ruler of one house is in another house. And one of the things that you need to do, then, is you have to synthesize the meanings of the house that the planet rules and the house that the planet it located in, like we were just doing in those two instances where, for example, having the ruler of the second house of finances in the 8th house of inheritance may mean that at some point, the native’s finances will be significantly affected by having a large inheritance, especially if the planet is like, well-placed in the birth chart. Or in the previous example, with like, the ruler of the 7th house of relationships in the 10th house of career, it may imply that there’s something about the native’s relationships and how they’re tied in with the native’s career. So perhaps they meet their future partner at like, a work function or something like that or through their work.

SO: Yeah. Or maybe their boss is their partner or something like that.

CB: Yeah. So there’s a lot of different potential scenarios for that, and it sets up what I call like, archetypal scenarios, where you have to figure out the core archetype of, for example, what we just said – like, you know, ruler of 7th house of relationships in the 10th house of career, and that can mean something very broadly that there’s a connection, most broadly, between relationships and career. But then there’s many different ways that that can work out in terms of specifics or particulars in an individual person’s life. So, I mean, let’s mention just a few of those real quick; let’s like, spitball some scenarios. So you mentioned one that’s like, you know, somebody that has a relationship with a boss or with a superior. Another one could be that we have a native where the two people work together – so a native who works with their partner where they start a business together or something like that.

SO: Yeah, that could be, too, like a 6th-7th house relationship too – like, maybe the ruler of the 6th is in the 7th, or the ruler of the 7th is in the 6th; there might be like, a work relationship with the partner in that sense. One that I was just thinking of was the 10th and 4th house axis. There’s often, like, connections between home and career with 10th-4th house axis, so like, the ruler of the 4th in the 10th, maybe your home is where you do your world, or if your 10th is in the 4th, it may have to do with, you know, real estate, or you work at home, where you live is where you do your work. So some really – yeah, that’s one example.

CB: Yeah, for sure. So here’s some examples that Rhetorius gives all the way back in the 6th or 7th century, and he’s drawing on and compiling delineations from much earlier in the tradition because this technique actually goes back at least to the second or first century BCE. But Rhetorius was just one of the ones who really compiled it in a large fashion or in a semi-systematic fashion, and that’s one of the reasons I like to mention him.

So he has a section where he’s talking about the 9th house, which he calls “the place of foreign travel,” and he associates the 9th house with foreign countries, with people that are from a foreign country than where the native was born, like, relative to the native’s birth and things like that. And then he goes through and he talks about some different meanings of when the rulers of the houses are connected with the 9th house. So for example, he says, “When the ruler of the 4th house of the home and living situation is located in the 9th house of foreign travel, it means that the native will come to live in a foreign country,” or at least that’s one of the basic delineations that he gives as a possibility for that placement. So that’s pretty, you know, straightforward, right? Like, you can see the logic of it, that it’s like, the native will come to live – 4th house – in a foreign country – 9th house.

SO: Yeah. And you see how, like, the direction that it’s going. So we’re going from the 4th house, which is where the ruler rules, and it’s going to, you know, another place in the chart – it’s going to the place of foreign places, basically.

CB: Right. So it’s like, one way that can be conceptualized is that the house itself and the ruler of the house indicates the context. So in this context, when you’re looking at the 4th house, the question is, “Where will the native live?” Since the 4th house has to do with the home and living situation in a person’s birth chart. And then the location of the ruler of the 4th house indicates the outcome, or it indicates the area where the context will be directed towards or where the native will gravitate towards in terms of the context of that house where, in this instance, we’re talking about the ruler of the 4th house of the home being in the 9th house of foreign places and therefore a propensity for the native, perhaps, to gravitate towards that which is foreign when it comes to their home and living situation.

SO: Yeah, definitely. That that would be a pretty – you know, oftentimes, you’ll see, or at least I’ve seen in charts from clients that there’s a way in which like, there are all these ways that we can modify planets, right? Like, planetary condition and things like that. But before all of that, there’s this like, fundamental, like, establishing of the houses through the planets and that you’ll see in a person’s life these things are really fundamentally like, intertwined, yeah, at a really baseline level.

CB: Yeah. For sure. So two of the other delineations that Rhetorius gives – he says, “When the ruler of the 7th house of relationships is in the 9th house of foreign travel, the native will be married to a person from a foreign country.” So that’s pretty, again, straightforward. And then elsewhere, he says that when the ruler of the 8th house of death and mortality is located in the 9th house of foreign places, that the native themself may die in a foreign country or that the end of their life may come about when the native is traveling abroad, which again, is pretty straightforward and pretty literal. And one of the things that’s really interesting about the rulers of the houses is sometimes, like, the ancient texts tend to put them very literally, and sometimes the manifestation can be very literal in terms of specific scenarios that are gonna be unique or particular to the native’s life. You know, like, not everybody gets married to somebody that’s from a foreign country or not everybody ends up living abroad or not everybody ends up, for example, having the end of their life come about in a foreign country. So there’s this idea of chance or fortune or fortune-like circumstances surrounding the native’s life and things that are unique to them that are being described by the houses and being described especially by the rulers of the houses. And sometimes that can manifest in very literal ways as very concrete, specific scenarios in a person’s life. But other times, of course, we can have just like with all things in astrology, we can have more sort of like, metaphorical manifestations as well that are not precisely as literal but sometimes can manifest as like, psychological dynamics. They can manifest as different types of dynamics or actions that the person does or that the person tends to repeat at different points or different like, circumstances that the native tends to find themself in at different points. So there’s kind of a range of different manifestations here. And while we’re gonna focus primarily on very literal, concrete manifestations for the purpose of this talk in order to sort of convey the point through chart examples, I just wanted to mention that, that there’s like a range of ways that these things can work out.

SO: Yeah. That’s a really good point. And another thing, too, is that sometimes – like, for example, so we have planets that have multiple houses, right? Mars has two signs that it rules; Mercury has two signs; Venus has two signs that it rules; Jupiter, and Saturn. And so like, for example, for the 9th house, you know, I have a 9th house sign that is ruled by a planet that rules another house in my chart. And I might be thinking of living in a different place, a foreign place, like it could be something that I could see myself doing, and it’s something that I have done. But you know, if it doesn’t manifest concretely, it may be something that the person is like, thinking about or something that they wish they could or daydream about.

CB: Yeah. Well, I mean, I’ve seen as a consulting astrologer, it’s like, you see all sorts of different possible ways that something works out. Another way that that can work out, especially if for example, let’s say the ruler of the 9th house of foreign things is in the 4th, is that the native could have design inspirations in terms of how they design their home and living situation that are inspired by, like, foreign cultures or foreign countries. Or the 9th house is also the place of religion and spirituality and philosophy, and so the native could have a real focus in terms of their home and living situation in terms of having it be a place that’s very focused on their personal spirituality or personal religious views in some way. Or, you know, which then is more metaphorical, but then sometimes that can again be very literal as well. You could have somebody, for example, I had somebody who was like, a priest once. So they literally, like, lived at a church, and that was —

SO: Wow.

CB: — how the like, 9th house and 4th house were tied together in terms of their particular life. So there’s all sorts of ranges of literal versus more metaphorical manifestations, and oftentimes, actually, what happens is it’s not always just like, one thing or one particular manifestation of a placement – sometimes it is, sometimes it can be a singular event in a person’s life at some point that becomes a defining event in the person’s life – but other times, you can see different manifestations of that happening at different points in a person’s life. So that you may see like, two or three different ways that that works out over the course of the person’s life that are distinct in terms of the particulars, but archetypally are still obviously very similar and tied into the same theme.

SO: Nice.

CB: Yeah. All right. And we’ll see some of that in the example charts that are coming up. So some of the considerations for studying the rulers of the houses and what it means when you’re looking at the ruler of the house is one, you need to look at and consider the symbolic meaning of what it means for the ruler of one house to be in another by essentially combining the significations of those two houses, which is what we’ve just been talking about. Like, combining the 7th house of relationships with the 10th house of career and seeing some of the ways that that could manifest. So that’s basically step one.

Step two is – especially in the ancient texts, there’s a tendency to focus on determining fortunate or unfortunate circumstances that are being dictated by whether the ruler of one house is in a more positive house or in a more challenging house in a person’s birth chart. And what I mean by that is in ancient astrology, the first house or the rising sign was said to be the house that was most closely connected with the native and their both physical as well as mental and spiritual vitality in the birth chart. So the first house is like, the most important house for the native because that’s the sign of the zodiac that was rising over the eastern horizon where the Sun and the other stars emerge each day at some point during the day or the Sun emerges from the earth each day at the rising sign in the morning, and it sort of like, metaphorically reborn each day, and in a same way, you – the native – was born on a specific day at a specific time when you emerged into the world symbolically at that time. So that’s why the rising sign is so important and so personally relevant to you. And then any house that is configured by a major aspect to the rising sign was said to be a good house that is supportive of the native’s life and vitality, and that is like, the 3rd house, the 4th, 5th, 7th, 9th, 10th, and 11th, whereas any house that doesn’t make a major aspect – which is a conjunction, sextile, square, trine, or opposition – with the first house is said to be a bad house or is said to be a house where there’s more challenging significations. So like, the 6th house, for example, is associated with illness sometimes. The 8th house can be associated with death and mortality. And the 12th house can be associated with loss or isolation. So having the ruler of a house located in a good house is going to, just generally speaking, tend to indicate more fortunate outcomes for the significations of that house, whereas sometimes having the ruler of a house in one of the bad houses can indicate more challenging outcomes when it comes to that house, generally speaking, although that can be modified based on different mitigating conditions as well as just the condition of the planet in that house.

SO: Yeah, I think the last part you just said is really good for anyone who’s sort of new to this concept is that if you’re new to this and you see that you have a planet in a “bad” house, you know, a challenging house, don’t totally freak out, you know? It may indicate some challenges, but there also may be some other things going on that are helping that planet.

CB: Yeah, for sure. And one of the ones I’ll mention just really briefly that I mention frequently on the podcast is just if a planet’s located in a bad house, if it’s configured to the degree of the Midheaven within three degrees or if it’s configured to a planet in the 10th whole sign house within three degrees, then it will actually mitigate the condition of the planet in the bad house, and it’ll tend to indicate that that planet will manifest some of the more positive indications of that house rather than the more negative ones. So we don’t have to get into that, but I just wanted to mention that briefly as one potential mitigating condition that I’ve talked about elsewhere.

And that actually brings us to the third point, actually, which is the third thing you need to do when you’re studying the rulers of houses is really consider the condition of the ruler of the house as indicating the quality of the outcome. So this gets into all sorts of things surrounding planetary condition that we can’t go into too extensively here, but there’s different ways to determine if a planet is in a good condition in a birth chart or if a planet is in a more challenging condition in a birth chart, and that can really change the outcome in terms of how those house topics are experienced. So let’s say, for example, that… You know, let’s go back to one of our examples. I’m trying to think of like, a non-problematic one, because I keep going back to the ruler of the 7th house in the 10th house. So let’s say that the condition of the planet is good, and maybe the person just like, meets their spouse because they’re both in the same field and they end of like, working together and writing books together or doing, you know, some of their most famous things together as a couple publicly, if the ruler of the 7th house is in the 10th house, and it’s well-placed in a positive way – let’s say, configured to benefics. That’s a positive outcome. Versus, let’s say, there’s a scenario where the ruler of the 7th house is in the 10th house, but it’s poorly placed, and let’s say then there’s a connection between the native having relationships with like, a superior, but then it goes bad or there’s some negative thing that happens that’s subjectively not experienced well on the part of the native. That would be, like, the difference between two scenarios and why it’s important, then, to consider what the condition of the ruler of the house is.

SO: Yeah. That’s very important. The ruler of house condition is really key.

CB: For sure. All right. So here’s a diagram – this is my classic diagram that gives the significations of the houses. We’re not gonna run through and like, give all these again today, because I’ve done full episodes in the past going through the significations of the houses. But you can refer to – you can like, pause the video and look at this to look up some significations or you can go and watch, search for my videos in my YouTube channel titled “The Significations of the Houses” and you’ll find very extensive treatments where I’ve done full episodes on that. I did want to mention… Were you able to see that diagram just now?

SO: This one, with all the houses, their names and significations?

CB: Yeah.

SO: Yep.

CB: Sorry, it was just cutting out for a minute, so I wasn’t sure. All right. So I —

SO: Okay.

CB: — did find recently there’s this mnemonic device from the medieval tradition, which is this verse that just gave a single signification for each of the houses, and it was used to memorize them in medieval astrology. And it’s given in Latin, but I thought it was really cool. My Latin pronunciation, I think, is probably worse than yours since you’re focused on learning Latin and Greek right now. Do you wanna give it a – do you think you could give it a shot in terms of reading the Latin?

SO: Yeah, sure. So the mnemonic verse on the houses – vita, lucrum, fratres, genitor, nati, valetudo, uxor, mors, pietas, regnum, benefactaque, and carcer.

