Almagest

The library · The Western houses

The seventh house

what the seventh house governs in the Western chart

What the tradition reads

The seventh house, opposite the first across the chart's horizontal axis, is the house of the other: marriage and partnership in the tradition's oldest and plainest sense, but also, by the same logic, open enemies and anyone met as an equal rather than a subordinate. Ptolemy's own chapter on marriage never names the seventh house or its ruler: his method reads the Moon's condition for a man's marriage and the Sun's for a woman's, with Venus, Mars and Saturn read for the spouse's character, and the durability of the union judged by comparing the two nativities' luminaries against each other. Lilly's later tradition is what actually keeps marriage as the seventh house's central office in horary practice, answering questions of whether and whom a querent will marry from the state of the house and its ruler, and pairs it, in the same chapter, with the house's other classical meaning, the open adversary, the enemy who contests a matter face to face rather than in secret, as the twelfth house's hidden enemy does. Alan Leo calls marriage the chief influence of the seventh and the house itself the one that denotes relation, in which all partnerships and unions of every kind are shown; the seventh house in every horoscope, he writes, is the complement of the first and represents the unifying of all that is separated or isolated in the ascendant, which keeps the point that this is the self met and answered by an equal.

The story

The seventh house rises at the Descendant, the point directly opposite the Ascendant, where the sign that was rising twelve hours earlier is now setting, and the tradition reads this angle's whole meaning from that geometry: whatever the first house claims for the self, the seventh claims for whoever stands facing it. Alan Leo heads his own chapter on the house marriage, partnerships, enemies, keeping all three under one roof, and reads the chord running from the first house to the seventh as the line that divides the dark half of the circle from the light, the latent from the active, the objective from the subjective. Ptolemy's own chapter on marriage, however, builds its judgments from the Moon, the Sun and Venus rather than from this angle, comparing the two people's whole nativities to test whether a match holds; it is Lilly, writing for a seventeenth century clientele that came to him with urgent, specific questions about whom they would marry and whether the match would hold, who gave the Descendant its fullest early modern treatment as the house of marriage in English astrology. The house has kept, through every later revision of astrological practice, its old identity as the angle of the other, met as an equal, for good or for open contest.

Written from

Corpus key house:7.