Lesson 5 · 9 min
The houses
The houses divide the sky around the birthplace into twelve areas of life. They depend on the exact time and place of birth.
Twelve areas of life
Signs divide the ecliptic. Houses divide the sky as seen from one spot on Earth at one moment. They start at the Ascendant, the degree of the zodiac rising on the eastern horizon, and run counterclockwise around the chart. In this tradition, each house stands for an area of life where planets act.
The first house is the self, the body and how you meet the world. The second is money and resources. The third is siblings, neighbours, everyday speech and short journeys. The fourth is home, family and roots. The fifth is creativity, pleasure, romance and children. The sixth is daily work, health and routine.
The seventh is partners and open rivals. The eighth is shared resources, debts and death. The ninth is travel, higher learning and belief. The tenth is career and public standing. The eleventh is friends, groups and hopes. The twelfth is solitude, hidden matters and retreat.
Angles, quadrants and house types
Four points anchor the houses. The Ascendant begins the first house in the east. Opposite it, the Descendant begins the seventh in the west. The Midheaven, the highest point of the zodiac in the sky, usually begins the tenth house, and opposite it the Imum Coeli, Latin for bottom of the sky, begins the fourth. These four points are called the angles.
The angles split the chart into four quadrants. Houses 1 to 3 run from the Ascendant to the Imum Coeli. Houses 4 to 6 run from the Imum Coeli to the Descendant. Houses 7 to 9 run from the Descendant to the Midheaven. Houses 10 to 12 run from the Midheaven back to the Ascendant. Houses 1 to 6 lie below the horizon, and houses 7 to 12 above it.
Houses also come in three types. Angular houses (1, 4, 7, 10) begin at an angle and are read as the most prominent. Succedent houses (2, 5, 8, 11) follow them. Cadent houses (3, 6, 9, 12) fall away towards the next angle and are traditionally read as quieter.
Why houses need a birth time and place
As Earth turns, every degree of the zodiac rises over the eastern horizon once a day. On average the Ascendant moves about one degree every four minutes and changes sign roughly every two hours. Since all the houses are measured from the Ascendant and the Midheaven, a change of even a few minutes can shift a house cusp, and a change of hours rearranges everything.
Place matters too, because the horizon depends on where you stand. That is why Zodiaq only shows houses and the Rising sign when a birth time is known. Without one, the signs of the planets can still be found, but the houses cannot, and it is better to leave them out than to guess.
House systems in brief
Astrologers agree on the angles but not on how to divide the space between them. Whole Sign houses, the oldest common system, simply make the entire rising sign the first house, the next sign the second, and so on. Every house is exactly one sign.
Placidus, the system Zodiaq uses, divides time rather than space: it splits the hours each degree takes to travel from horizon to Midheaven into thirds. Its houses are unequal in size, and the same sign can begin two houses. At very high latitudes, near the polar circles, it stops working because some degrees never rise or set. Other systems include Equal, Koch and Porphyry. A planet can fall in different houses under different systems, which is why it is worth knowing which one a chart uses.
Key terms
- House
- One of twelve divisions of the chart, measured from the horizon and Midheaven, each linked to an area of life.
- Ascendant
- The degree of the zodiac rising on the eastern horizon at birth. It begins the first house and gives the Rising sign.
- Midheaven
- The highest point of the ecliptic in the sky at birth. In Placidus it begins the tenth house.
- Angular, succedent, cadent
- The three house types: angular houses begin at an angle, succedent houses follow, cadent houses fall away.
- House system
- A method for dividing the chart into houses, such as Whole Sign or Placidus.
Worked example
Sun position and time of day
Houses follow the daily turn of the sky, so the Sun's house echoes the time of day. Our teaching sample Jun was born at 08:10 in Seoul, a little over an hour after sunrise. Zodiaq's engine places his Sun in the twelfth house, just above the eastern horizon. That is the fourth quadrant, houses 10 to 12.
Maya was born at 14:30 in Lisbon, in the early afternoon. The Sun had passed its highest point and begun to descend towards the west. The engine places it in her ninth house, in the third quadrant, houses 7 to 9. Her Ascendant is 5°23' Leo and her Midheaven 23°33' Aries.
House systems change the picture. In Maya's Placidus chart the first and second houses both begin in Leo, and the seventh and eighth both in Aquarius, because Placidus houses vary in size. In Whole Sign houses, with Leo rising, Pisces is the eighth sign from Leo, so her Sun would sit in the eighth house instead of the ninth. Jun has Scorpio rising, so under Whole Sign his Scorpio Sun would be in the first house rather than the twelfth. In the exercise, you will sort the twelve houses into their quadrants.
History and traditionFrom places to houses
Hellenistic astrologers called the houses places, topoi in Greek, and some had evocative names: the fifth was Good Fortune, the sixth Bad Fortune, the eleventh Good Spirit and the twelfth Bad Spirit. Historians of astrology find that the earliest charts mostly used whole sign houses.
Quadrant systems that divide space or time more finely developed over the following centuries. The Placidus system is named after Placidus de Titis, a seventeenth-century Italian monk and scholar. It spread widely in the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century, helped by popular printed tables of houses, and remains the most common system in modern Western software.
Try it: Sort the houses into quadrants
Place each house, from 1 to 12, into the quadrant it belongs to.
Choose a group for each item.
Check your understanding
Question 1 of 5
Think about it
Which area of life would you most like a symbolic map to help you think about, and what would you want from that map: answers, or better questions?