The Astrological Houses
©2007 Antero Alli
THE FIRST HOUSE -- BEHAVIOR
This area shows us how we act out, behave and express ourselves, whether we are aware of these reactions or not. First House experience is not self-conscious, planned or contrived but an expression of instinctual realities symbolized by the Rising Sign and any planets (forces) residing there. First House represents how we experience our own energy, that unique and distinct frequency; like the smell of your own body. This is how consciousness experiences itself through The Body. Though all human bodies are basically alike, each one also expresses highly idiosyncratic differences such as fingerprints and genetic coding. In this way, the First House also expresses the birth of ego or what sets each of us apart. This comes forth in our behavior, how we react and respond to each and every moment, how we move across space or enter a room. The First House conveys our unique movement and energetic signature and how we sense what is most personal and personally relevant to ourselves. It is, in a sense, how we are typecast in our own movie and forms the basis of our personality, an essential element for any meaningful relationship (7th house).
THE SECOND HOUSE -- WORTHINESS
After a basic sense of selfhood is established, we need to assure our worthiness to continue surviving. In any materialistic society money is assigned the highest value (hence the traditional association of the 2nd house with income and finances). The underlying essence of this House, however, is really about personal survival criteria and what makes your life worth living. How is security defined ? Look to the governor of your 2nd House for clues. What is it that, if you did not have enough of, would render your life worthless to you? Look to the planets residing here (if none reside here, look to the depositor of the governor). Planets here also represent our assets, a clue to how we can generate income using whatever resources we have. Our survival agendas and core values express territoriality and propriety. A kind of possessiveness naturally results from deep investment of personal energy to assure our survival. Earning power means whatever can be earned, can also be owned. The 2nd House relates to our earning power, not just for money but for all things. The 2nd House represents how you can stabilize yourself in the face of great change, crisis and shock (8th House).
THE THIRD HOUSE -- THINKING
After basic survival needs are met, we are more free to think, learn and educate ourselves. We learn to make associations and come to conclusions. We start “mapping” our experiences by the way we interpret them and communicate our ideas with others. We conceptualize our world by the way we think, talk and write about it. The 3rd House governor indicates our “learning style”, the approach our conceptual minds favor when learning anything new. Planets (forces) residing here tend to be “chatty” by the way they insist on staying interactive. You can say we "speak" and communicate through these forces. The processes here are steeped in networking and making connections, requiring constant stimulation and learning experiences. This House can show us how we tend to solve our problems or try to solve them. It is where and how we make our plans but not necessarily how they are realized. This is the House of Ideation and Conceptualization, as we attempt to translate more of the big picture, nonverbal intuitive impressions and perceptions (9th house).
THE FOURTH HOUSE -- SUSTENANCE
Conceptualization can only take us so far before we hunger for something deeper and more satisfying. The 4th House expresses the greatest depth of all the Houses and why its governor is sometimes called the Nadir. The Bottom. Here we can find the roots of what sustains us emotionally, and how comfort, satisfaction and nurturing is known and defined. Traditional associations of Family and Home ring true here, however, not all families and homes bring comfort and nurturance. The underlying essence here addresses how we set up a support system to maintain our lives. Look to the governor, or Nadir, for clues and the planets residing here. The 4th House connects us to the genetic depths of our ancestral legacies, the family codes passed down through generations that define the clan we were born into and emerged from. Deeper still we find our geomantic resonances with the Earth below as our first spiritual Mother. Sometimes the sign at the Nadir can indicate the type of bioregion we feel most at home living in. How you live your life (lifestyle) and what kind of life you need to be living to best support your goals and ambitions (10th house) make up the cage-giving agendas of the Fourth house.
