Almagest

The library · The glossary

House

every reader

What the tradition reads

A house is one of twelve divisions of the sky drawn for a particular moment and place; a sign is one of twelve equal divisions of the ecliptic, and the two are not the same thing. Alan Leo builds the houses out of the earth's rotation on its own axis: sunrise marks the Ascendant and the cusp of the first house, culmination the Mid-heaven and the tenth, setting the Descendant and the seventh, midnight the Nadir and the fourth, and out of these four angles, he writes, all the other divisions are obtained. He groups the twelve as angular, succedent and cadent, and gives each its own field, from the first house of personality, natural disposition and the physical experiences obtained through the five senses to the twelfth of the occult tendencies, which he calls the most critical house of the twelve. A chart is read by putting house and sign together: Leo asks the student to think of the houses as transparent vessels, each with its own shape according as it is angular, succedent or cadent, and of the signs as what fills them, giving each a special substance, colour and quality; Wikipedia's account of the horoscope puts it the same way round, a framework of twelve houses upon which the signs of the zodiac are superimposed. How the cusps are drawn is a separate question with several answers still in simultaneous use, and nothing in the sources consulted here settles which of them is right.

The story

The Swiss Ephemeris documents fifteen families of house method, some of them holding more than one variant. In whole sign houses the first house begins at the start of the sign the ascendant is in and each house covers a complete sign; that method, the documentation says, was used in Hellenistic astrology and is still used in Hindu astrology. Equal houses divide the zodiac into twelve arcs of thirty degrees from the ascendant. The quadrant systems cut the sky instead: Placidus, which the documentation names after an Italian monk, Placidus de Titis, sets its own by divisions of the semidiurnal and seminocturnal arcs, and those are not defined at all beyond the polar circles, where the library falls back on Porphyry houses. Wikipedia's account of the horoscope notes that programs generally let the user choose among the systems. The houses themselves are older than the quadrant arithmetic, which the documentation names for medieval and early modern figures. Wikipedia's account of Hellenistic astrology traces the material to the Babylonians and their celestial omens, and says that around the late second or early first century BCE that astrology was mixed with the Egyptian tradition of decanic astrology to make horoscopic astrology, so called because it used the ascendant, the horoskopos or hour marker, and the twelve houses derived from it; several Hellenistic astrologers credited the houses to a mythical sage, Hermes Trismegistus, said to have been the first to outline them and their meaning.

Written from

Corpus key glossary:house.