The 1st house pertains to everything from the “small” stuff of how you walk, and talk, and dress, to the larger matters of the assumptions that you make about how you need to operate in order to survive in this world, and the general style with which you approach life. It also relates to your body, your physical constitution, and your health or other conditions that might affect it. The central question that you meet in the 1st house has to do with the simplified version of yourself that you create. As you move through life in your social “wrapper,” will it leave you feeling awkward or fearful? Will you be unfocused or overbearing? Or will it help you feel confident and graceful? As you move through life, will you project a style of relaxed self-direction?

The 2nd House: The House of Resources

The 2nd house is the traditional House of Money. It pertains to how well-equipped we feel to face life. To feel self-assured we have to feel that we’re prepared to handle whatever life tosses our way. We need to equip ourselves with both tangible and intangible resources. Tangible resources include money and worldly possessions. Intangible possessions include skills, knowledge, and connections with other people. The 2nd house represents how you accumulate and apply such concrete and abstract possessions. A question, then, is whether you develop a healthy regard and a flowing approach to accumulating and using everything that you have going for you. Will you enjoy the possessions that you acquire? Will you use your resources for creative purposes? Or will you become blocked or obsessive about your worth as a person? Will you use your money or worldly possessions in an abusive fashion? The key issue that arises in the 2nd house is whether you can develop a healthy, flowing attitude toward your self-worth, as evidenced in how you approach earning money, spending it, and applying anything else that you’ve got going for you.

The 3rd House: The House of Information Exchange

The 3rd house is where we filter and absorb stimuli from our environment, process it, and turn it out again as ideas, opinions, or information. This includes learning, reading, and communication through the spoken or written word or some other media. One of the issues that we face in this part of our chart is what we do when information from our environment doesn’t match the mental map of the world that we carry around in our head. Do we distort the information, however subtly or well-intentioned we do it, so that it fits the map? Do we update the map? Do we do some combination of these two? The 3rd house also represents how we interact with elements of our relatively immediate environment, such as people whose paths we cross in our daily routines (neighbors, classmates, etc.). It governs siblings, travel across relatively short distances, buying and selling, training, negotiation and contracts, and primary and secondary education.

The 4th House: The House of Roots

We all need home and hearth. We need both a physical and an emotional environment in which we can feel safe and act freely, without inhibition. Having a place to hang our hat is important. So is being connected to people who will be loyal to us and committed to us throughout our lives. Whether or not they are related to us by blood, we need family. We need roots. We need to be part of a clan. It’s a little like what the poet Robert Frost said (“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in”), except that, in a healthy situation, the people would take you in not out of necessity but out of love. The 4th house describes our attitudes toward our home, our private life, that haven that we create from the world and how we relate to people who sleep (or used to sleep) under the same roof, including our family of origin and the second family that we create for ourselves.

The 4th house also describes the emotional underpinnings of our personality. It represents who we are at the deepest, most internal level. It symbolizes both the most heroic images and the darkest images that we have of ourselves (“I’m an invincible superhero,” “I’m a dastardly villain”). Even though these images are caricatures of us, they’re still important. They inspire us or scare us, and they help us understand what we really want. They tell us what we need to do to create balance between who we are (or are afraid of being) and the personality that we show the rest of the world. In order to absorb these self-images, we’ve got to have some peace and quiet, some time away from the hustle and bustle of life. That’s where having a safe haven in the world can come in handy.

The 5th House: The House of Self-Expression

We all need to renew ourselves. We all need to play and indulge ourselves. We need to be expressive and creative, and that’s what the 5th house is about. Creativity is something very broad here. Being creative could mean acting, or dancing, or painting, but it doesn’t have to mean that. It could be any activity in which we make some energetic, striking show of what’s inside yourself or what you value. The 5th house represents how you express ourselves creatively, whether it is by having a child or developing an idea (a “brainchild”) or a hobby. It’s how you take a creative risk, whether it is a financial risk (through gambling, or investment, or some entrepreneurial activity), or it’s an interpersonal risk (through being romantic with someone or showing your spontaneous side to someone). The 5th house is your experience of pleasure and playfulness.

The 6th House: The House of Responsibilities

The 6th house is all about become skillful and competent. It’s about acting responsibly, as a pupil, or adherent or follower in accordance with some philosophy or some cause. We all have some need to feel like we’re competent and effective. We need to be good at something that other people value. In order to become good at something, we have to act with self-discipline and engage in some measure of self-sacrifice. We can’t do whatever we want, whenever we want. We can’t strike out on our own and do only what feels good. We have to apply ourselves, and we have to learn from others. We need role models, mentors, heroes or gurus—people that will teach us a particular skill or teach us how to apply a particular set of principles in the way we live our lives. We have to voluntarily submit ourselves to some process, and then carry out whatever become our responsibilities. The 6th house represents all of these things. The 6th house also represents how you relate to anyone who depends on you for concrete support, including people in your personal life and any pets that you might have. It represents your general health, including your physical health.

