A Short History of the Houses

The twelve houses are about two thousand years old, and their meanings were not handed down whole. They built up over centuries as astrology passed from Greek into Arabic, from Arabic into Latin, from Latin into English, and finally into the psychological language of the twentieth century. Some ideas have survived the whole journey unchanged. Others are much newer than most books admit.

This page tells that general story once, so the chapters do not have to. Each chapter then picks up the history of its own house: its old name, its reputation, and how its meaning shifted. Read this page first if you want the big picture, or come back to it whenever a chapter mentions a name or an idea you have not met.

Places in the sky

The system of twelve houses took shape in the Greek-speaking world of the Hellenistic period, from roughly the first century BCE onward, much of it in Egypt. It grew out of a meeting of Babylonian planetary lore, Egyptian time-keeping by the rising of stars, and Greek geometry.

The astrologers of that time did not call them houses. They called them places (Greek topoi), and they counted them from the rising point on the eastern horizon. Each place was a sign: the rising sign was the first place, the next sign the second, and so on round the circle. This is the system now called whole sign houses, and it is the one this book uses.

Several of the places had names of their own. Some describe where they sit in the sky; others describe their reputation, good or bad.

The word horoscope comes from the first of these names. Originally it meant only the rising point. Only much later did it come to mean the whole chart, and later still a few lines in the back of a newspaper.

Good places, bad places and joys

Which places can see the Ascendant

The Greek astrologers judged each place by whether it could "see" the rising sign. Two signs see each other when they make one of the recognised angles, called aspects: the same sign, two signs apart (sextile), three apart (square), four apart (trine) or six apart (opposition).

Four places make none of these angles to the first place. The Second and Twelfth are next door to it, and the Sixth and Eighth are five signs away. A place that cannot see the rising point is said to be in aversion to it, and these four were thought to be cut off from the person's own steering. Three of them, the Sixth, Eighth and Twelfth, became the classic difficult places: illness, death and confinement.

The angles themselves (First, Tenth, Seventh and Fourth) were the strongest places, and the Eleventh and Fifth were counted especially fortunate.

The planetary joys

Each of the seven planets known to the ancients had one place where it was said to rejoice: its joy. The scheme has a neat logic: the benefics rejoice in good places and the malefics in bad ones.

The joys pair up across the chart: the Sun and Moon face each other across the Ninth and Third, the two benefics sit in the Fifth and Eleventh, and the two malefics in the Sixth and Twelfth.

The birth chart of the world

The Greek astrologers also taught with an imaginary chart called the Thema Mundi, the horoscope of the world's creation. In it Cancer rises, and each of the seven planets sits in a sign it rules: the Moon in Cancer, the Sun in Leo, Mercury in Virgo, Venus in Libra, Mars in Scorpio, Jupiter in Sagittarius and Saturn in Capricorn.

Nobody took it as a historical record. It was a diagram for explaining why the signs, planets and places relate as they do, for instance why the Sun and Moon rule neighbouring signs, and why Saturn, the slowest planet, rules the signs opposite them. It also places the beginning of the world, like the beginning of a life, on the eastern horizon.

From Greek to Arabic to Latin

From the eighth century onward, Greek astrological texts were translated into Persian and Arabic, and astrologers working in Baghdad and elsewhere refined the techniques considerably. They kept the meanings of the houses largely as they found them, but built elaborate systems on top: methods for judging the length of life, the timing of events, and the answers to specific questions.

From the twelfth century these works were translated again, from Arabic into Latin, and reached the universities and courts of medieval Europe. Students learned the twelve houses with a memory rhyme:

Vita, lucrum, fratres, genitor, nati, valetudo,
uxor, mors, pietas, regnum, benefactaque, carcer.

One word for each house, in order:

The rhyme is blunt, and it is a good reminder of how practical traditional astrology was. Its twelve words cover a medieval life from birth to the grave, with illness, death and prison given their own houses. Many of the softer modern meanings, such as creativity, transformation and the unconscious, came much later.

William Lilly and English astrology

The richest source in English is William Lilly's Christian Astrology, published in London in 1647, during the Civil War, when Lilly was the most famous astrologer in the country. It was the first major textbook of astrology written in English rather than Latin, and it is still in print.

Lilly gives, for each house, a detailed list of what it signifies, which part of the body it rules, and even a colour, used in his day for practical questions such as describing a lost object or a thief's clothing. He also names consignificators, secondary associations between a house and a sign or planet. A large part of the book is given over to horary astrology: answering a specific question from a chart cast for the moment it is asked.

