Almagest

The library · The Western houses

The first house

what the first house governs in the Western chart

What the tradition reads

The first house, beginning at the Ascendant, is read by the tradition as the native's own body, its physical shape and colouring, and the vitality of the life force that will run through it. Lilly gives the first house to life itself and to the querent's own person: complexion, natural disposition, and the manner in which the body is carried and how the whole person appears to others before a word is spoken. Ptolemy's tradition, in its chapters on the form and temperament of the body, works from the same point, the horoscopic degree, to judge stature, colouring and constitution, treating the rising degree and its ruler as the key to how the native is built and how much natural strength the constitution holds. Alan Leo, who gives the house a chapter of its own, holds that the ascendant rules the personal appearance and to a considerable extent the health, mind and disposition, and calls it the part of the horoscope having more to do with the physical body and its material wants than any other portion; his summary of the twelve gives the first house personality, natural disposition and worldly outlook generally, with the head and face. The older core stays underneath every later reading: the body one is given. Where the ascending sign is strong and well aspected, the tradition reads robustness and clear self presentation; where it is weak or heavily burdened, it reads a native who struggles from the outset to be seen plainly, or whose vitality needs tending.

The story

The Ascendant, the degree of the zodiac rising in the east at the moment a question is asked or a native is born, is the axis the whole house system turns on. English draws the word horoscope, Wiktionary's entry records, from the Greek horoskopos, built from hora, "any limited time", and skopos, "watcher": an hour watcher, the point marking the moment. Wiktionary's own definition shows the word has since widened from that point to the whole chart: "the position of the planets and stars at the moment of someone's birth", or a diagram of those positions. From this single point the rest of the figure is laid out. Alan Leo treats the ascendant as embracing the whole of the first house, and adds that in his own opinion about fifteen degrees above it may be counted as included in the ascendant, a limit he tells the student to find by subtracting an hour from the sidereal time at birth and reading off the degree then rising. In his scheme the first house is one of the cardinal houses, or angles, which show all things that must be expressed outwardly. William Lilly, writing in England in 1647, inherited the twelve fixed significations, the first house among them keeping its old office as the house of the native's life and body, and set them out one by one for a readership that no longer read Greek but still wanted to know what each house of the sky was for.

Written from

Corpus key house:1.