CB: Nice. Which means roughly “life, profit, brothers, father, children, health, wife, death, piety, kingship, good deeds, prison.” So those are core signification of each of the houses in order from the first to the 12th. Obviously, you know, there’s some modifications to that; obviously, there’s some issues. It’s written, you know, only to refer to the father for the 4th house, but the 4th house is also the mother. It’s basically, like, the parents. Or the 7th house, for example, this is written in the medieval period from the perspective of a man, but obviously the 7th house is just the marriage partner in general, not just the wife. Yeah, and there’s other ones that can be expanded upon as well. The one for kingdom – regnum – it also means like, to rule, basically, because the 10th house is the place of one’s career, but I thought “kingship” was like, a good sort of translation of that one signification.

SO: Yeah. That’s good – kingship, rulership, reigning. Yeah.

CB: Yeah. Power.

SO: Power.

CB: Power was another major one. So yeah, a useful device to memorize and think of your significations of the houses.

SO: Yeah, so everyone – go memorize that mnemonic device in Latin.

CB: Exactly. Well, that would be a cool —

SO: You’ll be golden.

CB: That’d be a cool tattoo, actually. That’s even cooler than —

SO: Yes.

CB: — the other one, the domiciles.

SO: Yeah, in like a nice ancient script.

CB: Exactly. All right. Let’s get into looking at some example charts. All right. So first example chart – one of my favorites is Steve Wozniak, who is one of the founders of Apple Computers, which is, you know, this huge company. It’s one of the biggest companies if not the biggest company in the world today at this point in 2024. What’s interesting – just one piece that’s interesting in terms of the rulers of the houses in terms of Steve Wozniak’s chart is that he has Virgo rising, and he has Libra as the 2nd whole sign house, and Libra’s ruled by Venus, and Venus in his chart is located in Cancer, which is the 11th whole sign house. So that means he has the ruler of the 2nd house of finances in the 11th house of friends. And indeed, Steve Wozniak became rich as a result of his friendship, because his friend was Steve Jobs, and the two of them founded Apple Computers together. So Wozniak with his Virgo rising and his Mercury-Saturn conjunction in Virgo was the like, tech genius, whereas Steve Jobs was the one who pushed for the creation of Apple and its subsequent like, marketing and subsequent success. So Venus is also well-placed in his chart; Venus is in Cancer, it’s conjunct its domicile lord, which is the Moon. They’re just barely separating from a conjunction. Venus has a superior, sign-based trine from Jupiter in Pisces, which is overcoming Venus, which is super supportive and helpful. And also, Venus doesn’t have any afflictions from either Saturn or from Mars, and by afflictions, I mean, hard aspects like a square or a opposition or a conjunction. So yeah, his – generally speaking, if we were to look at this birth chart and you don’t know who it is, one of the most general statements you could make about this person’s chart or this person’s life is you could say there should be something about his finances that are connected with his friends. And if you said that, like if you said that in a consultation with this person, you know, that would be stunningly correct and accurate, I think, in his instance, right?

SO: Oh yeah, absolutely. And it’s yeah, I mean, it’s one of the most – we’re doing one of the most like, fundamental things in a chart, and it’s just so powerful to see it come to life.

CB: Right. So one of the general points to take away from this also is that through the houses, and especially through the rulers of the houses, you can actually see other people in the native’s life and sometimes the role that they play in relation to the native’s fate and the native’s destiny. So in this instance, part of Steve Wozniak’s fate or destiny was having this connection with this friend of his that he would go on to form this company with, and then that company would change the world, basically.

SO: It’s a really – yeah, there’s a lot in this chart that’s like, wow.

CB: Yeah. There’s a bunch – I use this chart for a few different things, but – so we’ll stick to that for now. So that’s an example of the second house and looking at the ruler of the second house. Did you have any – or let me give one more and then I’ll ask that. So here’s a second example. So this is the birth chart of Maurizio Gucci, who was the grandson of the founder of the Gucci fashion empire. And what happened is that he – in the 1980s, when his father passed away, he inherited his father’s half of the family business and then became just wildly, obscenely wealthy as a result of that. And what’s interesting in his chart is he has Cancer rising and Libra is on the 4th house of the parents and the family and the father in particular. And so since Libra’s on the 4th house, the ruler is Venus, and Venus is located in his chart in Leo, which is in the 2nd house of finances. So he has the ruler of the 4th house of parents in the 2nd house of finances. Additionally, since Leo is on the 2nd house of finances, we look to see where the ruler is, and the ruler is the Sun, which is in Libra located in the 4th house of parents itself. So he has actually an exchange or a mutual reception, we might say, between the ruler of the 2nd house of finances and the 4th house of parents, which shows an extremely strong connection between those two topics, which in his case was very much true.

SO: Yeah. And this is the greater benefic, too.

CB: Yeah, this is a night chart, so it’s like, Venus is the benefic that’s of the sect in favor, or in other words, it’s the most positive planet in the chart, and it’s located there in the 2nd house, so it’s like, a positive outcome. In the lots episode, the episode I did with Kira a couple months ago on the Lot of Fortune, we also pointed out in this chart that the Lot of Fortune is located in the 4th house and it’s ruled by Venus. And in Fortune houses, Venus – the ruler of the Lot of Fortune in the 4th house – is in the 11th house relative to the Lot of Fortune, which is… Vettius Valens in the 2nd century calls that “the place of acquisition” and says it’s an indication for wealth and yeah, basically, he became very wealthy. So there’s often multiple overlapping things that are happening in a chart that are indicating particular outcomes, and sometimes when there’s a particularly important topic or theme in a person’s life, you’ll see multiple different ways that it’s indicated in the person’s chart. But the rulers of the houses is one access point for that.

SO: Yeah.

CB: But you see how it’s like, tying together a topic so it’s really, this is why we’re talking about like, chart synthesis, because it’s really synthesizing and showing how different parts of a person’s life can overlap or can come together. So here we’ve gone beyond just interpreting individual placements in isolation, and now we’re really looking at how the chart – or we’re starting to look at how the chart – works together.

SO: Yeah. Definitely.

CB: Yeah, so that’s crucial. Did you have any 2nd house examples? I can’t remember.

SO: For the 2nd house… Not from the 2nd house to another house. But in the 2nd house, I did, so maybe we’ll move on to the next one.

CB: Sure. Yeah. And I think you had a 4th house one, so maybe we’ll —

SO: Yeah, I have a 4th house one.

CB: We’ll do that. Okay, good. So in that case, I’ll move onto the 3rd house. One of the things I wanted to say, we’re gonna —

SO: Oh, Chris, I’m sorry. You know, I do have a 2nd house one; I’m sorry, I apologize. So there’s Lord Byron, actually. Do you have his chart handy?

CB: He was the one that was best for the 4th in the 8th —

SO: For the other one?

CB: — right?

SO: Okay, okay yeah, let’s do that one, then.

CB: That was the one I was thinking of for the 4th, so let’s save it —

SO: Okay.

CB: — for then. One of the things I wanted to mention is we’re kind of skipping over the ruler of the 1st house, and we’re doing that deliberately because the ruler of the 1st house and its placement in the chart is extremely important because that indicates something about the native’s overall life direction and focus in life. And that kind of deserves a whole special treatment unto its own; I usually treat that as a whole separate like, seven-hour lecture, I think, in my course where I go through a bunch of examples. So that’s kind of a special topic we’ll save for another day, the ruler of the Ascendant. So here we’re gonna focus primarily on the rulers of the other houses.

All right. So 3rd house examples… So Ted Kennedy had Capricorn rising and Pisces on the 3rd whole sign house, and Pisces traditionally is ruled by Jupiter, and Jupiter in his chart is located in Leo, so Jupiter is located in the 8th house of death, and it’s retrograde and it has an opposition by sign from Mars in Aquarius. So he has that, but then also, there’s actually an exchange because the ruler of the 8th house of death is the Sun, and the Sun is located in Pisces in the 3rd house of siblings. So Ted Kennedy, of course, was the brother of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, both of which were famously assassinated during the course of the 1960s. So John F. Kennedy was President of the United States; he was assassinated in 1963. And Robert Kennedy was assassinated I think in 1968 or so, right? Do you happen to know?

SO: I don’t happen to know off-hand, no.

CB: Okay, don’t sweat it. I’m pretty sure it’s 1968.

SO: I’m not up on my Kennedy history.

CB: All right. Well you gotta get to work on that. But even aside from having two brothers assassinated, he also had a sister who died in a airplane crash as well as actually another sister where there’s some problematic things with as well in terms of her status. But basically, generally speaking, we could just say that this person experienced the loss, the death of a sibling multiple times in his life, and that became part of his life story. So yeah, that why I wanted to use that example. Obviously, that’s an extreme example; that’s not gonna happen with everybody that has any part of those placements, but it’s one possible manifestation and one of the most literal manifestations in a way that clearly describes some of the most important events that occurred in this person’s life.

SO: Yeah. That very vividly ties together the 3rd and the 8th.

CB: Yeah.

SO: Yeah, despite Jupiter being a benefic, too, you still have – it’s still where the place is, you know? The place is really important – the domain, the region of where that planet is. You know, even if it’s a benefic there, it’s still in a difficult place.

CB: Yeah, well, it’s like a benefic, it’s in Leo – it is a night chart, so Jupiter’s not able to be as benefic as he would like to be otherwise. But you know, they still did become – like, his first brother became president and his second brother was actually in the process of running for the presidency when he was assassinated. So you know, there’s some positive things going on there with especially the trine from Venus, but yeah – sometimes the house topics, it has to come up in some way. And especially sometimes when the ruler is a more difficult house, sometimes the more difficult outcomes can be manifested.

So that’s a 3rd house. Let’s move onto the 4th house. So here’s one of my favorite 4th house examples is actually an astrologer. So this is a famous astrologer, Reinhold Ebertin, who is the founder of the school of astrology known as cosmobiology that focuses a lot on midpoints and other things like that. But fun, interesting fact about Reinhold Ebertin… You know, and he’s the one that’s the most famous in the English-speaking world because his book was translated into English and ended up influencing a lot of generations of astrologers after the 1940s. But interesting fact about him is that his mother was actually a famous astrologer; her name was Elsbeth Ebertin, and I’ve done an episode on her with Jenn Zahrt in the past. So she actually was very famous and she made a famous prediction about Hitler and his rise to power like, very early on in the 1920s before Hitler was anybody. And what ended up happening with Reinhold Ebertin’s mother is that she taught him astrology when he was in his 20s. So his is an interesting example because he has Capricorn rising and Aries is on the cusp of the 4th whole sign house, and the ruler is Mars, which is located in the 9th house, which is not just the place of religion and foreign travel and philosophy but the 9th house is also the house that’s associated with astrology and divination. And he literally learned astrology from his famous astrologer mother.

SO: That’s a really nice one. Yeah.

CB: Yeah. I thought that was cool seeing something like that in our community and seeing how that can work out intergenerationally in terms of the way that people can affect our lives in very unique ways, that different people in our lives that are close to us can affect out lives in different ways, and ways – through the rulers of the houses – that are, like I said earlier, unique sometimes. Like, not everybody learns astrology from their famous astrologer mother who happened to like, predict Hitler’s rise to power, for example. I don’t think – I mean, maybe. We’ll have to check and see if that’s happened any other times, but —

SO: Yeah, check the stats on that one.

CB: Right, check the stats on that. But that’s one of the things that’s cool about the rulers of the houses is it can show you those really unique instances of fortune that create distinctive characteristics about a native’s life as in the case here.

SO: Right.

CB: All right. So you had a 4th house example with Lord Byron, right?

SO: Yes. You wanna pull up his chart?

CB: Yes. So here is Lord Byron’s chart. He has Cancer rising. And why don’t you briefly describe the relevant placements in his chart and give me an idea who Lord Byron is and what he did?

SO: Yeah. So he has Cancer rising. We’re looking at his 4th house, which is occupied by the sign of Libra, and the ruler is Venus, and he has Venus up in the 8th house in Aquarius with a bunch of other things going on there. He has a packed 8th house. And Lord Byron was part of the Romanticism era; he was a poet, he traveled a lot. He was a very influential figure as a poet. So through a series of actually a couple of – actually, let me back up and say that we’re combining the 4th house of the home and family and then the 8th house of death. And it was through a couple of sort of unexpected deaths from his extended family that he was actually the next in line to receive this sort of lower level like, nobility title of Baron Byron. And through that process, he was able to – well, it was sort of not a great situation – he inherited his father’s debts, which is also another signification of the 8th house is debts, inheritances. So he literally inherited his father’s debts, and then he also inherited a dilapidated castle. And one of the things that’s interesting about that is that Venus is making a two-degree application to Saturn, and Saturn’s in like, great, knock-out planetary condition, but it’s still harming Venus so it’s not the best condition for Venus, and she’s also in a difficult house. So, you know, maybe if it was in better condition, he would have inherited a castle that wasn’t falling apart.

