Dana Gerhardt: The Houses
There are houses on the coast built right to the cliffs, with breath-taking views of sea and sky. What would life be like being born into such a home? Or how different might one’s perspective be, starting out in the desperate tangle of a South Bronx tenement? Location counts. And it makes its strongest statement in the 1st house of your chart.
When you're discussing the 2nd house, you have to talk money. Yet in most spiritual circles, money is a dirty word. Craving dollars is an affront to spirit and decidedly uncool (except of course, for those spiritual teachers whose hands are always open for donations).
The 3rd house rules siblings, neighbors, short trips, grammar school, the acquisition and use of language. But underneath these keywords lies a profound mystery: our fundamentally human dance of development--of curiosity, imitation and communication, of adapting to and connecting with our immediate world.It is not so much a house of "things" as it is a zone of activity.
The 4th is where we go when we collapse. It rules home and family, ancestors and homeland. It provides a literal retreat. Push ourselves too hard and we'll likely end up at home, sick in bed. But the 4th is just as much a retreat of the imagination. It is our psychic hearth. It holds the memories that both comfort and haunt us. As the base of our chart, it represents both the ground and mystery of our being.
This is the house of joy and spontaneous self-expression. It's the house of risk-taking, creativity, children, and love. There's a simplicity and innocence in this house that revels in the unbridled pleasure of being alive. What could be wrong with that? This is the house about which many are curious when they schedule astrology readings: Is a romance on the horizon? Will a child be conceived? Will a creative project come to fruition?
The 6th house refers to daily time and how we spend it. Here most of us defer to the cultural norm — which is to do time mechanically. We fill it with productive activity: We work. Most of us have no choice. This could indeed be the “bad fortune” the ancients were talking about! However, most of us would admit that working is not entirely bad. There is something in us that likes a regular structure in our days.
In the 7th house we strive to harmonize here, one-on-one, with not just one but a parade of significant others—teachers and counselors, business colleagues and lovers. We can dance with these partners for just a moment, a season, or for all eternity. But through them we step outside ourselves. They provoke us to grow. Through 7th house people we become more whole. That sounds nice, but it’s often painful in practice, for the 7th isn’t just a dance floor.
Writing about the 8th house isn¿t easy. 'After all,' says my friend Geraldine, 'who truly feels comfortable talking about their experiences of love, death, and sex outside the privacy of personal conversation?' The 8th carries your psychological inheritance—the potent invisible currents that no one talked about.
Here we feel adventurous and free. The 9th holds our personal Alps, where the spirit soars, the mind expands, and life acquires new meaning. The 9th takes us to uncharted territories and gifts us with new perspectives. It rules travel to faraway places, higher education, religion, philosophy, mysticism, divination.
Every astrological house has its secret anguish. In the 10th house it's failure, the discovery that we didn't make good on our dreams. I'll never forget the chilling confession of one of my high school English teachers, the one with the impressive Jesuit education and the faint smell of alcohol always on his breath.
The 11th is the house of friends. Opposite the 5th, that sandbox of child-like innocence and fantasies of our specialness, the 11th house describes our first experience of tribal society, the playground where we meet the world.
Over the years, I¿ve received more inquiries about the 12th than any other house. The ones who write are usually in distress. Sometimes they¿re new to astrology and are panicked to learn they¿ve got planets here: ¿I¿ve heard the 12th is a terrible house. Am I doomed?¿Topics in the Astro Shop
Current Planets
28-Apr-2025, 06:19
UT/GMT
| |||||
| Sun | 8 | 13' 8" | 14n15 | ||
| Moon | 14 | 38'55" | 19n53 | ||
| Mercury | 11 | 55'31" | 2n05 | ||
| Venus | 28 | 42'30" | 0n55 | ||
| Mars | 4 | 21' 0" | 21n10 | ||
| Jupiter | 20 | 49'31" | 22n53 | ||
| Saturn | 27 | 34' 4" | 2s48 | ||
| Uranus | 26 | 9'47" | 19n05 | ||
| Neptune | 1 | 0'37" | 0s46 | ||
| Pluto | 3 | 48'32" | 22s44 | ||
| TrueNode | 26 | 45'48"r | 1s17 | ||
| Chiron | 23 | 54'48" | 9n59 | ||
| Explanations of the symbols | |||||
| Chart of the moment | |||||