THE FIFTH HOUSE -- CELEBRATION
Once our support systems are intact and we know how to feed ourselves, it is only natural to want to get out, play and have some fun. The 5th house brings us into joyous celebration and creation of our own world. Traditionally related to art, romance and children, the essence of the 5th House serves the wonder and enchantment of the Inner Child archetype and the romantic talent for falling in love with almost anything. Each of us comes into the creative process differently, as symbolized by the sign governing this House, to express what is within us in a dynamic act of celebration. We not only create our own worlds, we also get to inhabit them. Planets residing here can symbolize artistic talents and/or Muses aroused through their activaton via improvised expression. The mysteries of creation show us that ultimately we are not THE creators but willing vessels through which creation flows and manifests itself. When we forget this core truth our self-image inflates and our swelling ego eventually corrupts whatever talent we had through excessive redundancy (the Wayne Newton Syndrome). An easy truth to forget when you’re having too much fun. Big egos can be balanced with the help of friends and others in the community (11th house) who care enough to remind us that we are not the only creative genius or artist in town.
THE SIXTH HOUSE -- MAINTENANCE
To minimize self-destructive creative burnout, we learn temperance, discipline and service to work that benefits others as well as ourselves. The 6th House involves the toil and the drudgery for maintaining those routines that preserve the quality of life we have grown accustomed or, that we strive for. Traditionally related to issues of Health and Employment, the 6th house can show us how to efficiently manage the stresses of living or get sick trying. The orientation here is utilitarian; the routines that function best to maintain the quality of our daily lives. The 6th house governor can also indicate the employment conditions best suited to our temperament, as can the planets residing here. Work, work, work. 6th house activities are commonly “ego-corrosive” when the focus of our employment shifts away from the ego towards meeting personal survival needs and, in the case of certain transpersonal causes, the survival needs of the many. The 6th house places us in the thick of community business processes, the hustle bustle of our time-as-money, punch-clock economic schedules and the skill set and technologies (tools) required to do our work. When the mounting pressures of work overwhelms us, we stress out and naturally seek escape (12th house).
THE SEVENTH HOUSE -- RELATING
The transition from 6th to 7th houses marks a major bridge linking lower and upper hemispheres of the entire chart. Whereas the lower six houses represent stages of self-development, the upper six houses link the self to greater realities starting with how we relate with another person. So much of what passes for “relating” is actually more steeped in self-involvement and why our interpersonal intimate relationships often suffer and signify the most difficult area of human experience. The Descendent, or the sign governing the 7th house, represents those conditions that make any relationship attractive to us. What are the conditions you need to stay related ? The characteristics of this sign symbolize your relationship check list: what tends to attract us to another and what needs to be present to commit into a long term relationship (5th house romances are more short-term). The 7th house represents the dance of courtship and how we can most honestly become our most attractive self. This idea often runs counter to our self-image and why the 7th house opposes the 1st House of Self. To truly relate, we must know how to get over ourselves to some degree and perceive the other in their own light. It's a dynamic seesaw balance; how to be true to oneself and aware of another. How to relate without losing individual integrity ? 7th house planets symbolize specific forces that become activate when we engage in any one-to-one relationship: intimate, business and/or friendship. Often times, we are most attracted to those who personify these 7th house forces until we are ready to embody them more ourselves. (1st House)
THE EIGHTH HOUSE -- CHAOS
Chaos is a simple word for a complex and unpredictable process tied to the way life changes, evolves and mutates. When the conscious ego faces realities greater than itself, it either surrenders and undergoes a transformation or, it resists and undergoes a transformation. Either way, transformation is inevitable. Chaos acts as an evolutionary trigger, testing and pushing the limits of our comfort zones, assumptions, definitions and perceptions. Chaos forces us to stretch, develop and outgrow obsolete modes. In a state of surrender, our desires can get fired up for more intensity, more passion and living closer to the edge of existence. We cultivate a taste for the extreme. The sign ruling your 8th house can indicate that aspect of yourself that, when integrated, can trigger meaningful change in your life. Planets here represent forces within you that are hungry for change and are catalyzed when you put yourself "through the mill". When we reach the breaking point of enduring so much change we want to puke, we naturally seek out more consistency and maybe even a more ordinary life (2nd house).