CB: Right. Yeah. That’s sort of funny. Again, have to check the stats on how many people like, inherited castles from their father, but that’s a great example with the ruler of the 4th house of the father and parents and the 8th house of death, inheritance, and debt. And Venus – it’s a day chart, so it’s not as bad as it could be with Saturn being of the sect in favor and being tempered, but Venus is applying to a conjunction with Saturn in the 8th house, so there’s both on the one hand the inheritance of something that’s old – in this case, like a castle – but on the other hand, you have the saddling and the debt and financial hardship that comes with that. The 8th house is also generally a house that has to do with like, other people’s money is the broad meaning, but what that can mean specifically manifests in a number of different ways.

SO: Yeah. Definitely.

CB: Yeah. That’s a really good example.

SO: Yeah.

CB: All right. Good. So let’s move on to the 5th house. This is an anonymous chart of somebody I knew that had the ruler of the 5th house of children in the 9th house of religion and foreign places. So they have two different children, and each of their children manifested this placement differently, which is interesting. One of the native’s children grew up and became very religious as an adult even though they weren’t really raised in a very religious household. But the native’s child converted to a specific religion and then sort of patterned their life from a religious perspective from that point forward. The other native’s child grew up with a fascination about like, Asian culture and eventually once they became an adult, they decided to move to Asia and live abroad for the rest of their adult life.

SO: Wow.

CB: So, you know, on the one hand, we have the ruler of the 5th house of children in the 9th house of religion and one of the native’s children becoming involved in religion. And in the other instance, we have the ruler of the 5th house of children in the 9th house of foreign places and foreign travel, and the native’s child deciding to live abroad. So this was a good one because it shows that there can be multiple scenarios for the manifestation of the archetype within a single life, and it’s not always just like, one thing but sometimes you’ll see different manifestations. So what you’re seeing then is like, the archetype of that placement coming forth and manifesting in the life in different ways that are, in terms of the particulars, unique and different, but in terms of the broad meaning, still very clearly connected to the archetype of those two houses.

SO: And so this person’s chart, Chris, did you say that that native had a particular – they did not have a particular influence on their children to do that, or that was —

CB: No.

SO: — just something that kind of happened like, by chance so to speak?

CB: Yeah. I believe they grew up in like, the native themself was relatively secular, and they didn’t like, raise their child or push them in any particular direction; it’s just that their child happened to, in each of those instances, gravitate towards those 9th house things.

SO: Wow.

CB: So that’s one of the things that’s interesting sometimes is just how it can be describing the circumstances of the people around the native and what happens in their lives. And that’s one of the things that’s important because it’s like, the first house and the ruler of the first house are the planets that are most closely connected to the native. And the ruler of the first house represents you in the birth chart. But the other houses represent other people in your life, and the rulers of those houses sometimes tell you what happens with other people in your life that are connected with you, like what happens with your 3rd house and your siblings, your 4th house and your parents, your 5th house and children, 7th house and relationships, 11th house and friends, and so on and so forth.

SO: Yeah.

CB: Yeah. So that’s an important distinction there. All right, that takes us into the 6th house. So this one is a more challenging one, but this is the birth chart of Ernest Hemingway; he was a famous American writer and author of the 20th century. He had Virgo rising and Aquarius on the cusp of the 6th house of health and illness, and the ruler of the 6th house of health was located in the 4th house of family and parents. And what ended up happening is he actually inherited a genetic disorder from his father, and this genetic disorder ended up eventually contributing to his suicide later on in his life – Ernest Hemingway’s suicide – and his father, actually, it turned out probably had the same disease and also ended up commiting suicide under circumstances that were like, kind of similar. So there’s other things going on with this chart. We also have Mars in the first house in a day chart, and it’s forming a superior square with Saturn from Mars at 20 degrees of Virgo squaring Saturn at 17 degrees of Sagittarius in a day chart. So there’s other kind of challenging afflictions going on here in terms of planetary condition as well as other things in Ernest Hemingway’s chart in general that are relevant for the broader topics of what happened in his life. But this is just one piece of that, which is just, you know, not everybody inherits like, a genetic disorder from one of their parents, but in this instance, he happened to and it seemed to be connected with that placement.

SO: One thing, Chris, I was wondering is because the 4th house is also associated with endings, which sounds kind of vague, but you know, the way things end, and I think maybe has been associated with death; I’m not sure on that, but I was wondering where “endings” may have come in in the tradition. Do you know?

CB: Like death in particular, or endings in general?

SO: Well, yeah, endings associated with the 4th house.

CB: Yeah. I mean, it’s tricky because basically like, Rhetorius talks about the 4th house and the 8th house when it comes to death and endings, and the 12th house actually has some relation to that broadly as well. But in particular, the two houses that most were associated with death were the 8th house and then also the 4th house.

SO: Okay.

CB: And the 4th house, also, is just generally associated with the end of the matter. As well as Rhetorius has this dynamic he uses regularly that’s really interesting about the first house and the 10th house indicating things that happen earlier in the native’s life versus the 7th house and the 4th house indicating things that happen later on or in some instances towards the end of the native’s life.

SO: Okay. That makes sense.

CB: Yeah. So that is a good one. I have another 6th house one to like, lighten things up after the depressing example. Because this used to actually be like, a 75-minute lecture that I’d given at a bunch of conferences and I had tightened down pretty well, and usually you needed like, something to lighten the mood at about this point in the lecture, so this is my funny 6th house example, which is the birth chart of Leona Helmsley. And Leona Helmsley had Cancer rising, and she had Sagittarius on the 6th house. The 6th house in ancient astrology was associated with quadrupeds – so four-footed animals – in the Hellenistic tradition, which in the later tradition, in like, modern astrology, one of the significations of the 6th house is actually pets. So she had Sagittarius on the 6th house of pets, and the ruler is Jupiter, which is in Leo in the 2nd house of finances. And what’s funny is it’s actually relatively well-placed; it’s like, Jupiter in a day chart, so it’s the most benefic planet in the chart… Yeah, basically, it’s the benefic of the sect in favor, the ruler of the 6th house of pets in the 2nd house of finances. So what ended up happening is when she – she was a billionaire hotel person and real estate investor, so she was worth just like, tons and tons of money. But she really loved her pets, and when she passed away, she actually left $12 million to her specific dog, and the dog’s name was Trouble. So basically, as soon as she died, like, her dog became like the richest dog in the world, which was notable at the time in news. She also left an eight billion dollar trust for dogs in general and to help out animals in general because she was an animal lover. So I found this story, though, from the New York Times about what happened after she died and after this dog became the richest dog in the world. And the New York Times said,

“She” – the dog – “had been hand-fed crab cakes, cream cheese, and steamed vegetables with chicken during her time with Ms. Helmsley.”

So the dog is actually treated like a prince or like a king while she was alive, but then what’s kind of funny and a little bit sad, like, after she died though, whoever was in charge basically began giving the food – it said the dog began dining on dog food from a can. So that the dog had gone from “has gone from caviar to Alpo,” the dog food. So and what’s funny about this is I was like, you know what, I have to look up the transits for this. What was going on in her chart, to the ruler of the 6th house, after she died? And it turns out that when she died, Saturn was actually transiting through Leo when Leona Helmsley died in August of 2007, which meant the ruler of the 6th house of pets in her chart was getting a Saturn transit, and the dog unfortunately had to go from like, eating crab cakes and caviar to eating dog food. So it was having kind of rough transition despite becoming the richest dog in the world at that point.

SO: Yeah, I was just gonna say, like, what day is it? How often do you become the richest dog in the world?

CB: Exactly, and this is the chart of your like, owner, or the person that was taking care of you.

SO: Wow. That’s amazing. Do they know what happened with all the money? Because it sounds like whoever’s taking care of the dog maybe like, took some of that money. Like —

CB: Yeah.

SO: — now feeding the dog Alpo.

CB: I was actually thinking about that. I was like, thinking about the logistics and the like, ethics of that, is like, if she didn’t leave a thing saying the dog had to be fed in a certain way, but then I also assume that wouldn’t have been particularly good for the dog, I assume. So maybe they were trying to like, actually care for the dog by giving it food that was probably better for its health. I don’t know. We —

SO: Yeah.

CB: We don’t have to get into a debate; I don’t wanna —

SO: No.

CB: — get into a – I don’t know if this is like, a delicate territory and I’m gonna get into like, a flame war on Twitter over —

SO: Yeah.

CB: — the ethics of like —

SO: No, you wanna be careful.

CB: — of like —

SO: I know. If only we had the chart of the new owner, then we’d really know.

CB: Yeah. What their —

SO: Or the dog.

CB: — what their intention was. But I wanted to mention this because it’s like, a funny example, and from an outside perspective, it might look kind of trivial. But there are things sometimes in a chart that indicate things that are maybe not as important to other people but are more important to some people, like for some people, their pets are very important to them. Maybe not like, you know, $12 million important, but you know, for some people not just pets but let’s say the broader topic of animals can be important to them and they can dedicate their life to working with animals or helping them in different ways, and so sometimes you need to be able to see where that shows up in the chart. And this is one of the ways that you can have an access point for that. And again, it shows some of the unique ways in which certain topics in a person’s chart that may not be important for other people can become much more important for an individual as a result of the placement of the rulers of the houses.

SO: Definitely. Yeah, every chart is different.

CB: Exactly.

SO: Each one is different.

CB: Yeah. So that is my deep takeaway from Leona Helmsley chart. Let’s move on to the 7th house.

SO: Did you wanna do the 6th house – I had an example, I think, for the 6th house.

CB: Which one?

SO: The author with the ruler in the 10th.

CB: Oh wait, yeah – here it is. Okay. So I’ll show the chart. So this is an anonymous native, and this was the chart, right?

SO: Yep. That’s it. Yeah, and also not, you know, not tragic but serious – definitely a serious situation. The 6th house is Virgo, and the ruler is Mercury, who’s up in the 10th conjunct Jupiter.

CB: Aries rising.

SO: With Aries rising. And 6th house talking about health – this person had a very rare health condition that was misdiagnosed as a basically a psychotic break, and when it was correctly diagnosed, she was able to heal and eventually ended up writing a book about it, a book that kind of gave her a lot of recognition, and she became a New York Times bestseller because of that. So she really kind of rose up, you know, to the 10th house so to speak through her Mercury, her writing. And it’s something that she’s sort of continued; I don’t think, obviously she didn’t expect this, but I think it was something that kind of naturally came for her to work on, you know, in her career with this sort of medical situation with other people who have this condition where it’s not often diagnosed correctly.

CB: Yeah, that’s incredible. So having the ruler of the 6th house of illness in the 10th house of career and that her illness ended up becoming part of her career as well as her reputation.

SO: Definitely.

CB: Okay. And then yeah, and it’s interesting because then it brings in things of when you have like, the ruler of a difficult house in a positive or neutral one and sometimes it can import more challenging topics into that house. But then in this instance, Mercury is at 28 Capricorn is closely conjunct Jupiter in a day chart at 28 Capricorn and also sextile to Venus at 28 Pisces so that there’s some positive things that come with it as well.

SO: Definitely. Yeah, there are other things definitely helping.

CB: Yeah, that’s a great example.

SO: Yeah.

CB: Cool. All right. So with the 7th house, I didn’t have charts to show, but I did want to just mention like, I’ve seen just a ton of examples of this. So I had one native, you know, tying things back in with Rhetorius and what Rhetorius said, I know one person who met and married a partner when they were visiting a foreign country and then they ended up moving to relocate there to live with them, to be with them, and they’ve been married for like, over a decade now. So that’s an example of the ruler of the 7th house of marriage and partnership in the 9th house of foreign travel and foreign people and places.

I knew another native who had the ruler of the 7th house of partnership in the 9th house of foreign travel and education and divination and astrology, and they actually met their future partner in college, and then later their partner was the one who got them into astrology, which the native ended up making a major part of their life. But they would never have gotten into that topic if not for meeting their partner.

SO: Wow. That’s an amazing one. Yeah.

CB: Yeah.

SO: And the first one that you said before that is a lot like the Rhetorius example at the beginning that you had mentioned —

CB: Yeah.

SO: — that you showed.

CB: And that’s why I mentioned it. Well, and that one’s funny, and that one – I don’t think he’ll care, but that one’s actually my friend Nick Dagan Best, frequent person who appears on the podcast, and he actually met his wife at an astrology conference in South Africa and then —

SO: Wow.

CB: — they hit it off, and then he ended up moving out there and they got married and have been living happily ever after.

SO: Very cool.

CB: Yeah. So those are some ruler of the 7th house examples. Many other different ways that that can work out, but we will not dwell on it. Moving on to the 8th house – wait, you didn’t have any 7th house ones, did you?

SO: No.

CB: Okay. No problem. We’re moving onto the 8th house. Sometimes, of course, the 8th house is where we encounter death and mortality. One example that I’ve always used for this is Princess Diana, who had the ruler of the 9th house of foreign travel in the 8th house of death, and she also had the ruler of the 8th house of death in the 3rd house of short-distance travel. And so she, of course, famously died in a car accident while she was in a foreign country. So she was from the UK, and she ended up dying, I think, in Paris in what – like, 1997? So —

SO: Yeah, I remember that.

