4 house: Home and roots

Houses

Where do I recover and what do I consider my beginning?

The fourth house starts at the Nadir and governs roots: family, home, origin, the sense of ‘where I come from’. It is the most private part of the chart, so its themes are rarely visible from the outside and often explain much.

The first, fourth, seventh and tenth houses are called angular: their boundaries are the Ascendant, the nadir, the Descendant and the Midheaven. A planet at such a boundary shows up most noticeably.

See the sign on the Nadir, the planets in the fourth house and the Moon: they describe relationships with home and origin. Saturn here indicates a strict family, the Moon indicates a strong attachment to one's roots.

A house without planets does not mean the theme is absent. It is read by the sign on its cusp and the ruler of that sign: where the ruler is placed, the theme goes. Empty houses in a chart are usually more than half – there are ten planets and twelve houses.

Houses are built with the Placidus system from the time and place of birth. An error of four minutes in the time shifts the Ascendant by about a degree, and an error of an hour can move a planet into the neighbouring house. Without a known time the platform shows no houses at all, rather than inserting noon and producing a plausible but wrong chart.