Almagest

The library · The Western houses

The second house

what the second house governs in the Western chart

What the tradition reads

The second house, the tradition holds, governs money and movable goods: what a person earns, saves, spends and is worth in material terms, and by extension the resourcefulness with which a livelihood is pursued. Ptolemy's own chapter on the fortune of wealth does not read this house directly: it keys the whole judgment to the Part of Fortune, a point calculated as far from the Ascendant as the Sun is distant from the Moon, and to whichever planets hold dominion over that point, for whether wealth arrives and by what means, steady or sudden, earned or given. Lilly is plainer, titling his own judgments of the house by what means a person shall attain riches, and treating its ruler and the planets found there as the second house's own clearest signal of whether money comes easily or by hard effort, and whether it is kept once it arrives. Alan Leo, who gives the house a chapter of its own, says money matters are judged largely but not exclusively from the state of the second house, and sets it in a triad with the tenth and the sixth, the tenth for occupation, business and profession, the sixth for the situations in which money may be earned, and the second for money itself; the second house, he rules, must be allowed final voice in the matter. His summary of the twelve gives it finance and monetary prospects, desires caused by tenth house influence affecting moral growth, and the throat and ears.

The story

The second house takes its meaning from its position immediately after the Ascendant, which makes it succedent to the angle of the first: not itself an angle of power, but the house that follows directly from selfhood, as if livelihood were read as the first consequence of simply existing in a body. Alan Leo groups it with the fifth, eighth and eleventh as the succedent or fixed houses, which he reads as less physical in nature than the angles, more in sympathy with the feelings and emotions, not yet ripe for physical expression but maturing for future development. Ptolemy's own method, as his chapter on the fortune of wealth shows, never names this or any other house directly, reading wealth instead from the Part of Fortune and its ruling planets; the second house's fixed association with money is a later systemisation laid over a doctrine he had already worked out by other means. William Lilly's Christian Astrology, printed in London in 1647 for a practice that answered horary questions about exactly this kind of worldly matter, gave the second house its most practical early English treatment, walking through the planets, their rulership of the house, and what each combination meant for a querent who had come to ask, plainly, whether they would prosper. Leo reads the second house as the outcome of the labour or profession in financial advantage, remuneration and monetary condition generally, the older sequence from the Ascendant restated in the language of a wage.

Written from

Corpus key house:2.