CB: Yeah, I remember it too. I remember I was at a friend’s sleepover or something, and I came back and I saw like, the headlines on the newspaper or something like that. So, you know, this is more challenging, obviously, in this instance. So she has Sagituarius rising; Leo’s on the 9th house of foreign travel and foreign places – the ruler is the Sun. It’s located in Cancer in the 8th house of death and mortality. So in this instance, it’s like, the chart ended up describing some of the circumstances surrounding her death. And then with Cancer on the 8th house of death, the ruler is the Moon, which is in Aquarius, and the 3rd house has always been short-distance travel. In this instance, in modern times, that can refer to like, driving and cars, basically, like, local travel as opposed to like, long-distance travel which is more 9th house.

SO: Yeah. Like, little trips. But like, here you have both of those things are connected.

CB: Yeah. And hers is tricky because it’s like, the Moon is at 25 degrees of Aquarius. It’s conjoining the South Node at 28 degrees of Aquarius, but more importantly, it’s applying to an out-of-sign opposition with Mars in a day chart where Mars is at one degree of Virgo. So the Moon’s like, applying directly to that opposition within 13 degrees, so that’s where it gets tricky is that the ruler is in a really difficult condition at the same time.

SO: Yeah, that is the next aspect that it makes, I think, right?

CB: Yeah, it is.

SO: The Moon to Mars and Mars is – anyway, yeah. Mars is ruling the 12th.

CB: Yeah. So it kind of brings up the broader topic where, you know, there’s different scenarios for different things for the end of a person’s life, or a person’s death. There’s like, let’s say, one end of the spectrum is like, the person who dies at the end of a long life in their bed, comfortable, surrounded by friends and family who like, lovingly see them off or something like that. Like, let’s say, whatever the best case scenario is or the most idealized scenario in terms of how we all would want to pass away, perhaps, versus the other end of the spectrum where sometimes in terms of the broad range of human experience, sometimes people can die prematurely in a violent way, and that’s the other extreme end of the spectrum. So sometimes the chart – especially when the life is distinctive, and for her, part of what became distinctive of her life was that she did die young in this tragic accident. And sometimes that can be seen in the chart itself to the extent that that becomes part of what’s distinctive about the native’s life.

SO: Yeah. I’ve noticed, too, that – well, I mean, I think she also had some psychological, personal challenges, too, right? Did you know – you hear about that or know about that?

CB: I mean, I don’t know. I know a little bit. I’m not like a super… I have done, I guess especially recently, like, a surprising amount of work on the royal family and especially their eclipse connections. But yeah, I don’t… Because it’s also tricky sometimes when it comes to some of those things where I don’t know, especially when different sides are like, when there’s in her case, a divorce that was acrimonious and then different sides are dropping things, I don’t really know. But yeah, so maybe we’ll leave it at that. But just in terms of the external circumstances that we know about, this is obviously one of the more defining events that happened in her life.

All right, so that was an 8th house example. Your 8th house example was Lord Byron that connected the 8th and the 4th.

SO: Right.

CB: Okay. 8th house stuff, I should mention, can also indicate like, other people’s money, and it can be a financial house where sometimes… You mentioned an example where there was like, inheritance with Lord Byron. That can be a common, like, positive 8th house manifestation is the native will have an inheritance at some point, or that in some instances that the inheritance will really affect their life and career in a major way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. I’ve seen other 8th house instances, though, where that topic of other people’s money can be like, something distinctive about the partner’s finances in a positive or negative way. Or sometimes it can just be people who have a knack of having financial support that comes in through other people, and if it’s extremely well-placed, that can be actually a very positive or supporting thing.

SO: Yeah. I’ve seen it connected when there are like, benefics there or when there are kind of benefic situations happening with the 8th house. You know, I’ve seen it with people who are really great at raising money and fundraising; that’s like —

CB: Yes.

SO: — one thing, yeah, that I’ve seen personally in clients. Like, someone I did a reading for, now that I’m just remembering it, I can’t remember the exact details of the chart, but she was able to raise like, I think it was in the millions. It was really astounding how much money she was able to raise, and it’s not like she was a famous kind of person who had lots of connections, but she just had a really like, knock-out 8th house. So that’s one way, too, it can go.

CB: Yeah, for sure. I’ve seen that a bunch as well. All right. Let’s move onto… We’re gonna go to the 10th house, since we’ve already had a bunch of like, 9th house examples, I feel like. So this is somebody that has Cancer rising, Aries is on the 10th house. The 10th house is associated with career. And the ruler of the 10th house is Mars, which is located in Virgo in the 3rd house conjunct Mercury and Venus in a night chart. So it’s actually relatively well-placed. There’s also a nice superior trine from Jupiter, which is at 29 degrees of Taurus. And the native’s career has largely focused on education, especially children and younger people in high school or below. So she was like, the head teacher at a charter school. She took a leadership role at a high school at one point, and then eventually became a teacher and eventually a school principal. And I thought this was really interesting because especially in modern astrology, we tend to associate the 3rd house with earlier forms of education like grade school through high school, whereas the 9th house is associated with higher forms of education like college. In this instance, I was always impressed how we had a very literal manifestation of that where literally the ruler of the 10th house of career is in the 3rd house of early education, and the native ended up becoming a teacher and a principal.

SO: That’s amazing. And this too’s a really good example that sometimes we forget like, the kinds of planets that are ruling these houses and the signs that are there – like, head teacher. Leadership role. These are really like, Mars keywords. If it were Venus, you know, maybe it would be like, a fashion designer or something – I don’t know, or like, an interior designer, but yeah. Or teaching a different kind of thing. Yeah, really nice way to tie in the Mars.

CB: That’s a great point. And also just it’s extremely well-placed. This is an instance where it doesn’t have any – it’s actually in aversion and has no aspect to Saturn, which is the most difficult planet in a night chart, so it has no aspect to Saturn, which is actually a good thing in this instance, because there’s nothing hindering it. And then instead, it has lots of good things going for it where Mercury, the ruler of the 3rd house, is actually in its own sign in the 3rd house itself. Venus is the most positive planet in the chart, and Venus is located in the 3rd house. Jupiter is trining it from Taurus. There’s just lots of very good things going on here in terms of the placements and the different planetary conditions.

SO: Yeah, that Jupiter’s amazing.

CB: Yeah. Totally Jupiter in Taurus in the 11th. It does bring up a point maybe we need a brief digression about – you know, what do you do when the ruler of a house is in its own house? And usually one of the things about that is it just means that the planet is also in its own sign, which is usually a place of power and a place where the planet has much greater personal autonomy. So that can be typically a more positive indication or one positive indication for the status of that house if the ruler of a house is in its own house, but it does make it a little bit trickier to delineate because then you don’t have this easy like, shortcut where you can look at, you know, what significations are being imported into a different house. You can, though, sometimes still focus on, for many of the visible planets, what is the other house that it rules? Because then it’ll be importing the significations of the other house that it rules into the house that it’s located in.

SO: Yeah, definitely.

CB: So that was something we actually saw a lot in the Saturn return stories that we just did earlier this month when I did the Saturn return in Aquarius retrospective where one of the things you pay attention to when you’re looking at a person’s Saturn return is what are the two houses that Saturn rules in the person’s chart? Because the topics of both of those houses will tend to come up during the course of the Saturn return.

Yeah. Other 10th house example – here’s an example of a doctor and a person who became the head of a hospital, and they have Pisces rising and Sagituarius on the Midheaven in the 10th whole sign house, and the ruler is Jupiter, which is located in Leo in the 6th house of illness and health. And the native became a doctor, became the head of a hospital, and generally gravitates towards helping to heal people basically who are dealing with medical conditions.

SO: Yeah. That’s also an interesting one. I was kind of surprised when I saw this one that, you know, before we saw the example that I showed with the ruler of the 6th going to the 10th – so from a bad house to a good house – here’s the reverse. Good house to a bad house. But still, you know, something really powerful and beneficial.

CB: Yeah. Well, one of the things, one of the tricks, is that sometimes when a person has like, an important planet in one of the bad houses, if it’s relatively well-placed in that house, what’ll end up happening is the person will end up helping people who are themselves in a difficult situation. So for example in this case, we have an extremely well-placed – it’s actually a very well-placed Jupiter, because it’s Jupiter in the 6th house of illness, which is one of the bad houses, but you’ll notice that it’s at 26 degrees of Leo, and it’s actually trining the degree of the Midheaven within three degrees. So it has that classic mitigating factor of having a close aspect within three degrees – in this case, a trine – which is helping to boost and helping to pull that Jupiter out of its otherwise challenging condition or inauspicious condition, which comes about partially because it’s not as active in the 6th house, which is a declining house where it’s falling away from one of the angular houses – in this case, the 7th. It also has a superior square, which is overcoming or also referred to in the Hellenistic tradition as “domination,” from Venus in a night chart, which is overcoming Jupiter by a superior sign-based square, which is a major condition of bonification that’s making Jupiter better and making Jupiter more happy. But that’s an important point; I’m glad you brought that up that sometimes it’s just that when a person has a well-placed ruler in a difficult house, it indicates that they end up helping or doing sort of like, charity work in some instances for people who are themselves in a difficult situation. I see that sometimes in like, the 8th house, and you’ll have a person that – if it’s well-placed – it could be part of their career. So I’ve had a client who was like, a mortician, so they’re literally like, helping people who are burying their loved ones and trying to do that in the best or most respectful manner that they can. Or in other instances, I’ve seen lots of people that were like, accountants that had heavy 8th house placements because they’re dealing with other people’s money.

SO: Wow. Yeah.

CB: Yeah. So good to keep in mind. One other funny example – this is where, you know, I like to sprinkle in the funny examples from time to time here because I’m a pretty funny guy; I think everyone agrees. Evel Knievel was an example of a timed birth chart I have, and he was a famous American daredevil that would do these like, death-defying stunts like, you know, jumping a motorcycle over a bunch of flaming cars or stuff like that, like the archetypal risk-taking person who risks their life as part of their career. What’s interesting – he had Aquarius rising. He had Scorpio on the 10th whole sign house, and the ruler of the 10th house of career was Mars, which is located in Virgo in the 8th house of death. And this guy literally, like his entire career, was doing death-defying stunts and coming very near to death but never actually dying of it and then, you know, becoming very famous or becoming very notable and developing his reputation as part of that, which is the other part of the 10th house is it’s the most visible part of the chart, so it represents our public life and what we’re known for.

SO: Yeah, and I’m just noticing too that, before you mentioned in another chart the place of acquisition by Valens, and this is also – Mars is in the place of acquisition here, right?

CB: Yeah, because the Lot of Fortune’s in Scorpio in the 10th, and so the 11th house from Fortune is Virgo, where Mars itself is located. That’s a great point. He also has other stuff, like I use him as a ruler of the Ascendant example because the ruler of his Ascendant is like, Saturn in the 3rd house of short-distance travel and that, you know, is very relevant in terms of like, jumping motorcycles. But yeah, so that’s my other example, because you just get some funny stuff. And this is something every astrologer needs to do is you need to build up a database of charts so that you can research stuff like this, and especially… You know, it’s one of the things I really loved about having SolarFire, for example, because once I got SolarFire is you can start saving charts and especially saving timed charts that you know are reliable, and then you can use its search feature to just like, search, you know, “Show me all charts that have the ruler of the 10th house of career in the 9th house of death,” and it’ll just tell you in a second all the charts that have that, and then you can like, look through those charts and start to see the patterns and the different things involved, and that was a really crucial thing for me – it has been over the years in terms of doing my research.

SO: Yeah. And in there I think you, too, can use like, they have their own existing database of charts that you can like, add to your own database if you want. So you can add charts of your own and then use their existing database, so it’s a very powerful tool. Yeah. The astro.com database is also really good for researching.

CB: Yeah, and they do have charts that are built into it, but one of the things I recommend doing is building your own database of charts that you know have reliable data, because one of the things, of course, that’s very important for this technique of studying the rulers of the houses is you need the Ascendant and the rising sign to be correct. So I have a whole chart database that I started building up a long time ago where it’s only charts that I’ve checked out like, the birth time, and I know that the birth time’s reasonably correct. That way I know I’m working with reliable charts for that entire database. Whereas sometimes, if you go to like, Astrodienst and you go to Astro-Databank and look up the data, sometimes you can see that there’s like, no birth time that’s known or there can be conflicting data about the birth time, so it might not be reliable. And the other thing is also building up your own database – because one of the things you wanna do is build up a database of charts of people that you know as well and their birth times, because even if they’re not famous, you can learn a lot from studying the lives of people around you, and that becomes hugely crucial as well.

SO: Yeah. Very good words of wisdom there.

CB: Yeah. All right. I wanna take just a little bit of a break and then we’ll come right back.

