Almagest

The library · A planet in a house

The Moon in the third house

the Moon in the third house (Western)

What the tradition reads

The third house, in Alan Leo's summary of the twelve, carries relatives and kindred, travelling, the intellect derived from education and study, and the minor impressions made upon the physical brain; in the chapter he gives it, headed brethren and relatives, short journeys and the mind, he says that there we study all that relates to movement, transition and change, and that it rules all affairs that seriously affect the mind. The Moon placed there is read by the tradition as an emotional life that moves easily into words, a person naturally responsive and curious, often gifted with languages, who talks about feelings, their own and other people's, with a comfort that less expressive placements do not share. The astrologers read this placement as prone to shifting opinions, taking on the views or the mood of whoever is closest at the moment, and to speaking about emotion either in unusually analytical terms or with more feeling than the occasion strictly calls for. A real psychological insight is credited to the placement, an instinct for what is going on underneath a conversation rather than only what is being said aloud. Siblings and the immediate, everyday community are read as an especially strong emotional influence on this placement across a life. The tradition's caution is an identity so easily coloured by whoever it is currently talking to that its own settled opinion can be hard to locate underneath all the borrowed ones.

The story

Hesiod's Theogony places Selene among three children born to the Titans Hyperion and Theia: Selene herself, her brother Helios the sun, and their sister Eos, the dawn. The three were bound together by more than blood; between them they accounted for the entire cycle of a single day, dawn giving way to sunlight, sunlight giving way in turn to Selene's own night, each sibling's arrival the direct and necessary cue for the next one's departure. They are rarely shown acting entirely apart from one another in the surviving myths, and ancient art frequently paired Selene with Helios directly, sister and brother crossing the sky in sequence as though performing one continuous piece of work between them. It is an unusually literal picture of siblings whose lives are structured entirely around each other's comings and goings, each one's presence defined by the other's absence. The Moon in the third house is read through this same close sibling bond: an emotional life shaped early and lastingly by brothers, sisters or the immediate people nearest at hand, each one entering just as another one steps back.

Written from

Corpus key planet-in-house:Moon:3.