It’s All About the Houses — Charting the Annual Edition

In this special edition of Planet Waves FM, I explore one of the most commonly asked questions about “general” readings — how does the astrologer make them specific? How can we get any detail at all, just knowing someone’s Sun sign? This discussion will be interesting for both astrology fans and astrology students. I describe the solar house system, which counts the houses off of the Sun, and the whole sign house system, which uses the whole sign as a house. I.e., the house cusp is the sign cusp and vice versa.

I also describe how astrology is a holographic art — and because I am using a whole chart for each of the readings, I can interpret a complete story that you might even relate to. (By the way I just heard a ridiculous verbal typo – toward the beginning, I say the word ‘simultaneously’ when I mean ‘synonymously’. It’s an interesting blend of concepts anyway, as one implies time and the other implies meaning.)

Technical note: “ascendant,” “1st house” and “rising sign” are all the same thing, for our purposes here. Another: the astrological wheel is usually divided into 12 signs and 12 houses, which spin like two different roulette wheels. There are 144 basic combinations of sign and house; in this audio I explain how this works when you don’t have the birth time available, or in a prepared reading like the ones in Reality Check.

There are a few resources that might help ease your way, if you want to go deeper into understanding the astrolotical houses. One is a basic description of house meanings. Here is another one, that focuses on sexual themes through the astrological houses. In this article from way back when the Internet was young, I describe how horoscope writers use the solar houses and whole sign houses. Finally, in this article from Cosmic Confidential, I describe my holographic method of reading for the signs, which allows the use of a full chart — granted, a simpler chart — and why it helps that an astrologer sees the whole chart and creates a cohesive narrative. That, I think, is the key. Okay so — just thought of one other, one that skips back into the earliest history of astrology as we know it in old Greece – the Thema Mundi. The Thema Mundi may be modern astrology’s oldest artifact. It’s a single chart, a teaching chart, that describes the logic system behind astrology.