Lilly matters to this book for two reasons. He preserves the traditional meanings in plain English, and he shows them in daily use, applied to real questions from real clients. Each chapter quotes or summarises what he says about its house.

The modern houses

After Lilly's century, astrology lost its place in learned life, and for about 150 years it survived mainly in almanacs. When it revived at the end of the nineteenth century, it had a different aim.

From prediction to personality

Writers such as Alan Leo (1860–1917) turned astrology toward character rather than events, and in the 1930s Dane Rudhyar, in The Astrology of Personality (1936), recast it in the language of psychology and personal growth. The houses changed with it. The First House became self-image; the Sixth, once illness and servants, became work and health habits; the Eighth, once death, became intimacy and transformation; the Twelfth, once prison, became solitude and the unconscious. Astrologers borrowed freely from the psychologist Carl Jung, including his word persona for the social mask.

Neither version is simply right. The traditional meanings are older and more concrete; the modern ones are more inward. The chapters give both, and say which is which.

The sign-house shortcut

Alongside this came a neat equation that spread through popular astrology: the First House is Aries, the Second is Taurus, and so on round the circle, each house paired with the sign of the same number and that sign's ruling planet.

It is a handy memory aid, but it blurs two different things. A sign is a sector of the zodiac, the same for everyone born on a given day. A house is a division of one birth chart, set by the time and place of birth, describing an area of life. Aries is not automatically the First House, and Pisces is not automatically the Twelfth. Older astrologers kept the two separate, and so does this book. Lilly does record a minor link, naming Aries as a "consignificator" of the First House, but he never treats them as the same thing.

Dividing the sky: house systems

Astrologers have never agreed on exactly how to cut the chart into twelve. Every method starts from the same place, the rising point on the eastern horizon, but they divide the rest of the sky differently. These methods are called house systems, and there are dozens. Three families matter for this book.

Whole sign houses

The whole rising sign is the First House, the next sign the Second, and so on. Each house is exactly one sign. This is the oldest system, the one the Greek astrologers used, and it is the system this book uses throughout.

Whole sign houses fell out of general use in the Middle Ages, as Arabic and European astrologers adopted more complex methods. They came back into use from the 1990s, when translation projects made the original Greek texts available in English again.

Equal houses

The First House begins at the exact degree of the Ascendant, and each house is exactly 30 degrees. If the Ascendant is 3° Libra, the Second House begins at 3° Scorpio, and so on.

Quadrant systems

These divide the sky by the four angles, then split each quarter into three. Houses come out unequal in size. The best known are:

• Porphyry, named after a third-century philosopher, which simply trisects each quarter of the zodiac.
• Regiomontanus, from the fifteenth century, the system William Lilly used.
• Placidus, named after the seventeenth-century Italian monk Placidus de Titis. It became the default in the English-speaking world because the most widely used published tables were calculated with it, and most astrology software still uses it.
• Koch, devised in the twentieth century.

Quadrant systems become distorted far from the equator, and at very high latitudes some of them stop working altogether.

Angles are not always house boundaries

The four angles are calculated points: the Ascendant and Descendant on the horizon, and the Midheaven (MC) and Imum Coeli (IC) on the meridian. In quadrant systems the angles are also house boundaries: the Ascendant begins the First House, the Midheaven the Tenth, and so on.

In whole sign and equal houses that is only true of the Ascendant and Descendant. The Midheaven can fall inside a house rather than at its start. With whole sign houses it is usually in the Tenth, but it can land in the Ninth or Eleventh. Keep the angle and the house boundary separate when you check a chart.

What difference does it make?

In most charts the systems agree on most placements. The differences come near the boundaries. Here is the example chart used throughout this book (Bangor, 16 November 1955, 03:00 GMT) under whole sign houses and under Placidus:

Two planets move: Neptune drops into the Second House, and Uranus rises into the Tenth. Mercury, Pluto and the Nodes are not shown; they stay in the same houses under both systems.

When the birth time is uncertain

All of this depends on an accurate birth time. The rising degree moves about a degree every four minutes, so a time that is out by an hour or two can change the rising sign and every house in the chart. If the time is unknown, the honest course is to read the planets in their signs and leave the houses alone, rather than invent an Ascendant.

Further reading

• Chris Brennan, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune (2017). The Greek origins in depth: places, joys, aversion and whole sign houses.
• Deborah Houlding, The Houses: Temples of the Sky (1998). How the meaning of each house developed over time.
• William Lilly, Christian Astrology (1647). The great English textbook; out of copyright and freely available online.
• Howard Sasportas, The Twelve Houses (1985). The modern psychological approach.