THE NINTH HOUSE -- REVELATION
After surviving any genuine 8th house transformative processes, we can't help but emerge with new perspectives and fresh ways of seeing. We experience sudden epiphanies and revelations of truth. Our naked visions of truth eventually succumb to a our naive attempts to preserve its purity by forming beliefs and dogmas around it (religion is often associated with the 9th house). The 9th house is as the altar of the chart. The planets here represent forces and dynamics we tend to exalt above everything else in our lives. These 9th House energies expand our consciousness and bring us closer to truth as we know it. The 9th House is traditionally associated with relgion, philsophy, metaphysics, institutes of higher learning, and long-distance travel because all these activities can expand our consciousness beyond the mundane level of existence. The sign governing the 9th house indicates what might constitute “higher learning” for us; often times, this will not be what we think but what we intuitively know as true. in the 9th house we find the big picture birdseye view of our lives that can also miss the details so apparent in the 3rd house.
THE TENTH HOUSE -- OFFERING
Sometimes, it’s not enough to search; we must also find. When the searching spirit of our 9th house vision finds its target in the consolidating ambition for realizing our dreams, we have entered the 10th house. Here we find and project our unique contribution to the world at large. Traditional 10th house terms --“career”, “fame”, “success”, “status”, “reputation” -- hold truth yet what we actually have to offer may not fit into any known or socially-accepted profession. We may even disdain the glitz of fame or abhor public life. Yet everyone has a 10th house. Putting aside these corporate terms, let's look to the cycles of agriculture to guide us. If the 1st house represents the first seeds we plant, and the houses that follow express various stages of their development and growth, then the 10th house symbolizes the harvest. “We reap what we sow”. Harvest time is work-intensive. Get that fruit to market before it rots! Whatever sign rules the 10th house (sometimes called the Midheaven) represents the characteristics of our best face, or public image, the platform our reputation can be built on or, if betrayed, destroyed. 10th house planets symbolize aspects of ourselves on display, as if the whole world is watching. 10th house can be a very vulnerable place for anyone overly sensitive to public opinion and its potential for slander and scandal. All the more reason to root deeply in a strong 4th house support system just in case it all topples down and collapses.
THE ELEVENTH HOUSE -- COMMUNITY
After harvesting ourselves we natrually seek the company of our peers, our people, those we share common unity with -- our community -- to share our fortunes and our losses. The social fabric of our lives weaves us into concentric circles of strangers, acquaintances, friends, tribes and groups, and societies we somehow attempt to fit in with. Somehow. Over the course of our lifetime, the unpredictable nature of social interactions continues to change the shape of our friendships and tribal affiliations. The 11th house governor (house cusp) can indicate the qualities we seek in friendships. Planets here can symbolize something of who we are in the village, what characters and roles we play in the collective drama. Though the 11th house is not the last house, it does represent the final stage of the grand astrological 12-phase cycle engaging the external world at large. Here in the 11th house, we get a glimpse of the final flowering of our entire life’s dreams and ambitions and, the friends we share that with. How friendships are made and broken remains an essential 11th house criteria for community-building, of knowing who your friends are, with the pacts that bind us and the betrayals that separate us. When our selfhood is consumed by the din of too many people, it may be time to recreate ourselves in the 5th house world of our own designs.
THE TWELTH HOUSE -- SOLITUDE
The final stage of the grand astrological cycle begins here with the dissolution of our previous identifications with the outer world -- friends, career, religion, relationships, work, family, etc. -- towards a deepening connection with the immaterial, internal landscape of the soul and its subconscious domain of dreams, memories and repressions. In psychological terms, the 12th House represents the depository of the subconscious where we stuff and repress aspects of our nature we are not ready to face or expose to others. In spiritual terms, the human need to withdraw our attention from, and identification with, external stimulus can express a genuine longing to merge with the divinity within. Our innermost vertical sources -- “the stars above, the soul within and the earth below” -- can connect us with spiritual energy, information and guidance. Solitude is the gratifying aspect of being alone, all-one, at one with oneself. This solitude can also lead to a sense of oneness and unity with all of life. By contrast, lonliness acts as a pained mask we sometimes wear when resisting our solitary needs to withdraw and reflect, to do nothing and simply be. After our beings are cleansed by these vertical sources, we are more ready to return to the noisy village and the 6th house work at hand, refreshed and renewed.