THE TWELVE HOUSES
If the signs are how a planet acts and the planets are what is acting, the houses are where it acts. They are the twelve fields of life, raised from the sign rising at your birth: the body, what you own, kin, home, pleasure, work, partnership, and so on around the wheel. A planet’s house tells you which corner of your life its force is spent in.
The body, the temperament, and the face you turn to the world; the door through which all the rest is met.
What you hold: money, possessions, and the worth you can call your own.
Speech and writing, siblings and neighbors, the short journeys and daily exchanges.
Home, ancestry, and the buried root; the ground you were raised on and return to.
Pleasure and creation, play and romance, children and everything you make for joy.
Labor and service, illness and health, the daily upkeep of the body and its tasks.
Partnership and marriage, contracts and alliances, and the open adversary across from you.
Death and inheritance, shared resources, and everything hidden, owed, or transformed.
The long journey and the foreign, philosophy and law, and the things of the divine.
Career and public role, reputation and standing, the work the world can see.
Friends and allies, the wider community, and the hopes you set for the future.
Solitude and the subconscious, confinement and loss, the undoing that works in the dark.
Astra Antiqua raises these with whole-sign houses, where the rising sign becomes the entire First House and each sign after it the next. For how that compares to other methods, see house systems.