Houses or Not?

So, recently I've been reading about different house systems. I started with house placidus, and then explored whole sign, and have been doing a few natal charts for friends for practice, and I came across some rather general discrepancies in both systems.

So, I decided to look at other possible ways of reading the houses. There are a bunch of different systems using the various planets as the first house markers, I played around with using the strongest planet in the chart as the first house cusp; I used the sun; I went through most of the more popular house systems some of which of course didn't make much of a difference in placement and some of which shifted planets as much as two houses.

Then I read a chart using what I guess you'd call natural house placement? Or better to call it a lack of houses - I used aries for the first house, and so on. This is, keep in mind, specifically for natal chart interpretation. The interpretation suddenly started to make a lot more sense, down to details that I don't typically get out of chart.

I gave nine people a little quiz - two columns, 10 rows, each with a house interpretation for a planet using on one side the placidus houses as it's become the most common, the other side using natural houses where Aries = 1st house. I mixed them up in each quiz so that no one had the same relative order, and of course mixed the columns up so that not all the placidus interpretations were on one side and visa versa.

Everyone scored between 7-10 in favor of natural houses, with only 1 person scoring 7 on the natural house side, and 3 people scoring 10 for natural houses. When asked about the choices that went for placidus, with only one exception did everyone say that it was just a really close call and they both seemed very similar. I didn't use anyone with an ascendent in Aries or pisces, because using placidus system either of these signs on the ascendent might not make much of a change in the natural house system.

In light of this, I'm inclined to throw the house system out all together in natal interpretation. Apparently there's a newer tradition (supposedly actually a very old tradition) called Magi Astrology which doesn't use a house system and instead focuses more emphasis on aspects as well as using declination in their calculations. Not much info was available to me on their system so I don't know what else goes into it or if they interpret the planets and signs generally the same way in practice, but their basic list seems more or less traditional. for keywords.

Does anyone else have experience with entirely non-traditional house systems? I don't know how non-traditional this look at houses really is - it seems to me that houses probably developed after the use of planets in signs. The ascendent still plays a role, it just doesn't factor in to how the house cusps are arranged. I'm currently working up natal interpretations for each of the survey takers' charts to see how taking into account planet-sign placement and aspect relationships change things as far as accuracy, using this natural or non-house system.

peace

That sounds a very interesting experiment. Hats off to you for taking the time to do it.

One thought that came to me as I read your post is that since people tended to find the placidus interpretations a close second, suggesting that both systems are relevant, perhaps the natural house interpretations chime with people because they echo the sign placements, and the placidus ones resonate because they add something new and relevant to the sign placements ???

Having done charts where no time was available, I feel that most of the information is available without houses.

Well, the thing that made me want to poll people in the first place was that in reading with placidus or whole sign format, some of the house related interpretations were significantly inaccurate. In the cases where there was a clear cut difference between interpretation in one format in the other (I gave interpretations, for example, of the moon situated in the fourth house by placidus, and in the 7th house by 'natural' house, without regard to sign; although in either case libra is in some ways accounted for as being the basis for the nature of the 7th house) the choice was very easy, apparently. In some cases where the meanings of both houses are somewhat similar (like venus in the 2nd/Taurus while conjunct Sun - which puts leo in the 4th - versus Venus in the 4th/taurus conjunct Sun) There are similarities in the way they feel that may have more to do with the influence of the Sun in conjunction with Venus than with Venus being in the 4th house.

However, cases like that weren't evident across the board. It's possible also that there's an element of self-knowledge to try and account for as well, and I don't know the poll subjects well enough to know if they were at all biased on how they want to be versus how they actually are.

The next step like I said, will be to interpret the whole chart accounting for aspects, etc., and interpreting the whole chart using a house format. I do feel that between placidus and whole sign I've had a closer degree of accuracy using whole sign; but being able to consider the Asc/Desc axis in some other place than the 1st/7th house area, and the MC/IC also in an axis that might place the IC in the 7th-12th houses and the MC in the 1st-6th, may also show some interesting variations. Mine is the first chart I will be interpreting in this light. I haven't been able to find more information on this adjustment of cusps so far, but I'm certain it exists. I got the idea partially because I use Kepler astrology software, and it offers the option of setting the 1st house cusp to different places, including any of the planets or signs. I chose aries based on it's association with the first house.

