Almagest

The library · The other points and bodies

Juno in the seventh house

the asteroid Juno in the seventh house of the Western chart

What the tradition reads

Of all twelve houses this is the one whose subject matter stands closest to Juno's own, and it is worth being exact about how far the sources go. Alan Leo describes the seventh house as unions, marriage and partnerships, individual character and humane tendencies, calls it the Descendant and the house of relation, in which partnerships and unions of every kind are shown, and names marriage its chief influence; the same chapter adds enemies to its matters and reads the house as the complement of the first, the unifying of all that is separated or isolated in the Ascendant. He counts it angular, among the houses he says show what must be expressed outwardly, and assigns to it the veins and kidneys. Juno, in the modern practice that began with the asteroid ephemerides of the 1970s, is read by Cafe Astrology as commitment, marriage, betrayal, give and take in partnerships, infidelity, fairness and compromise, and as the effort of balancing power between two people; Wikipedia calls it an indicator of what a person requires to feel a marriage is satisfying, and notes that it is often found in aspect between the charts of spouses, which is a statement about contact between two charts rather than about a house. For Juno placed in the seventh house, no page consulted here supplies a delineation. Cafe Astrology reads Juno through the twelve signs and publishes nothing for the houses, so the obvious reading is left unwritten instead of being assumed.

The story

The seventh house sits opposite the first, across the descendant, and the tradition gives it to dealings with another as an equal. The goddess in question presided over exactly that transaction. Wikipedia calls Hera the patron goddess of lawful marriage, saying that she presides over weddings, blesses and legalises marital unions, and protects women from harm during childbirth, and describes her as goddess of marriage, women and family, queen among the twelve Olympians and both sister and wife of Zeus. Her Roman counterpart Juno is introduced on her own page as a goddess of marriage and childbirth who equates to Hera. What is striking in the Greek record is the legal note: not only blessing a union but making it lawful, an office closer to the contracts and agreements the seventh house is given than to romance. Both figures keep the same double character, a wife inside the marriage and its guarantor from outside it, which is the position this house describes in a chart.

Written from

Corpus key point:Juno:house:7.