- by Roy Kirkland
The scheme of the 12 houses of the Horoscope is well known and consistent in meaning throughout the astrological world, but little has been written about how the definitions of the houses were established. Many modern astrologers seem to be content with the description of the houses as directly analogous to the zodiac signs, but every aspect of the craft of astrology has been altered by shifting philosophical and religious paradigms over the last few thousand years, and the 12 house scheme is no exception.
Classical authors assigned a distinct set of attributes and rulers to the houses of the Horoscope: the first house was not thought to have anything to do with Aries, either by nature or by rulership. Originally Saturn was associated with the 1st house, because it was considered to be the eldest of the planets, and the planet through which the unmanifest comes into existence – the hidden emerges into our world through Saturn. Saturn is also the first of the planets in the Chaldean order.
The Chaldean order is the arrangement of the planets from the slowest to the swiftest: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. This is the order of the Sephiroth of the tree of life as well: Saturn had only the spheres of the fixed stars and the zodiac "above" it, while the Moon was the last Sephira before our sphere, the Earth. The planets were associated with the houses such that the order repeated itself after the 7th: Saturn was the planet of the 8th, Jupiter the 9th and so forth. Interpretations of planets in the houses were also considered so that Saturn in the 1st would exhibit the positive traits of caution and persistence, even if it were in Aries, Cancer or Leo, and an afflicted 1st house or first house ruler marked the native with the negative attributes of Saturn - slow, lame, unfriendly, difficult early life and so forth.
Astrological researchers, using modern techniques of linguistic analysis and philological study have come to believe that the inventors of the 12 houses of the horoscope as we know them today were the Hellenistic period Graeco-Egyptian astrologers of Alexandria and the Mediterranean. In that they claimed to have gained the fundamentals of the astrological canon from the Egyptians, it may have been Egyptian geometric thinking that divided the heavens by 12 (i.e. the Pyramids are based on the numbers 3 and 4 - triangular sides and square base). The ancient Egyptian obsession with proportion and symbol clearly are expressed in the astrological way of observing celestial phenomena.
Older Babylonian (Chaldean) tablets show the heavens divided by 8 3-hour periods, called watches, but nothing like the 12 'topical' houses existed at that time, according to the best current research. It was in the written work of the Hellenistic era astrologers that the first systematic explanation of the houses occurred. Even Manilius, writing in the first two decades CE, wrote of the houses with enough deviation from the philosophical standard described below to demonstrate that although the heavens were already being divided and subdivided by 12, the formulation of house meanings that have become the common standard had not yet been systematized.
The Horoscope, or Horoskopos, was, in fact, the Greek name for the degree of the zodiac on the Eastern horizon at birth, or the Ascendant. The Ascendant was calculated by degrees, but the whole sign house system was commonly used for interpretation. In this system, if the Ascendant was 23° of Taurus, the whole sign of Taurus would be the 1st house, Gemini would be the 2nd and so on. What we call the signs today were considered the houses of the planets: the house of Mars meant the sign Scorpio (or Aries), and the 8th house was the 8th sign from the one rising at the time of birth, or in their terms, the 8th house of the Horoscope.
Systems of mathematical house division (primarily the Porphry system, in which the quadrants subtended by the ascendant and meridian axes were trisected) were used by the ancients to determine planetary expressiveness. The reasoning behind this is that those two axes defined the extremes of the horizon (at the east and west, where Sun, Moon and planets rise and set), and the meridian (the point due norh and south that intersects the Zodiac, where the Sun, Moon and planets reach the highest and lowest points of the sky on a daily basis).
Somehow these 'expressiveness' calculations became confused with methods of interpretation, and the ancient tradition fell by the wayside. Astrologers began to assume that the strength divisions were, in fact, the houses, therefore muddying up the difference between topical and dynamic houses. While the traditional method seems overly simplistic, its efficacy cannot be denied: Vedic astrologers have used whole sign houses with great success for many dozens of generations.
The meanings the houses came from the idea of fate, which was an important topic of discussion in various schools of Greek philosophy. Some Hellenistic astrologers were strict determinists, and some weren’t. They all had a rich vocabulary concerning these matters – philosopher’s discussions about the nature of free will, wisdom, the soul and freedom are some of the most read-worthy collections of ancient wisdom that exist.
Fate, or Moira, was a term that had a sense of something being distributed or portioned out - not unlike the concept of Maat in Egyptian mysticism. It was definitely not an essential characteristic or a driving force - fate represented the chains of causality through which ‘essence’ is fitted with form. The Moira of the universe elicits the forms and motion of the stars and planets – fate is not exclusive to humanity. Fate is more like the laws of physics than the retribution of the gods.
In this regard, the houses may be considered as "agents" of fate, distributing the results of one's actions according to the various departments of activity in which we have our human experience, as determined by the "accident" of birth, and the relationships of the planets to the various places (pivotal, supportive or diminishing), as below.
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