The 7th House: The House of Intimacy

The 7th house pertains to our intimate relationships and our identification with other people—our ability to put ourselves in someone else’s “shoes.” Intimate relationships such as those with significant others, close friends, business partners, clients, and specialized advisors (such as lawyers and astrologers) are represented by this house. Seventh-house relationships don’t have to be cooperative. They call also be competitive, such as with legal opponents, business competitors, or other rivals. Whether the relationships are competitive or cooperative, they involve face-to-face, close encounters with others. The 7th house also represents how we deal with the public and how the public responds to us.

The 8th House: The House of Instincts

The 8th house is where we encounter intense, gut-level feelings that temporarily overwhelm our egos. We all have “hot button” issues. We all run into dark territory eventually. Someone dies. How do we cope? What happens when we die? The here is how you’ll address such issues. We can try to consciously suppress or unconsciously repress such issues and feelings, or we can explore them and absorb them so that we can move forward effectively in our lives. The 8th house is where we have the potential to transform our psychological pain into a deep sense of well-being. It’s where we decide whether to face our emotional vulnerability for the sake of healing. The 8th house is also the house of deep bonding with others. It’s where we meet issues about exposing ourselves, making ourselves vulnerable by combining what’s “yours” and what’s “mine” so that we can accomplish more together than we could do alone. Such merging could take the form of sexual union, or interweaving finances, or some other type of bond. How do we keep ourselves safe while bonding with someone else, whether through merging sexually or merging financially or through some other joining? That’s another consideration in the 8th house.

The 9th House: The House of Experiences Beyond Your Everyday Routines

The 9th house is where we confront life’s tendency to become routine and mundane through experiencing the unusual or the out-of-the-ordinary. It relates to our belief systems—our philosophical point of view on life, our ethics and values, our worldview. It’s through our belief systems that we try to discover the meaning of life or to give meaning to life. Such a belief system could be Islam or Catholicism, but it could also be art, or science, or materialism, or humanitarianism. In the 9th house, a “religion” can be anything that we believe in. By experiencing the perspectives of other people—their values, morals, and mythologies—we can test our beliefs. We can clarify what exactly it is that we believe. Traveling and meeting people from different types of backgrounds can help us do that. So can education, especially higher education. The 9th house, then, is also where we get out of our everyday physical surroundings, rub elbows with people from different walks of life, and consider major philosophical, spiritual and intellectual matters. Concretely, this house deals with religion, higher education, long-distance travel, other people’s communication, publishing, legal matters, foreigners and distant relatives.

The 10th House: The House of Public Pursuits

The 10th house is the traditional House of Career. The most public and visible part of your chart, it represents your most high-profile pursuits and the highest to which you might aspire in life. It symbols your destiny, the public roles that correspond well to the person that you are when you go home each night, and the path that you might take en route to occupying such roles. The 10th house represents your reputation, how people honor you or vilify you. It’s your social status, as a single or divorced or married person, a working or retired person, or some other category or label. It’s the shorthand way that people know you when they know of you, but they don’t know of you personally—what you might write or check off on an application form that you fill out.  

The 10th house also relates to the exercise of authority, both authority that you exercise and authority that someone else might exercise over you. As such, it represents past and present authority figures: parents, work supervisors and employers, and representatives of institutions such as business companies, the government, the law, and organized religion. We humans are social creatures, and we tend to have pecking orders or hierarchies of position in our societies. The 10th house describes our concern with status, how we acting on behalf of our community, and how we stand by some principle or ideal in public. It represents your job as a higher power might define it, whether it’s the same as the work that you get paid to do or not. 

The 11th House: The House of Goals

The 11th house is where you stretch toward whatever future you envision, or you drift along aimlessly, going nowhere fast. It represents the goals and priorities that you set for yourself, especially those that require the participation of other people in order for you to be able to accomplish them. The 11th house is the traditional House of Friends, but let’s be clear about what “friends” means in connection with this house. Here, friends are people with whom you share a sense of common cause. Whether or not you like each other, you cooperate with each other in order to attain some mutual goal, such as helping the same place of worship, or club, or company thrive. Friends here could include any individuals, groups, organizations or movements with which you join forces, to get from the present to your future. You network with them, or you hang out with them, and you identify with them. The 11th house is the house of the future, and as you become older and more mature, planets in the 11th house become more significant in your life. For example, if you have Pluto in the 11th house, then the issues associated with Pluto become increasingly significant once you reach middle age.

The 12th House: The House of Release

The 12th house includes those experiences that are beyond our control and disrupt our identification with our egos. It also represents our spiritual life, whether that means meditating, engaging in religious practices, reading spiritually inspired works of literature, or taking selfless action on behalf of others. The 12th house also relates to behind-the-scenes, secluded or confined activities such as in hospitals or prisons, intellectual work carried out in solitude, and matters that are conducted behind closed doors or swept under the rug, away from the general knowledge of the public.

© Brian Habit - The Proud Phoenix, 2004
(All Rights Reserved)