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All right, we’re back from a break. So let’s continue with the 11th house. So one of my favorite charts for this is the birth chart of Eleanor Roosevelt, who had Sagittarius rising and Virgo is the 10th whole sign house, and it’s ruled by Mercury, which is in the 11th whole sign house – the place of friends and groups and alliances – and it’s conjunct the degree of the Midheaven, which is importing 10th house topics into the 11th house. And then interestingly, the ruler of the 11th house itself of friends and groups is Venus, and Venus is located in Virgo in the 10th house. So she has this very strong connection between her 10th house of career and her 11th house of friends and groups, and how that manifested in her life is she was very focused on social issues and social reform movements. So she was the First Lady of the United States; she was the wife of US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s and ‘40s. And she ended up being involved in and becoming a leader of the Progressive Movement. She ended up really pushing for the New Deal, which created some social support for people during the Great Depression. She was involved in the Women’s Rights Movement during that time frame. She was involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the US. And also, she was very involved in the creation of the United Nations in the 1940s and early ‘50s, and she ended up, I believe, actually becoming a delegate to the United Nations on the behalf of the US, but I think she was actually like, the first delegate on behalf of the US once the United Nations was created. So yeah, this is really that theme of like, the 11th house having to do with friends, groups, social movements came through very strongly in her chart. And yeah, that’s why she’s one of my favorite examples for that.

SO: That’s a really good one.

CB: Yeah. So and it also brings up a point, also, about when you see a mutual reception or an exchange of the rulers of two houses, that often creates a very, very strong connection between those two topics that stands out as being particularly distinctive in the person’s life and ends up standing out even more than if you just had the ruler of one house in another. If you have, as in this instance, if you have both, if you have the ruler of one house in another, and then the ruler of that other house in the first house – in this case, the ruler of the 10th in the 11th and then the ruler of the 11th in the 10th – the topics just always really stand out as being super important in that person’s life way more than in other people’s lives. And we’ve actually already seen a few examples of that in other earlier examples like Maurizio Gucci, where we saw a mutual reception between the ruler of the 4th and the 2nd and the strong connection between finances and the parents in his chart. Or even like, Ted Kennedy, with an exchange of signs or roughly what I would call a mutual reception between the ruler of the 3rd house of siblings and the 8th house of death and mortality and having lost multiple siblings during the course of his life. Yeah, that’s a trick and an important interpretive principle I’ve learned over the years that’s very crucial.

SO: Yeah, I’m really glad that you said that, because I’ve sort of had a hard time myself understanding mutual reception. Like, I understand it conceptually, but just the way that you said that just now, that it’s really tying those two planets together in a really impactful way, you know, that seems to click, and that makes a lot of sense.

CB: Yeah. And I did a previous episode of The Astrology Podcast which is a lecture on reception that people can check out for that. I do have my own particular definitions of “reception” where I think even just two planets exchanging signs and exchanging houses – even if they’re not aspecting each other – it still creates a very strong connection between those two houses. Because they basically, it’s like, two people that have moved into each other’s homes, so they become interconnected in that way. Yeah, I think that’s very important and it’s something I just see come up over and over again when I do research on the rulers of the houses. Yeah.

All right. And then 12th house – you had a really good 12th house example with Frida Kahlo, didn’t you?

SO: Yeah. And I did have an 11th house example, too, but I don’t know if you wanna do that one now or after with —

CB: Yeah, let’s do —

SO: — Harvey Milk.

CB: — your 11th house example. That was a great one.

SO: Yeah.

CB: So this is the birth chart of Harvey Milk. Do you wanna describe it briefly for the audio listeners?

SO: Sure. So he’s Harvey Milk; he has Aquarius Ascendant, and we’re looking at his 11th house, which is occupied by Sagittarius, and the 11th house of friends, groups, alliances, also social movements – really strong social house. So Sagittarius, ruled by Jupiter, and Jupiter is in the 5th house of, you know, basically, it’s creative self-expression, but how else would you classify this here, Chris?

CB: I think it’s like the 5th house was originally associated with children and with procreation, but it was also the 5th house was said to be the place of good fortune and it was associated with Venus. And by extension of being associated with children as well as good fortune and positive things, it also came to be associated with like, sex and sexuality as well —

SO: Right.

CB: — and I think that’s a pretty solid signification that’s pretty reliable is that the 5th house has to do with sex and sexuality in a person’s life.

SO: Right. And that’s hugely tied to his 11th house of his social vision or rather his vision for society is to basically ban discrimination against sexuality. So you really see the workings of the 11th house ruler operating through the realm of sexuality.

CB: So could you describe like, imagine you’re explaining it to somebody from a foreign country that doesn’t know who Harvey Milk is, like what his story was, briefly?

SO: Yeah. So I would say that he was basically an icon for the LGBTQ community and he worked in policy trying to push for acceptance of the LGBTQ comunity, and he was either born or based in – I think he was based in – San Francisco. I should know that, but.

CB: Yeah. And eventually, did he also like, run for office?

SO: Yeah. I wish I had seen that film about him, but I don’t know what position he actually ran for.

CB: Okay. Yeah, so that’s really important, though, that he was very involved in the Civil Rights Movement and pushing for civil rights for gay and lesbian and queer people in order to not have like, restrictive or oppressive laws, which there still were because this was like, the 19 – what? – ‘70s, I think, time frame?

SO: Yeah. I thought it was like, ‘60s – maybe it was the ‘70s. And another thing about that chart I just noticed was that like, when you have a planet that rules the house that it’s opposite to, it’s usually in its detriment. So there was Jupiter in its detriment in Gemini, and you know, he was also considered like a martyr for the LGBT community.

CB: Right, because he ended up being like, assassinated for —

SO: Yeah.

CB: — the work that he did, right?

SO: Right.

CB: So I’m just pulling up the Wikipedia page. It says… Actually, let me…

SO: I feel terrible. As part of the LGBTQ comunity, I should know this.

CB: Sorry, buddy, you’ve lost your —

SO: I’m really failing; I’ve lost my card.

CB: You’ve lost your LGBT card after today. That’s all right. It happens to the best of us. So Harvey Milk Wikipedia – 1930 through 1978, “was an American politician and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Milk was born and raised in New York, where he acknowledged his homosexuality as an adolescent, but chose to pursue sexual relationships with secrecy and discretion well into his adult years. His experience in the counterculture of the 1960s caused him to shed many of his conservative views about individual freedom and expression of sexuality.”

He was – yeah, so I think it’s, you know, the core thing. And one of the things that’s important to mention in his chart is it’s not just the 11th house, but I noticed that the degree of his Midheaven was actually in Sagittarius so that that Jupiter is not just the ruler of his 11th whole sign house of friends and groups and social movements, but it’s also the ruler of the degree of his Midheaven. And the degree of the Midheaven, when it’s in a whole sign house other than the 10th, it imports 10th house topics into whatever whole sign house it falls so that there’s a doubling up of the topics. So that creates a doubling up of like, friends and groups and social movements with career and reputation and social standing, and so that Jupiter becomes tied in with or becomes part of that in its placement in the 5th house of sex and sexuality.

SO: Yeah. That’s a really good point. Definitely.

CB: Yeah. So and then you made the point about it also being in the place of its – since Jupiter is opposite Sagittarius, it’s in the place of its detriment or anti-domicile or exile. I had come up with another term I had been kicking around for that, but I can’t remember it right now. But because Jupiter’s in the place that’s as far away from its domicile, which is Sagittarius, as far away from home essentially as it can get, sometimes planets in detriment have this feeling of being out of place or being, you know, in a place that’s foreign to what they’re familiar with or foreign to what’s comfortable to them. So I think that might be part of what you’re describing a little bit here, as well, is he found himself sometimes being an outsider or being like, cast outside of the mainstream, you know, whatever culture, but then ending up needing to fight for that in order to fight for ensuring that people have rights like, no matter what their orientation is.

SO: Right. Right. And that instead of staying on the fringes or staying on the outside or not doing anything about it, he actually went in to try to change things on the inside for, you know, mainstream.

CB: Yeah. That’s brilliant. And Jupiter is like, conjunct Venus in a night chart in the 5th house, so it has some very good things going for it. Yeah. That’s a really good example and really awesome.

All right. So did you have – oh yeah, you had one other —

SO: Yeah.

CB: — example with Frida.

SO: Yeah, with Frida, yep.

CB: Let’s do that one.

SO: For the 12th house. Yeah.

CB: Okay. That’s a good 12th house one. So let me find… So this is Frida Kahlo’s chart, who had Leo rising and Cancer on the 12th house and the Moon in Taurus.

SO: Yeah. And I think like, before going in the 12th, I think just need to say that the ruler of the first house is in the 12th house, and I think that’s kind of necessary to just sort of like, contextualize the 12th house 10th house connection.

CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s —

SO: Yeah.

CB: — it’s not a happy like, ruler of the Ascendant in the 12th house, not just because it’s in the 12th, but also because it’s being afflicted, right?

SO: Yes, it is being afflicted by an opposition – a partile by degree opposition – from Mars. It’s like, a couple reasons for it to be maltreated here – one’s being in the 12th and then the opposition from a malefic in a bad house.

CB: Yeah, so it’s like, Leo rising. The Sun is at 13 Cancer, for those listening to the audio version; it’s conjunct Neptune at 12 Cancer, and the Sun is being opposed by a Mars-Uranus conjunction in Capricorn. Mars is at 13 degrees of Cancer, so it’s like, almost exactly like, almost to the minute – not just the degree, but almost the minute – opposing the Sun in a day chart. So Mars is the most difficult planet, this Mars-Uranus conjunction is in the 6th house, which relates not just to illness but also to injuries. The 6th house is also the place of injuries in ancient astrology. And with that, that actually – and the first house and the ruler of the first house often relates to the person’s body and physical vitality, and that came up in a really distinctive way in her life very early on, right?

SO: Yeah. When she was 18, which I think is the year – I mean, this is a little bit of a tangent, an aside, but I think when you’re 18, that’s your Sun year in one of the ancient timing techniques. I’m completely blanking on which one it is, but anyway. Yeah, when she was 18, she was in tragic, pretty intense serious tram accident where I think her spine – and the Sun, I believe, is connected to the spine in medical astrology, and Leo as well – the spine? But her spine, I think, was like, pierced by something in the bus, and so it was a really serious accident and it left her bedridden for, I think, a few months. And later in life, it meant a lot of surgeries that she had to have, so she was really affected badly by that accident. But it was during her time while she was bedridden and, you know, confined to this bed right after the accident that she actually started to make artwork and she started to paint. And of course, we know that her artwork, you know, eventually became the most influential and iconic work of the 20th century and herself as a figure, too, one of the most influential people in that period. And so the ruler of her Sun, being in Cancer, the ruler is the Moon, and the Moon is in the 10th house of career. So we see the ruler of the 12th being like, isolation and loss, confinement, and it’s really like a tragic house sometimes. And for her, it was. The ruler of that being in the 10th house of career and her reputation – it was a lot of, most of the time, through her art that she was able to really cope with the negative effects of her health, her surgeries, the difficulties of her body. And the Moon also rules the body as a significator, so yeah, it really shows up strong in her 10th house.

CB: Yeah. That’s a really good example. And so this draws out some of the 12th house stuff, like we’d read in that Latin verse earlier where it said the 12th house imprisons. Sometimes the 12th house can literally indicate prison or places of confinement, but also more broadly, it can indicate, you know, when a person is confined or stuck in a certain place against their will, that can be like, a 12th house experience. The 12th house can also represent in modern astrology like, hospitals and other things like that. So she had a major 12th house focus and emphasis, and then with the ruler of her first house representing her physical vitality and body and with that being afflicted so heavily by Mars-Uranus, having that major accident that then would really plague her and cause major health problems for the rest of her life, but then having the ruler of the 12th house be the Moon and having the Moon be in the 10th house of career and having it exalted – the Moon is in the sign of its exaltation. It’s very near the degree of the Midheaven. And that she was able to take, you know, a lot of her pain and suffering and loss and other 12th house things and kind of, I don’t wanna say “transmute” that, but like, put that on display in her artwork and to express that in her artwork, and that’s what she became known for as, eventually, today becoming one of the most famous artists in the world in terms of like, world history and art over the past century. And that in her art, she often expresses some of the pain and some of things she was struggling with in terms of her health issues and different things that were related to that, including miscarriages and other things like that.

SO: Yeah. There’s some really striking artworks. I don’t know the titles of them, but if people look up, you know, on Google Images, there’s lots of examples of her artwork where she’s showing, yeah, she’s just letting it out, you know?

