Signs and Houses are different expressions of the same energies. This is not to say they’re equivalent – rather, they stem from the same root (indeed they were once called Celestial and Mundane Houses respectively). Signs are their operation in us, and Houses are our encounter with them. A Sign in a House determines our manner of dealing with its phenomena.
And it is basically that simple. Scorpio Rising will work aggressively and energetically: Aries 6th. Note also that if you can figure out someone’s Ascendant by their face, you can tell what all their other Houses are. Each Ascendant necessarily involves all 12 Signs in a standard arrangement – for instance, Gemini Rising has Pisces 10th: Its authority is that of a wise man who seems to know everything – what from the Gemini Rising’s perspective comes about due to a lifetime of learning simply seems like vague and mystic wisdom to the public – moreso because it can’t spare the time to explain everything; it has Sagittarius 7th, so its relationships are with exotic things (which hold its interest), as student or teacher (because it loves talking and listening), or with many partners (if one can’t hold its interest, it flits around). How this is, I don’t know – the universe just seems to be arranged such that it is the case. All this is modified by the Planets therein and the Houses’ Lords (Rulers), but we’ll get to that another time.
The nature of the energies involved has been covered on one front in the last article – they are the Elements – but the other half of the equation, Modes, has not. We will do so here, although I’m not quite satisfied with my understanding. Cardinal Signs want continually to make more of their element. Fixed Signs want to surround themselves with it, maintain it, accumulate it – but they accumulate passively, more as a consequence of not letting go, like a semi-permeable membrane. Mutable Signs seek it, then they want more, as if they were big hungry mouths seeking sources of their Element. This is why they (the Modes) resemble Fire, Earth and Air respectively – active, stable and curious – although the correspondences are not exact, because Sagittarius may as easily be a free-wheeling soldier of fortune as a searching intellect. It’s only that searches are more easily undertaken with the mind, and require the least physical action to carry out.
(Also worth noting that the last and the first 3 Signs – Pisces, Aries, Taurus and Gemini, which are Mutable, Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable respectively – seem like the most straightforward manifestations of their respective Elements, although you must be very careful with imposing structures like this on the Zodiac before you master the basics – otherwise you end up thinking nonsense like the last 6 Signs are more “social” than the first 6.)
Louis A. Sass in his book Madness and Modernism regards many of the symptoms of schizophrenia – eg. incoherence – as an attempt to escape a too-great coherence, a too-heavy structure which imposes itself on the mind. For this reason the opposites are copresent and interfere with each other in various ways. This is particularly relevant to Cancer, whose nature is a problem for me: Is its hard shell a consequence of its too-great sensitivity, or simply a feature of Water in the Cardinal Mode? More research is needed.
Anyway, the Houses: By my understanding, Houses are those parts of life in which we encounter an Element in a particular Mode – and here let me restate my thesis of the PHENOMENOLOGICAL POLYVALENCE of the Elements, which is to say, their capacity to be expressed in superficially different, essentially similar ways, and whose expressions compose the domain of each House. For instance: Fixed Fire, which shows up in Leo and the 5th House. Consider first the 5th House’s purview – pregnancy, children, play, creative projects, love affairs – and reason back from these to what they have in common. The most obvious correspondence is between a pregnancy, a love affair, one’s children, and a creative project – an enduring appreciation and elaboration (Fixed) of something’s individuality (Fire). Without knowledge of the Elements and Modes, this simply seems like a random grab-bag of phenomena which might be linked up by “joy” or some similarly vague idea – with it, we see the sustained expression of Fire, which cannot be reduced to any of its particular manifestations. It is essential, primordial.
Similarly, the Ascendant (1st House) governs our reaction to things in the first flash of their individuality – Cardinal Fire. It’s commonly characterised as a mask or a tint to the images we encounter before we penetrate their essence, but all we have are images – those of the first and subsequent encounters. Gemini Rising investigates or talks to that which it first encounters, Leo Rising attempts to impress or endure it, etc. – and the cumulative consequences of this influence our worldview. Start as you mean to go on. Medically and biologically, I am less certain: It governs our body because our body is that with which we first encounter the world, and which the world first encounters. Our body is an initial condition and constant constraint on our action. Our face is the first impression people have of us – Aries governs the head & face. The Ascendant is the Sign on the dawning horizon at the moment of our birth, another dawn. Prior to that, I assume we experience our body prior to anything else. There’s a whole load of old symbolism in here about the body as vessel and condition of the soul’s life on earth – Mercury is the crossroads, the point of contact, and it Joys in the 1st House (Each Planet “Joys” in one House in particular – this lends it Dignity). Start as you mean to go on!
Now this model of the Houses raises a few questions for me – what about an enduring partnership (7th) like marriage is Cardinal Air? I know the 7th also governs “people in general”, the Other – the House opposing the 1st, the Self – although how this differs from encounters covered by the 3rd house (of daily routine, communication, primary schooling, short (return) trips and siblings) I’m not sure. To me the 3rd seems to concern insertion into structures which precede us (of all the people you know, you can’t choose your siblings. Why doesn’t this include your other family? Because of the people related to you, your siblings are your only peers. Air Houses broadly concern association-as-equals – 4th is nurturing figures (Cardinal Water), 5th those one nurtures (sources of joy – Fixed Fire)) That said, the patterns are so compelling that I’d revise my understanding of the Elements and Modes before discarding it completely – and we would define “siblings” as those people in your life which behave as such. We know that relationships with our siblings are distinct from any other.
