Almagest

The library · The Western houses

The fourth house

what the fourth house governs in the Western chart

What the tradition reads

The fourth house is read by the tradition as the home: parents, ancestry, property and the private base a life is built from. Ptolemy's chapter on parents draws on the Sun and Saturn for the father, and the Moon and Venus for the mother, together with the stars in attendance on each luminary, to judge the parents' condition and the native's relationship to them; the chapter itself names no fourth house or its ruler. Lilly follows the old inheritance of Sun and Saturn for the father, while Alan Leo, who gives the house a chapter of its own, writes that it relates to the grave, the end of life, and one of the parents, usually the father according to Western astrologers, though the Hindus say the mother, since the fourth house corresponds to Cancer; the tradition carries both pairings side by side rather than choosing one. Leo keeps the older core and adds the environment, residence and family conditions in which the native dwells, together with hidden and secret matters connected with parentage or domestic affairs, summarising the fourth as the personal environment and the tenth as the individual environment; his summary of the twelve gives the house hereditary tendencies, home and domestic life, parentage, and the general state of things at the close of life. The house's angle, which Leo names the Nadir or Lower Meridian, gives it a foundation's weight in every era of the reading.

The story

The fourth house sits at the angle Alan Leo names the Nadir, or Lower Meridian, the lowest point of the chart, the sky's midnight beneath the earth as the Midheaven is its noon above. Ptolemy's own chapter on parents names this angle, the lower heaven, only once, among the four angles whose affliction by Saturn and the Sun can bring injury or disease to the father; the chapter's actual method rests on the two luminaries and the stars that attend them, not on a single house read as the parents' significator. Because the tradition reads the Sun's daily arc as an image for a life, the angle beneath the earth carries the reading of what lies hidden underground: roots, the family line, and the private foundation nobody else sees a house built upon. Lilly inherited the angle's full weight in 1647, keeping it as one of the four pillars of the chart alongside the Ascendant, the Descendant and the Midheaven. Leo passes the same four angles on in his own account of the twelve houses, calling them the cardinal houses and holding that from each of these angles the other houses receive their value, the cardinal points denoting the root of the life to be expressed.

Written from

Corpus key house:4.