CB: Yeah. So and she would end up being like, bedridden at different points in her life but continuing to paint and produce things. And her chart and her example always reminds me of another similar chart like that that I often use in other ruler of the 12th house in the 10th example, where… It’s the chart of Galileo, actually. Let me actually pull that up. The birth chart of Galileo where, interestingly, he also had Leo rising, and he had Cancer on the 12th house, and the ruler, again, was the Moon, which is exalted in Taurus in the 10th house of career. And what’s interesting about him is he ended up, you know, he put forward during his lifetime his heliocentric hypothesis, the idea that the Sun is the center of the solar system, and this ended up getting him in trouble with the Catholic Church. And eventually at one point in his life, he was put on trial and he was condemned and they ended up putting him under house arrest so that he couldn’t leave his home and he was basically imprisoned, essentially, at home. But during that period of imprisonment, he ended up still doing some of his most important work at that time. So I see a real sort of archetypal similarity there between those two people, between Frida and Galileo, both of them having that connection with the ruler of the 12th in the 10th.

SO: That’s such a good connection, yeah, to those two charts. This is another really good exercise to do is to find these similar placements, if you can, of famous charts and see how they resonate and see the similarities, and that’s really striking.

CB: Exactly. And that’s part of what we’ve tried to do in this talk is get people in that mindset, because it’s only once you’ve… You know, now everyone who’s watching this for the first time, you’ve now been initiated into this technique and into this way of thinking. And now that you know what to look for or how to approach things, you can start doing this research and seeing the connection between charts and between people’s lives that otherwise don’t have a connection like, you know, Frida Kahlo in the 20th century and Galileo way back in the – what? – 16th, 17th century, but they have this like, parallel in their lives, and astrology’s able to describe that. And this is why – it’s through this technique. And once you start seeing it and you start unlocking that side of astrology, at least for me, it just becomes one of the most fascinating things and you just wanna study every chart you can find, because you start seeing all sorts of interesting parallels.

SO: Yeah. I think that’s a really good point to make, because I think the thing that I hear the most from skeptics – and they’re often the people who don’t really know much about astrology; they know to the extent of like, zodiac signs and maybe rising signs, but that’s about it – it’s like the skeptic sort of thing to say is that, “oh well, how can people born under the same sign be exactly the same?” And, you know, we’re looking at something that’s a lot more nuanced and specific and takes a little bit more time to learn some things before you get to that stage. And like, that is really where you start to see parallels in people’s lives is at this level, which is still a fairly early fundamental level of astrology.

CB: Yeah.

SO: We’re not doing anything too, you know, wild and crazy with techniques. It’s a really basic technique.

CB: Yeah, it’s definitely like an intermediate technique because it takes several basics where you have like, the fourfold system at the very foundation of everything, which is the fourfold system of Western astrology, which is like, planets, signs of the zodiac, aspects, and houses, and then that’s the basics. And then you can do those things in isolation, but then the next level, the intermediate stage, is you start combining them together, and the rulers of the houses is like the first gateway into that, because that also then leads you into studying planetary condition. So there’s the point in my course right after this where I teach, like, bonification and maltreatment conditions, which are the specific conditions for determining if a planet’s really well-placed or if it’s really poorly placed. You know, while these are like, more intermediate things, you know, astrology does start getting somewhat complicated at this point, and this is where you see that astrology is this complex system. It’s not this simplistic thing of just like, Sun sign astrology, which is what skeptics assume and that’s usually as far as most skeptics surprisingly ever really research it. But it really is this complex system for studying people’s lives and for studying people’s fate. And of course, any system that could attempt to do something as wild or as impressive as attempting to describe a person’s fate and describe the most important events in their life, of course a system like that’s gonna have to be somewhat complicated. So it does start getting complicated at this point, but it’s still understandable and you can still break it down into basic pieces and principles that follow a logic that is clear and is relatively straightforward, and that’s what I love about it, and then trying to outline the principles of that as clearly as I can has been part of my work here.

SO: Yeah. One of the things that I love about this technique in particular, too, is that you really get to see that astrology is like a two-way street. So, there’s like, the input of the heavens to us, and there’s like the output that we’re like, living our lives, and we know that a person doesn’t need to know astrology in order for their lives to accurately reflect their chart. But we can also put the input into certain parts of our chart when we know and understand some techniques and we can apply those techniques to our own chart. We can put energy into certain areas, you know, some things may be doing well. Some things may be challenged. Some things maybe need healing. And we can like, be more aware of that and put energy into those parts of the chart to make them resonate with something that’s closer to like, the lifeforce energy, and that’s really powerful. That’s a really powerful thing to be able to do and to be able to know how to do.

CB: Yeah. For sure. That’s a really great point, and that sometimes like, knowing some of these placements or patterns about a person’s life can sometimes help you give you perspective to contextualize things or give you perspective to try to work on things and to try to work towards more positive outcomes for certain placements or certain parts of the life.

SO: Definitely.

CB: Yeah.

SO: Yeah.

CB: All right. Well, let me summarize then what we’ve just learned. So considerations recap: one, combining the meaning of both houses is your first step. Two, determining whether the ruler is in a good house or a bad house is one of the considerations to take into account. And then three, determining the condition of the ruler by sign, by aspect, and by all of the other things that astrologers take into account for planetary condition, which are things like sect, benefic and malefic, aspects, bonification and maltreatment conditions and so on and so forth, of which that’s a whole complicated thing, but to distill it into the basic principle, just paying attention to the ruler of the house will tell you a lot about how those topics work out in a person’s life.

All right, so let’s transition into talking about the other part of this, which is the rulers of the houses is one thing, and you can look at it for sort of like universal statements about the native’s life or about some of the major things that will happen in it, which sometimes I describe as like, the natal promise of the birth chart itself. But there’s also other techniques that you can use to determine when certain things will happen in a person’s life and when that natal promise will be delivered.

So this is where we’re gonna get into timing the activation of the rulers of the houses using an ancient timing technique known as annual profections. So I’ve done a whole episode on annual profections before, so I’m not gonna dwell on this too much, but briefly to reiterate the main points of that, there’s this lost collection of timing techniques in ancient astrology known as timelord systems. And the premise of the timelord systems is that not all placements in a person’s birth chart are activated at all times. But instead, the latent natal potential of a planetary placement becomes activated at certain fixed periods in a person’s life when a planet is activated as a timelord using these different timelord techniques. So the most widespread and important timelord technique in ancient astrology was known as annual profections. And annual profections is also the most simple timelord technique, but despite how simple it is, it’s also one of the most powerful ones.

So with annual profections, you basically just count one sign per year from the rising sign, and whatever sign you come to, the ruler of that sign will be activated in that year. So for example, let’s say we have a chart with Cancer rising where the person’s first whole sign house is Cancer. So the first year of their life from their birth until their first birthday will be activating the sign Cancer and the ruler of that sign, which is the Moon. Then when the person turns one year old, when they have their first birthday, it moves to the next sign in zodiacal order, which in this instance it would be Leo, so it moves to their second house. It activates Leo and it activates the Sun as the ruler of that house so that the Sun becomes the timelord for the year. Then at their next birthday, it moves to Virgo and activates the ruler of Virgo, which is Mercury, and so on and so forth – it just keeps jumping forward one sign for each year of the native’s life. Eventually it comes back around at the age of 12, and when you turn 12 years old, the cycle comes back around to your rising sign and then starts over again. So at 12 years old, it activates your first house again, then at 13 years old, it activates your 2nd house, and so on and so forth. It just keeps doing this every 12 years so that eventually like, when you turn 24, it comes back to the first house. At 36, it comes back to the first house and so on and so forth. So very quickly, here’s just a diagram for the video viewers that shows all of the different profections years and the ages that are associated with different houses.

All right. So in terms of the rulers of the houses and timing their activation, you can actually time the activation of the rulers of the houses using annual profections. So two potential times when the rulers of the houses can be activated through profections are one, when the profection comes to a particular house. Like, for example, when the profection comes to the 10th house, it’s gonna activate the 10th house of career as well as the ruler of the 10th house of career, and that’s one of the ways that profections can activate the rulers of the houses. The second way the rulers of the houses can be activated is when the profection comes to the sign that contains the ruler of a house. It will activate that planet and it will activate the houses that the planet rules, and I’ll show some examples of that. So this is kind of like a basic and intermediate approach to this technique of timing the activation of the rulers of the houses. There’s a third, more advanced method that I teach in my course on Hellenistic astrology for timing the activation, but I’m not gonna go into that today because I teach it in that full lecture.

All right. So activating the house. So this one’s pretty simple. When you count profections using whole sign houses and the profection year comes to a specific house, the topics associated with that house are activated. So for example, if the profection comes to your 2nd house, then the 2nd house is activated and the topic of finances is gonna become more prominent, potentially, in that year. When it comes to your 7th house, relationships are more prominent. When it comes to your 10th house, then career may be more prominent. So in addition to that, the ruler of the house also becomes activated in that year. So that means that the significations of the house that the ruler is located in are also going to become relevant. So for example, if the 7th house is activated, and the ruler of the 7th house is in the 11th house of friends, then it may indicate a year in which, let’s say for example, relationships with friends could be one delineation, and that’s gonna become more important to you in that year of your life compared to other years. Does that make sense?

SO: Definitely, yeah.

CB: All right. So let’s give an example of this, I think, starting with the first basic method. So this is the birth chart of Lisa Marie Presley who was the daughter of the famous musician Elvis Presley. So Elvis, sadly, died when Lisa Marie Presley was only nine years old, and what ended up happening is he had written a will where he set it up so that if he died prematurely, that her inheritance was supposed to be held in a trust until she turned 25 years old. So what ended up happening is essentially that the day that she turned 25, on her birthday that year, she inherited Elvis’s entire estate and got access to it, which was estimated to be worth about $100 million at that point in time. So what’s interesting is she was in, when she turned 25 years old – the day she turned 25 years old, she moved into a 2nd house profection year. So let’s count through the profections with her chart. She has Leo rising, so the first year of her life would be Leo. Then the 2nd year of her life would be Virgo. The third year of her life would be Libra, and you just count all the way around each of the signs of the zodiac. Eventually at 12 years old, it comes back to Leo, and then it starts the cycle over again. So Leo is 12, Virgo is 13, Libra is 14, Scorpio is 15, Sag is 16, Capricorn is 17, Aquarius is 18, Pisces is 19, Aries is 20. Taurus is 21, Gemini is 22, Cancer is 23, Leo is 24 – the cycle starts over again – and the 25, literally the day she turns 25, she moves into a 2nd house profection year. So obviously at that point, it activates her 2nd house, but it also activates the ruler of her 2nd house, which in this case since the 2nd house for her is Virgo, the ruler is Mercury. And Mercury itself is located in Pisces in the 8th house of death, inheritance, and other people’s money. So she had the activation of the 2nd house of finances but also the activation of the ruler of the 2nd house of finances, which was located in the 8th house of inheritance. So that’s why I’m sort of including this is the technique of the ruler of the houses is not just stunningly impressive about describing some very specific or highly specific things that will happen to people during the course of their life, but you can also use timing techniques to determine when those specific things will happen at specific times in a person’s life, which you know, to me has always been pretty mind-boggling and pretty impressive.

SO: Yeah. It is remarkable. It’s really… When you can use it for your own chart or anyone’s chart, it helps you to get a sense of where things are going and where things were, and that just helps you to understand, like helps you to navigate things a lot more and kind of get a sense for what’s coming and maybe where to turn your attention to. Because there might could be opportunities or situations that you wouldn’t think are significant but might be, actually.

CB: Right. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it becomes really good in terms of that and just in terms of not just knowing what will happen but knowing when it will happen, and that’s part of what we do. That’s part of our job as astrologers is to figure that out.

All right, so that’s Lisa Marie Presley. There we go. So this is the birth chart of Robert Kennedy. Robert Kennedy has Taurus rising, Cancer on the 3rd house of siblings, the ruler of the 3rd house of siblings is the Moon, which is located at 28 degrees of Capricorn and unfortunately in the 9th, but it’s applying to a square with Mars in a day chart so that the ruler of the 3rd house of siblings was significantly afflicted or maltreated. And what ended up happening is that his brother became the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, but John F. Kennedy was killed two days after Robert turned 38 years old, which is to say two days after he moved into a 3rd house profection year where the Moon was activated. So he turned 38 years old, which is a 3rd house year, activating Cancer and activating the 3rd house of siblings, but then it also activated the Moon, which is afflicted by Mars. So the planetary condition really came into play there in indicating a more negative outcome rather than a more positive one.

SO: Wow. That’s a really strong example.

CB: Yeah. So it’s planetary condition… Here’s the birth chart of Steven Spielberg. This one’s funny because like, this one I came across years ago, more than a decade ago, when somebody challenged me about the concept of sect, and they said, “Sect doesn’t work” or like, “Sect doesn’t make sense” because they just like, picked out an example and they said, “Here. Steven Spielberg is a famous movie director and he’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He’s one of the most successful directors, you know, of the 20th century, but he has Saturn in the 2nd house in a night chart, but he’s extremely wealthy, so obviously sect doesn’t work.”