Now this understanding of Signs as our manner of encountering the phenomena governed by the Houses they involve led to an epiphany regarding Mundane Astrology: In the total effect of the Planets on Earth, without reference to a particular thing, you can’t distinguish between “in” and “out”. For this reason, transits of the Celestial Houses affect the Mundane Houses which correspond to them – transits of Capricorn involve authority in general, those of Libra involve partnerships in general, those of Pisces involve self-undoing in general – Uranus in Pisces = violent self-undoing = the self-harm of the mid-to-late noughties. Neptune in Pisces = slow subtle dreamy self-undoing = the current opioid crisis. Pisces/12th also governs large animals, incarceration – I haven’t studied enough to know whether or how those things were affected by the recent transits. Another point is that the planets are simultaneously transiting billions of natal charts – the cumulative effects of this seem to be expressed simultaneously by the planets alone. Remarkable!
We can extend this principle of Sign-House indistinction in Mundane Astrology to that of the Axial Ages – so the Age of Aries was one in which the self underwent certain radical, long-term changes. If Jaynes’ timeline is right, bicameralism ended and something resembling the modern self emerged over this period – but we can also consider the ascent of the individualistic Proto-Indo-Europeans (Aryans) a more prosaic manifestation of the Age. This brings us to two questions: The timing of the Ages and the disparate manifestations of the Planets’ influences on different races. The PIE peoples were individualists before the Age of Aries if their burial practices are anything to go by, and the Age’s end was not the end of the emergence of warlike cultures – the Mongolians, for instance. But the Aryans didn’t reach their zenith until their Age, and the Mongolians didn’t exalt the principle of individual excellence as highly (impressive as they were and are – and by the way there’s no political commitments in my use of the word “Aryan”, it simply sounds nicer and evinces the Arian connection). History is not my strong point so I welcome corrections on this front.
I don’t pretend that these questions of timing are simple and I don’t want to give them a gloss – perhaps nothing more than a rough timing can be achieved, at least with our modern means. But we can divide timing into two further questions:
- How hard are the transitions? Is it like flipping a switch or does one meld imperceptibly into the next? Is this influenced by the nature of the Ages involved – will eg. Mutable Ages give way more easily?
- When did the last Age finish? How long exactly do they last? This is the big question! It’s not like the Age of Pisces had to kick off with Christ, just as the surfeit of wise men of the time around ~580 BC didn’t come at the beginning of the Age of Aries. Similarly, although I think we’re firmly in the Age of Aquarius, I can’t tell whether it began. It seems history is marked by turning points of greater and smaller magnitude, timed most likely by the Modern Planets (beyond Saturn). We could also count the procession of the points of conjunction of certain Planets – the Neptune-Pluto conjunction is by far the slowest, happening once every ~493 years and moving 5-6 degrees each time. Very roughly, that adds up to a cycle of 30,000 years, longer than that of a complete cycle of Axial rotation – wouldn’t it be nice if they were equivalent! Oh well. The conjunction of Neptune-Pluto-Uranus to within about 2 degrees occurs every ~3950 years (last was around the above-mentioned 580 BC), although I’m unsure whether the arc of conjunction proceeds through the Zodiac in an orderly manner.
As for the astrological composition of races/nations, there are some tables of Zodiacal rulerships running about, but surely it’s more complex than this! The depth and richness of each nation can’t be reduced to a single Sign – Spain fits with Sagittarius, Ireland with Taurus, but so many subtleties are left by the wayside. You can read Salvador de Madariaga’s ‘Englishmen, Frenchman and Spaniards’, as a synopsis of Aries, Leo and Sagittarius respectively, and by extension of Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable Signs in general. This is part of my lifelong conviction (Geminian) that every thing explains every other thing by pointing to the things which they all are – Sagittarius explains Spain as much as Spain explains Sagittarius.
And God willing you have all learned something from this.
APPENDIX: ARYAN IMPERIALISM AND JUPITER
Open and expansive (Jovian) environments (Steppe (Sagittarius) and Ocean (Pisces)) make Imperialist (Jovian) states – mercantile sea-states and military land-states. Have not found an exception to this rule yet – mountainous states such as Switzerland do not go in for imperialism. This man pointed out empires require “restriction and control, infrastructure, taxation [and] bondage” to function, which is true – but absent Jovian expansion, there is simply a state – not an empire.
The Aryans themselves strike me as Sagittarian, being a people of the horse and of strong religious convictions (it seems) – people of the Primordial Sky God. We see Jupiter probably derives from the Proto-Indo-European *dyeu-, meaning “to shine”, and from which we get “deity”, “divine”, Zeus; Dyēus Phter, “Shining Heaven Father” is the PIE God of the daylit sky, Proto-Jupiter, “wide-seeing” as Jupiter governs context.
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