It would help greatly to know exactly when houses were first introduced, and under what circumstances. I wonder, actually, if they were originally used in natal interpretations at all or had something to do with another branch of astrology.

peace

Cosmobiology rejects houses altogether, the Uranian system uses the meridian house system, where the first house cusp is the equatorial ascendant as opposed to the ecliptical ascendant, Huber school uses Koch houses but produces something called the House chart which differs from the natal chart (only know the broad brush details of this, not how house chart is calculated) and some modern astrologers use Gauquelin sectors instead of houses. Your experiment is interesting, and amounts to putting the Aries Point on the first house cusp - Uranian astrology and cosmobiology see the Aries Point (in midpoint pictures) as signifying one's public presentation, very similar to the more traditional Ascendant

Yes, R. Ebertin rejected all house system formats in the 1920's (and onward) in his development of Cosmobiologie. And Cosmobiologie is a very interesting and effective system of astrological delineation, but I prefer using "houses", and feel that Cosmobiologie is too "aspectology" oriented, and so I (personally) prefer my own eclectic approach (which is heavily influenced by Traditionalist and Greco/Roman concepts and methods)

Houses were not originally called that (nor were they called temples either) in the first few hundred years (AD) of Greco/Roman astrology. Whatever the rising sign is, the ancients called the "first place"; then the SIGN (30 degree sign) after that was called the "2nd place", and so on around the circle (hence the origin of the "whole sign" format, also called the "sign=house" format) . Each "place" (locus) was alleged to be affinitive to certain areas of life: however, these "place affinities" varied with the TYPE of chart being delineated; eg, in a "raw" horoscope, the "2nd place" was affinitive to wealth, money; however, in a Fortunata chart (where the sign positing the Part of Fortune is made the "first place"-what we today would call the first house) the "2nd place" of the Fortunata chart is affinitive to warfare and the various struggles and battles of life.

I shall also mention that looking at the "place" affinities (ne house affinities) in Greco/Roman astrology, we find a number of differences to what developed in later Western astrology: those interested in investigating the oldest (extant) "place" (house) affinities, both for "raw" horoscopic charts and also for "Fortunata" charts, see Manilius (14 AD-the "Astronomica")

Thank you inconjunct and Dr. Farr, this gives me some direction on where to focus some of my research. Cosmobiologie is something i've come across a couple of times, I may have access to a couple of books on the subject. I haven't got any experience with it, but it sounds at least in a similar vein. I'll look into manilius' texts. I wondered about different kinds of charts; in looking for information on a system without houses, I came across some interesting discussions on placing the first house cusp according to all sorts of factors, as well as whole new charts based on when the sun initially transits each house, etc. I have a tendency to allow information to overwhelm me and always have to slow down and pick and choose where to get started and what to continue with.

Thanks!

Peace

Jyotish (Vedic) astrology with its divisional charts (varga charts), initially influenced to a considerable extent by the Greeks (Pinegree) has taken this to the "nth" degree: a complete horoscopic delineation, for their adepts, involves a minimum of 4 types of charts: the rashi chart (30 degree signs) plus the drekkana chart (10 degree decan chart) plus the navamsha chart ( 1/9th sign chart) plus the dwadashama chart (1/12th sign chart) This is somewhat reflective of the Greco/Roman astrologers with their "raw" and Fortunata charts, and the importance they attributed to parts of signs-decans and sign 1/12ths (duodenaries)

I think this could be very accurate. I recently had the idea that maybe the world has houses that uses Aries for house 1, etc. regardless of where individuals' houses are. The individual houses would still be in effect, but the world houses would probably have more as to how that individual is seen and how in return they see themselves. It makes perfect sense in application and theory to the point it's worked out, I just have no idea what would allow the world to have houses.

As I mentioned in previous posts, originally the ancients did not have "houses", as well call them, but rather they had "places", these places being 30 degree divisions of the circle of the sky; so, the world certainly has "places", the circle of the sky everywhere on the surface of the earth can indeed be divided, still, into 30 degree segments ("places"), so perhaps that is how the world might have (what we now call) "houses"?
Just a speculation...