So I didn’t know anything about Steven Spielberg’s life, so I just like, looked it up and started researching it and also looked at his chart, and I was like, “Well, you know, how is Saturn connected to the houses in this person’s chart?” And Steven Spielberg has Cancer rising, and Capricorn is on the cusp of the 7th house, and Aquarius is on the cusp of the 8th house. So basically, Saturn is ruling the 7th house of relationships and the 8th house of shared resources, and it’s located in the 2nd house of the native’s personal finances. So what happened is that when Steven Spielberg was 42 years old, he went into a 7th house profection year, which activated the 7th house of marriage and partnership and relationships. It activated his natal Saturn placement as the lord of the year, and Saturn is, again, ruling the 7th and the 8th and it’s located in the 2nd. And what happened is he got a divorce from his partner, and there was this famous incident where he had… Somehow, like, they had had some sort of like prenuptial agreement, but it was written on a napkin, and the judge looked at it, and he was like, “What is this?” And he threw it out so that it nullified the prenuptial agreement that they evidently had, and then as a result of that, his ex-wife then got an estimated hundred million dollars, which was half of his fortune at the time. And at the time, it was actually the most costly celebrity divorce in history, and I think it still is ranking up there with one of the most costly celebrity divorces in history.

So, you know, this is my like, long way of answering that critic from long ago and pointing out the technique still works. Like, Saturn in the 2nd house, even though Steven Spielberg is a very wealthy person and obviously it didn’t indicate that he would not be wealthy, but rather he did still have what, to him at least, was a subjectively negative experience at one point in his life and a particularly notable one where he, you know, had the most costly celebrity divorce in history when that placement was activated through annual profections. And at least for him, he experienced something that presumably he experienced as subjectively negative. So yeah, that’s another example of that.

SO: Yeah. There’s nothing like… I love this as an example of like, your 8th house ruler being in detriment and a judge just saying, “What is this garbage?” And crumpling it up and throwing it away.

CB: Right. And it’s retrograde as well, so it’s like, something that’s like, unique or out of the ordinary or… Also, retrogrades can be about like, retractions, like something is given but something is also taken away. Yeah. So that’s a funny example.

SO: And disobedience, too, I’ve noticed with retrogrades. Rebelliousness and disobedience, and it’s kind of like, writing your prenup on a napkin is a little unusual.

CB: Yeah, it’s a little out of the ordinary. Evidently not recommended. I do enjoy napkin astrology, like when you’re out with a group of astrologers, and you’re like, talking astrology and you start looking at each other’s charts at conferences, like writing a chart out on a napkin is a very common experience. But that’s a much more positive use of napkins.

SO: Yes.

CB: Yeah. All right, so that’s Steven Spielberg. This is Amanda Knox, who is an American who was in college, and she went to study abroad for a year for college and she went to Italy shortly after she turned 20 years old. So 20 years old is a 9th house profection year. She was born with Gemini rising. Her 9th house is Aquarius; the degree of the Midheaven is there. The ruler of the 9th house is Saturn, which is located in the 7th house of relationships, and Saturn is also the ruler of the 8th house of death and mortality. And so what happened is in this year, she went to study in Italy; she had a boyfriend, and she had a roommate out there in Italy. She is originally from America. A few months into her stay, her roommate was murdered, basically, and then Amanda Knox and her boyfriend were accused of being involved and having done the murders. And initially, she was convicted and sentenced to 26 years in prison, but she continued to like, plead her innocence and say that she had nothing to do with it. And later, she ended up being acquitted and actually being exonerated, and they said that it was a false case that didn’t have any basis. So she ended up, evidently, like not doing it and being freed and then going back home to America or to the United States.

So this is an example, particularly, because it’s like, it’s tying in all these topics of like, the 9th house and foreign travel and foreign countries, the 8th house and like, death and mortality, and the 7th house, which is relationships and the fact that it wasn’t just her but also her and her boyfriend were charged with this and convicted initially, but then eventually both of them were set free.

SO: Wow.

CB: So —

SO: Wrong – yeah, wrong person at the wrong time, kind of. Wrongly accused.

CB: Well, and that’s something – because I had another example of that with Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter in the episode on the Lot of Fortune with Kira a few months ago where he was also wrongly imprisoned. Interestingly, actually, that was also another… In his case, it was like, a retrograde Mercury that was like, ruling the Lot of Fortune that was tied in with it, but in this case, it’s interesting that Saturn is again retrograde and the idea of like, a false report or things going awry. But yeah, that’s obviously a very unique situation that she found herself in and that it’s something then that she became known for and will always become known for to some extent even though she’s now gone on and she’s doing other things with her life and pursuing other careers and other successes and things. But you know, the placements did just show a distinctive scenario, but also the activation was perfectly timed based on the annual profections. It’s also worth mentioning that the degree of the Midheaven is there in Aquarius, and this is something that she received worldwide notoriety from at the same time.

all right, so that’s that one. I think the last one is just Carl Sagan. So this one – he was a famous astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist and astrobiologist, and he wrote the original Cosmos television series, which was like a wildly popular television series about the cosmos and the solar system and about promoting basically science, essentially. He was a great promoter of science and science learning. So the Cosmos series premiered in the fall of 1980, and he was in a 10th house profection year which activated Aquarius. And there we find Saturn, and Saturn was the ruler of the year since it was a Aquarius profection year, and Saturn was the ruler of his 9th house. So it was activating the 9th house, which relates to astronomy, to education and teaching, but also to foreign travel and foreign countries. One of the things that I thought was interesting is that the series ended up becoming so popular that it was viewed by more than half a billion people across 60 different countries, and it became, I think, the main thing that he became known for. So it’s interesting – in his case, it’s like, we have this close connection between the ruler of the 9th house and the 10th house and his 10th house being very strong and prominent there in Aquarius and being activated in that year.

SO: Wow. That’s amazing.

CB: Yeah. So —

SO: A really good one.

CB: That is the initial technique, which was just paying attention to the ruler of the year and that house being activated and then whatever house the ruler is located in being activated as well. The second part of the technique or the other way you can determine when the ruler of a house will be activated is when the profection comes to a sign that contains a planet, the house or houses that that planet rules will be activated in that year, which sounds complicated but it’s actually pretty simple. Here’s Ted Kennedy’s chart. He was the other brother of John F. Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and Ted Kennedy, the native owner of this chart, he was 31 years old when his brother was assassinated. And 31 is actually an 8th house profection year, so his profections came around to the 8th house, and the 8th house not only activates the topic of death just by virtue of activating the 8th house, but in activating Leo, Jupiter is located there in his birth chart. And as we talked about earlier, Jupiter is the ruler of his 3rd house of siblings. So in this instance, the profection year is activating the ruler of the 3rd house of siblings which is located in the 8th house of death, so it therefore is activating the houses that the planet rules.

SO: And also activating the 12th house, too, a little bit, with Sagittarius ruling the 12th.

CB: Yeah, it’s activating the 12th house, which is the place of loss. It’s even activating in a more complicated – that it’s also activating the Sun itself as the ruler of the year, and the Sun itself is like, you know, the ruler of the 8th house of death and it’s located in the 3rd house of siblings. So that’s the other reason why mutual receptions are super important.

All right, so that’s Ted Kennedy. Another one in the same family, so just, you know, looking at the same event from the perspective of different family members, this is the birth chart of John F. Kennedy, Jr., who was the son of John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated. And President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963, and his funeral was held just three days later on November 25th. November 25th was also his son’s birthday. So the owner of this chart, he was basically like, turning three on the day that his father’s funeral was occuring. And when you turn three, he had just moved into on that day a 4th house profection year. He had Virgo rising. Sagittarius on the 4th house of the parents and the father. And the Sun is the only planet that’s located in the 4th house, and the Sun in this instance is the ruler of the 12th house of loss, basically. So we have an activation of the ruler of the 12th house of loss in the 4th house of parents, and literally on the day of that birthday, like, his father’s funeral took place. So we see going back to the very beginning of this person’s life, the first time he ever experienced this profection year, we see that very important event and life-defining event happened at that time.

SO: Geez.

CB: Yeah. So that is pretty heavy, but that just gives you an idea. All right. Just two more examples. One last one to return to – Lisa Marie Presley. We talked about how, you know, the day that she turned 25, she was in that 2nd house profection year, which activated Mercury as the ruler of the 2nd house, which is placed in the 8th house of inheritance. But also, she has Jupiter located in the 2nd house of finances, and Jupiter itself is the ruler of the 8th house of inheritance. So in that way, the profection coming to the sign that contained Jupiter, the ruler of the 8th house, was also an activation of that placement that represented her inheritance. So that again explains why mutual receptions are important.

And then finally, to give one last example, this is the birth chart of a native who has the ruler of the 4th house of the home and living situation in the 9th house of foreign travel. So they had Virgo rising, Sagittarius on the 4th house of the home and living situation, and the ruler is Jupiter, which is located in Taurus in the 9th house of foreign travel and foreign places. So what happened is that the native grew up for his entire life having just strong urge to live abroad that he had from a very young age. And then eventually when he got older, when he turned 32 years old, he moved into a 9th house profection year, so it was activating Taurus, and it was activating that Jupiter placement, which is the ruler of the 4th house of home in the 9th place of foreign travel. And what happened is that he ended up moving to live in a foreign country in that year and ended up resettling there permanently. So what we have here is like, the natal promise of the birth chart indicating something – in this instance, the desire to live abroad at some point in the native’s life with the ruler of the 4th in the 9th. But then it took the profection year to come around and activate that placement to indicate the timing of when he would finally be able to manifest or follow and live out his destiny.

SO: That’s a really powerful example. And these are things that are really specific, you know? You can, as an astrologer, if you’re using this technique, you can make fairly specific statements and predictions given this technique that we’re doing with the rulers of the houses and the profections. And of course, you keep kind of going around the wheel, so you can sort of say, well, these are the years that, you know, where that would be more likely to happen or fulfill itself. So, you know, like has been said before, it’s archetypally predictive, but sometimes these things activate very specifically, very literally, manifesting the ancient significations of the houses.

CB: Yeah, I mean, to the extent that astrologers are able to make specific predictions about a person’s life, especially about very unique things, like, it’s through techniques like the rulers of the houses that we’re able to do that. But then, yeah, and through this, we can obviously see how you can make some very specific statements about some of the most defining characteristics about a person’s life through the rulers of the houses. At the same time, you know, the rulers show archetypal scenarios and to the extent that they show archetypal scenarios, the trick is to figure out what the archetype is and to be able to describe that and to find a good middle ground between describing the broadest possibility of how to describe the overarching umbrella concept that is behind, you know, the connection between two houses and how you could synthesize the meanings of those houses together. But then from that, to also try to get as close as you can to specifying some specific outcomes, especially through the analysis of the condition of the ruler and other things that can help narrow down the range of possible manifestations so that you can kind of like, squeeze the archetype and take it as far as you can towards making the most specific possible statement that you can make. But ultimately, there’s still a tension there because the technique is still ultimately symbolic and is archetypal and therefore, there’s a range of possible manifestations, which consequently is also the reason that nobody should get too freaked out by a difficult placement or indication with a ruler of a difficult house just because there’s such a wide range of manifestations that sometimes you can push for more constructive ones. And even though we’ve seen some very negative ones, we’ve also seen some more constructive ons where people have done very positive things within the context of working with, you know, people who are in a more difficult set of circumstances.

SO: Absolutely. Yeah, like, for example, Saturn doesn’t always mean something negative. It might just mean, “Not right now,” you know? It might mean a delay; it’s not going to happen, you know, you’re going to wait, actually, for this thing.

CB: Right. And it’s like, you might not want to wait, but sometimes in retrospect, like let’s say at the end of your life, you end up realizing that waiting was the best thing you could have done because then the thing that you were truly meant to do came at the time that was right. And you become appreciative because then maybe it’s like, the right person who you were meant to meet came along at that right time even if there was, let’s say, a delay or something like that.

SO: Right. Yeah.

CB: Yeah. So the rulers show – to give some concluding remarks – the rulers show archetypal scenarios. It shows how different parts of our life are connected, sometimes in very unique ways but very interesting ways, which is part, you know, it’s all part of what makes us unique as individuals is the unique experiences that we have and sometimes the things that make our life different from somebody else’s life is those unique crossovers between different topics and different houses in our chart that produce or at least correlate with some of the most unique experiences that are specific to us. It also shows – the rulers of the houses – how different people play a role in our destiny and how, while the first house and the ruler of the first house represents us in the chart, the other house and the rulers of the houses sometimes they’re about other people and the role that other people’s destinies and other people’s fate has when it intersects with ours in different ways. And that’s a really important component in astrology that needs to be explored more, because – and this is something that’s kind of new and has been a little bit unique in my research that I’ve been trying to promote through the podcast and through my research in Hellenistic astrology is recovering an astrology that’s capable of making those more concreter statements about other people in our lives and recognizing that, you know, in 20th century late psychological astrology, they had more of the view that the entire chart is you and the entire chart is like, different parts of your psyche. But from a more ancient astrological perspective, it’s clear that sometimes different parts of the chart are not you; they’re representing like, other people that are in your life and how those other people and their lives intersects with yours in important and interesting ways, and making those sorts of conceptual distinctions I think is very important for being able to, you know, make statements about a person’s birth chart to time things or even to make predictions.

