Learn the Houses in the Natal Chart: Houses 5 - 8

Welcome back to class, where we’ve been using our growth through the chart as a method to interpret the houses through the ages and connect to their significance.

Here’s our brief recap: starting with our horizon (a.k.a our Ascendant), we grow up from our first house to the second to grasp what we have. After learning how to say “mine”, we learn how to get to pre-school ( 3H of communication), then how to sleep in our own room at night (4H of privacy).

Now, at the age of five, we are more expressive than ever. Since we’ve learned how to walk and talk, we can engage in more activities. Our days are filled with more coloring books, puzzles, games, and Saturday cartoons. Creativity and play are the main themes of this house, which can be easy to imagine for a child of five. This is where we form hobbies and use our active imagination to create and play. The core significance of this house is pure creation, which means we can look to this house when and if we ourselves have children. When reading someone’s chart, you can see what someone gravitated to doing as a child, where the fourth house is mainly the environment or setting of that childhood.

There’s another layer to this house as we grow up, in the same way we start playing explicit video games or music. We started from creation and play to transitioning to pleasure-seeking as well as procreation. Creative hobbies fall into this category, but so do love affairs and romantic partners. Since this house is also the house of games, play, fortune and luck, you can also look here for gambling and risk. This is where we choose to roll the dice in order to try something new, or attempt to better our fortune. This can be a very creative and generative house to be in, and someone with placements here can be drawn to (depending on their aspects) everything from childcare and artistic pursuits to casinos and Casanova-style dating lives.

We’ve far progressed past our terrible twos, grown up with our foundations, and start playing in the world we find ourselves in. Now that we hit the age of six, we can start to see how our responsibilities emerge.

At six, you can brush your own teeth (hopefully) and start putting on your own socks to get ready for school. Fine motor skills are a bit more developed at this time, and you might start riding bikes or jumping rope. Six-year-olds are more likely to have a more regimented routine and start doing basic worksheets at school, if all is well. The idea is that you start to bear more responsibility for yourself at this time, which leads us to how we work and treat our health as we get older. The sixth house rules routine, work, and health.

This ends up being the house we can look to for what kind of menial jobs we pick up, where we work as employees (or, if manager, where you’d look to see said employees). This is the house of physical work and of how we exert our energy both to maintain our health and complete necessary actions in our daily life. It’s said that planets in this house have to “work harder” to enact their traits. Someone with several planets here may have to work physically harder, exert more energy, experience more health issues or work in healthcare, or perhaps struggle with routine if there are challenging aspects. We can see if someone has a stable routine or good health by glancing over here. In a spiritual sense, we can also see how routine can translate to ritual (psst, this later connects to the 12H). But for our current purposes of growing through the chart, the sixth house is our arena of work, routine, maintenance and health.

Wow, we grow up so fast. We’re already at the age of seven, and we’ve hit a lot of milestones. Our next one is how we connect to people in the realm of interpersonal relationships. We have friends now, and maybe even some grade school crushes. Seven-year-olds can grasp more complex and nuanced social skills, so they engage differently and learn to relate to their peers. This is the house of relating to others, specifically one-on-one. And why only one-on-one? Because we stand at the exact opposite of our Ascendant, where we first started. Where we first came into being. We are, (to be on the nose), at the Descendant now, which we can associate as being with the other after being ourselves. This is our mirror, the house of significant relationships: a business partnership, a long-term friend, or, as most people like to look to this house for, a romantic relationship. This is also our “open enemy”: someone you’re in an open rivalry with. Later, the twelfth house will explain our hidden enemies, but for now, we can walk away from the seventh knowing, in a nutshell, it’s how we relate to other.

After exchanging pleasantries, we can try to move through the veil to somewhere a bit more dim, dark even: the eighth house, commonly known as the house of death. Dramatic, I know. For now, we’ll circle back for a moment to the second house. From taking a few steps back to the age of two, we start with what’s “mine” as we look across the way and see what is “theirs.” As the eighth house reflects the second, we can derive meaning from what starts as our personal possessions and values to other people’s resources. At eight-years-old, we are a lot more perceptive and start to examine what other people have and what we share with others.

Fun fact! The eighth house rules death, sex, taxes, and the occult, to name a few. It’s admittedly a lot going on, but from all of these stepping stones, we can see how the resources of others (like taxes) can also relate to what we all share in common (such as death). On a deeper, more intense level, the eighth house rules intimacy and secrets, powerful transformations and trauma. Power and control also rule this area of life. Depending on placements, you can see if someone is set to inherit a hefty sum from dear old dad, or if our partner has an impulsively fluctuating spending habit. Not everyone has placements in this house, but for those that do, you can find that they’ll be anything from an accountant to a mortician, or even a spiritual counselor to a high-level researcher and investigator.

Creativity and play transitions to work and health before the way we relate to others morphs into how we relate to others’ resources. This is the beginning of seeing our houses reflect each other. How we approach situations in the 1H faces how we approach people in the 7H, and our 2H of values, income & possessions becomes our 8H of inheritances, shared experiences & resources.

Next, we’ll see how our ninth through the twelfth house mirrors what we’ve previously started with.