SO: Yeah. It’s really amazing, because you’re weaving together other people’s like, fates with someone else’s fate. You know, those things are coming together and showing up in, you know, through houses and through different planetary patterns, so…

CB: Yeah. It makes me think of in a recent episode both on – I think in the Lot of Fortune episode with Kira, but also in the Proclus episode I did with José last month we talked about Plato’s Myth of Er and how in the Myth of Er it’s talking about the story about people prior to incarnation, their souls like, descending eventually through the planetary spheres. But they meet – that there’s these three goddesses on the outer periphery of like, the cosmos and that they’re like, turning the cosmos and that those three goddesses are the three fates, the three Moirai, who are like, weaving the fate of destiny that like, that extend the thread of destiny, that measure it and then eventually cut it. In Plato, they’re actually turning the spheres of the planets. And I think here, as you were just saying, with this technique, we get really close to that conceptualization because we’re almost like, taking the different parts of the chart and the different threads and then showing how those threads can be extended to other parts of the chart and other parts of the life and that the way that our fate and the fate of different people in our lives, that their fate sometimes becomes intertwined with our own.

SO: Yeah.

CB: Yeah. So other points to reiterate – the condition of the ruler of the house makes a huge difference. That’s the next step after learning this technique is you really have to get good with learning planetary condition because that’s crucial to really understanding how things are gonna go is understanding how to analyze what the situation of the planet is in a given chart.

SO: Yeah, and another thing I don’t know if you were gonna get to this, but like, you mentioned it before, but one thing that we take for granted is birth times. You know, having an accurate birth time is crucial for this. And one thing that I’ve learned from doing readings with people is that asking someone for their birth time is usually like, not enough. Like, you have to… What I’ve noticed is useful is to ask someone like, what their birth story is or if their birth time is written down on their birth certificate. Because a lot of times, people will say, “Oh yeah, this is the time I was born,” but it wasn’t really written down on the certificate that way, so they find out that they were maybe off or completely wrong. So yeah, I find that that’s also a really crucial factor for being able to do this.

CB: Yeah, that’s a great point, that the birth time is required for this technique and that you have to know, at the very least, the rising sign needs to accurate in order to study the rulers of the houses and that that’s one of the reason why knowing your rising sign is so important and especially the closer you can get to knowing the exact time of birth, the better, because if your rising sign is wrong, it’s gonna throw off the houses, and then all of the rulers of the houses are not gonna be correct for you either. So that’s actually a really crucial precursor for this technique.

SO: Yeah, definitely.

CB: It also, though, it then conversely becomes one of the ways that you can rectify charts, though, is through the rulers of the houses, because if you – let’s say you know that the birth occurred within a one or two-hour time frame and that you have like, two different possible rising signs. One of the things you would, if you were trying to narrow down which rising sign it was, one of the things you can look at is what the rulers of the houses are in each chart so that you can kind of like, reverse engineer what the correct chart is, and that’s something I’ve talked about extensively as like a tool or like a hack for rectifying charts in a previous episode on birth chart rectification.

SO: Yeah. And also, just like, what are we saying is the moment that the chart is impressed upon the person? You know, I remember hearing like, the moment the infant takes their first breath. It’s like, they’re a separate entity from their mother, and that at that moment, that’s when the chart – they become a separate individual person and then that’s when the chart is kind of ratified, so to speak. But like, I had… Yeah, I would be curious to have you weigh in on that, but I had a client once who was born where they were a C-section, and they weren’t able to breathe when they were taken out, and so they had to be assisted with breathing. And so it’s like, well, how do you consider – like, is the first breath when they were assisted, you know, with whatever they were being assisted with to breathe, or when they took their breath on their own, which was only a few days later after that. You know, those are the kinds of questions that are tough, I think, to… Tough questions that come up when it comes to birth times and deciding when that is.

CB: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think it’s that tough, because I think it’s based on a misconception that it was the moment of first breath, because I think when you’re looking at the rising sign, and you’re looking at the Ascendant degree, one of the things I said earlier in the episode is the symbolic connection is that the rising sign and the rising degree, especially in whole sign houses in the original system of houses from Hellenistic astrology from the very foundation of it, you’re not just looking at the rising degree but you’re looking at the entire rising sign. And so what you have there is a process, it’s a dynamic process, of the part of the sky and the cosmos and the planets that are hidden underneath the horizon, underneath the earth, from our vantage point. They rise up over the eastern horizon, and they emerge into view, and they become visible. Just like if you go out at sunrise in the morning, you start from a point where it’s completely dark and it’s darkness, but then it starts getting brighter and brighter and brighter, and the Sun starts slowly emerging just like a person who’s like, starting to be born or starting to emerge from their mother, until eventually the Sun itself peeks up over the eastern horizon and then eventually emerges into complete view. That’s I think the paradigm of the birth chart and of the moment of birth; it’s the moment of the emergence in some way of the native, but also the separation of the native, where at first when the Sun is emerging, it’s almost like, stuck to the earth or it’s almost like, a part of the earth from our vantage point. But then eventually, once the full orb of the Sun pops up enough over the horizon, you can see that it’s a distinct entity. And I did some research in writing my book on like, ancient embryology and views about this, and it seemed like some of the ancient people and especially ancient Stoics had this analogy or this idea that the baby is kind of like… The analogy that they would use is it’s kind of like a piece of fruit that’s growing on a tree, where for a long time, the fruit itself is just a part of the tree, and as we’re watching it grow initially, we’re just seeing it as being an extension of the tree. And in the same way, the ancient people at least viewed the baby as part of the mother’s body and as an extension of the mother’s body, but then eventually at the moment of birth and at the moment of emergence, suddenly the baby becomes separate from the mother’s body and becomes its own entity in the same way that a piece of fruit that grows on a tree eventually at some point matures and ripens and then drops off the tree on its own and becomes a piece of fruit and like, a separate entity. I think that’s closer to the paradigm of what’s important. And even though there were probably some important things about breath and these notions of life breath and other things like that in ancient astrology that may have been important in parallel or as adjacent things, I think there’s something about the symbolism that’s still accessible to us about the notion of planets emerging from the horizon and the native emerging from the parent that are probably the most important things to focus on as the paradigm for this.

SO: Okay.

CB: That make sense?

SO: Okay, yes, thank you.

CB: All right. You get me on these little —

SO: I know, these —

CB: — topics and I will go —

SO: Yes.

CB: — I will just go. I tried very hard in studying ancient astrology; I wanted to go back to the roots and understand everything and not take anything for granted and be able to answer any question that came up about what are the fundamental principles of astrology, so I’ve always tried to not take things for granted and to research that stuff as much as I can. And in doing so, I think oftentimes by going back to ancient astrology, you can understand the origins and the foundations of everything. And I think that’s really important, and that actually leads me to my concluding point, how I usually conclude this lecture when I used to go around to conferences and give it is by saying that, you know, techniques like this – some of these ancient techniques – we’ve recovered relatively recently. But I think it demonstrates, like, especially with these example charts, the value of studying the ancient traditions, and that ultimately, by going back into the past, we can create a better astrology for the future, not by going back into the past and staying there, but instead by going back and bringing some of the best pieces from ancient astrology forward into modern times and then synthesizing them with some of the great advances in astrology that have happened over the past century or two so that it’s really a balance of both, and that’s one of the ways that I end it. That’s the note that I ended my book on, because I think it’s important to find a balance between those two things of like, finding the good things about ancient astrology, perhaps leaving behind some of the not-so-good things, and then merging those with the best things from contemporary astrology because that’s just part of the process of the transmission of astrology that’s been happening for thousands of years now is that process of almost like, inhaling and exhaling, and moving the tradition forward, sometimes looking back, and then turning back around and moving forward again. And that’s sort of one of the stages that we’re in today with the contemporary astrological community.

SO: Definitely. Yeah. It definitely seems to be what we’ve been doing the past 40, 50, 60, 70 years?

CB: Yeah, exactly.

SO: Yeah.

CB: All right. So that’s it. I think that’s it for the rulers of the houses. So if people wanna learn more about this, I talk about it in my book, which is titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, but more specifically in my course on Hellenistic astrology, I actually go into a lot more example charts to give you the full range of different manifestations of these placements. And if you wanted to learn more about this topic, I would recommend that. So you can find more information about that course at Courses.TheAstrologySchool.com. And right now, I’m not doing consultations because I’m focused on doing the podcast and researching things, reconstructing the origins of ancient astrology, and producing these episodes, but there’s a lot of good astrologers that do, including you, I believe, Sam. You are somebody that’s —

SO: Aw, thank you.

CB: — available for doing consultations and applying this technique.

SO: Yes, I very much apply this technique. Yeah, I’m open for readings. People are more than welcome to contact me. My website is BrotherMoonHealing.com. I’m not on social media other than my website, because I’m kind of taking a step back from social media, and I kind of like that because it allows me to get a little bit of closer connection with people. So if people are interested, they can definitely reach out to me there on the ‘Connect’ part of my website that my email is there. And yeah, I do readings, and I also make myself available for one of the things I think I mentioned in the episode was I’m working on a degree in classical studies. And so for the past few years, I’ve been learning Latin and ancient Greek, and I am definitely not going to attempt to teach ancient Greek yet, but Latin is definitely on the table. So if people are interested in that, that’s certainly something that I’d like to see expand in the astrological community is an expansion of a knowledge base of those ancient languages. I think that’ll really strengthen our understanding of the texts. Even though we have a good understanding of them, it really deepens the understanding. So if people are interested in that, that’s something that I’m more than happy to do as a private tutoring or as a course or something like that, so that will be coming in the future as a more formal thing. So that’s that. Yeah.

CB: Good. Yeah. I think people should take advantage of that, both in terms of your consultation offerings as well as in that possibility of doing, you know, tutoring for you, because sometimes it can really help to have somebody to work with directly when it comes to those things.

SO: Definitely, yeah. If you’re learning on your own, that’s great, but it definitely can help to have, you know, a second eye on things, so. Yeah. Thanks, Chris.

CB: For sure. Awesome. Well, thanks a lot for joining me for this episode today. This was great, and I really enjoyed collaborating with you; it was a lot of fun.

SO: Thank you. Likewise. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. This is such a powerful technique, and you know, people should have at it. Go look at your houses!

CB: Yeah. Well, I hope people will drop us some comments in the comment section below this video on YouTube and let us know what unique combinations of the rulers of the houses you have in your chart and some specific ways that that’s played out in your life, because that’s my favorite thing is hearing people share their personal stories because then you really get… You know, we gave like, the CliffsNotes version of a bunch of these stories, but in reality, when you sit down and talk to a client or to another person about the rulers of the houses, the meanings are much deeper and much more rich when you hear a person’s entire life story. You can’t really convey that in a lecture. But I hope we’ll hear some comments from listeners who might feel comfortable sharing their stories, and maybe we could hear some more manifestations and perhaps I’ll do a followup episode at some point sharing some of those stories.

SO: Nice. That’s a great idea.

CB: Yeah. All right. Cool. Well, thanks a lot for joining me today. I think that is it for this episode, so thanks everyone for watching or listening, and we’ll see you again next time.

Shoutout to our sponsor for this episode, which is the CHANI App, the #1 astrology app for self-discovery, mindfulness, and healing. You can download it on the Apple App Store or on Google Play, or for more information, visit app.chani.com.

Special thanks to all the patrons that helped to support the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on Patreon.com. In particular, a shoutout to the patrons on our Producers tier, including patrons Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jake Otero, Jeanne Marie Kaplan, Melissa DeLano, and Sonny Bazbaz.

If you’re looking for a reliable astrologer to get an astrological consultation with, then we have a new list of astrologers on the podcast website that we recommend for readings. Most of the astrologers specialize in birth chart readings, although some also offer synastry, rectification, electional astrology, horary questions and more. Find out more information at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations.

The astrology software that we use and recommend here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is available for the PC at Alabe.com. Use the promo code ‘AP15’ to get a 15% discount. For Mac users, we recommend a software program called Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is from the creators of Solar Fire for PC, and it includes both modern and traditional techniques. You can find out more information at AstroGold.io, and you can use the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ to get a 15% discount.

If you’d like to learn more about my approach to astrology, then I’d recommend checking out my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, where I go over the history, philosophy, and techniques of ancient astrology, taking people from beginner up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts.

If you’re really looking to expand your studies of astrology, then I would recommend my Hellenistic Astrology course, which is an online course on ancient astrology, where I take people through basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, as well as guided readings of ancient texts, and by the time you finish the course you will have a strong foundation in how to read birth charts, as well as make predictions. You can find out more information at Courses.TheAstrologySchool.com.

And finally, thanks to our sponsors, including The Mountain Astrologer Magazine, which is a quarterly astrology magazine which you can read in print or online at MountainAstrologer.com, and the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is happening both in person and online, May 23-27, 2024. You can find out more information at norwac.net.