The Declining House Meanings in Childhood and Retirement

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology, and today we are going to finish our series on the meanings of the houses for the stages of early life or childhood, as well as later life, say, retirement and beyond. But you know, more broadly speaking, this series can really be used as a way of understanding the meanings of the houses outside of, let's say, sort of like career focused and, you know, for people who, you know, there's like a very standard, normative way of looking at house meanings and then there are broader, more universal, and archetypal ways of looking at them that can really be applied more broadly for people who don't fit neatly into some box or who are in a stage of life that doesn't fit with like your typical forecast or horoscope.

So I hope that this will be, you know, just received in that spirit. Here are some broader ways of looking at the houses, and if you missed the first two parts of the series, we looked at the angular houses and the succedent houses, and now we're finishing the series with the cadent or declining houses.

I just had a few other things I wanted to finish before I did this one. Also, I honestly believe that the declining houses or the cadent houses are the most universal and easiest to understand for all people at all stages of life.

Succedent and angular houses lend themselves a little bit more, for example, to talking about things like money and career and that kind of middle-life stage that most consumers of astrology find themselves in. But I think that this series, in particular, looking at the cadent houses in this series, will be something that, but it's like, again, it's like the most universal of the house meetings. Anyway, that is our objective for the day.

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Okay, so today, the cadent house meetings, and we're looking at these in terms of kind of the most broad least so that you can apply them and understand them at any stage of life. How does your eight-year-old experience a ninth house transit or a twelfth house transit, or how might you experience it at 75 or at any other stage in life? How can we understand this outside of, say, the kind of, again, I almost want to call them like astro normative ways of relating to the houses?

The nice thing about the cadent houses, like I said earlier, is that they sort of are the most universal and the least tethered to the normal world of seeking love and seeking, you know, employment or success in your career or money or, you know, whatever, buying a house or having kids or something, which are like a lot of the things that people come to astrology asking questions about.

These houses, in particular, were called declining houses, and the reason that they are called declining houses is very simple. You're looking at house 12, house 9, house 6, and house 3, and the thing that is most interesting about them is that if you think about the wheel as moving clockwise, that's the primary motion of the sky that will bring, for example, in the real-time clock that I have right now, you know, Libra is rising. So what will happen is the whole sign house of Libra will become the 12th house and then the 11th and the 10th and the 9th, and it moves clockwise like that around the wheel. That is called the primary or diurnal motion that rotates it that way.

So when you have a birth chart, and you're looking at houses 12, 9, 6, and 3, they're called declining or cadent. Cadent means falling, the same kind of idea as the word declining. Falling or declining away from the angle. The angular houses are houses 1, 10, 7, and 4, and so when you have whole signs that are in 12, 9, 6, and 3, what we're saying is that if you back this clock up one whole click, all of those cadent houses, declining or falling houses, have fallen away from the angle.

Most recently, if you back the clock up, they were the angular in the positions. House 12 was most recently house 1, house 9 was most recently house 10, 6 was most recently 7, and 3 was most recently 4, but the clock has kept turning and they have fallen out of that position. These houses are called declining or Cadent, which means falling because they have fallen or declined out of the seat of power. These houses, the angular houses, were sometimes mentioned as Kramatistikos in Greek, which basically means a place that speaks loudly or as it's an oracular spot that has like a megaphone in the chart.

So, the angular houses were considered very loud and vocal. If you have planets in those places, they speak to the native's fate or destiny very loudly, and they are tethered to the world. That's why in Indian astrology, the first house is Dharma, the 10th house Arta; the seventh house Kama, the fourth house Moksha, the major four major philosophical pursuits of life.

Duty and character development, the pursuit of power, prestige, mastery, success and recognition, the pursuit of pleasure or bliss, and the pursuit of enlightenment or release from worldly concerns altogether.

So, these four areas of life are constituting the pursuits of the angular houses. They're called Kramatistikos in Greek again, which means loud. When you're looking at the declining or cadent places, the planets have slid away from and are in a kind of reflective but related relationship with the angle and its topics.

So that means something very particular for each of the cadent places, and this is something we take, you know, 12 hours to unpack in my year one program. So we're just doing a really brief treatment here, but let's start with house 12.

In house 12, the planet is in a kind of reflective but distanced relationship from the first house. That means the planet has declined away from the first house and is looking at it by its secondary motion. It's sort of moving toward Libra or the first place, the angle, but by primary motion, it's been brought away from it.

So that was a symbolic astronomical picture for ancient astrologers of something that has lost its ability to hold onto the steering wheel of the chart.

The first house was called the helm, and it was the place where the natives' agency, their intelligence, their body, and their free will is paramount. Now, a planet in the 12th house is sort of has fallen out of that position is and is looking at it reflectively but from a pulled-away distance, and so for that reason, the 12th house is associated with a loss of control, a loss of agency, a loss of sanity, a loss of health, a loss of freedom, and the desire or attempt or hope to get it back.

It's also associated with all of those things that are considered to be like lost parts of us or parts that we can't see or don't understand, or subtle forces that might undermine us because we don't have control over them, or we don't have a more conscious relationship with them. So this is why I started off by saying that these house meanings are the most universal.

In fact, all cadent houses were called metacosmios in Greek as well, which means kind of like a world between worlds or a kind of liminal space. The 12th house is probably the most difficult in so far as it represents all those things which elude or evade the natives understanding or control, and therefore, while it can be very spiritually enlightening to get in touch with that unconscious material, it is often very difficult and challenging.

The 12th house doesn't have an aspectual relationship with the first in ancient astrology, so it's considered to be averse from the ascendant. That also would mean that things in this house are located in a kind of blind spot for the native.

All of this in mind. This is why I said these meanings are sort of universal and already, by their very definition, sort of transcend stages or ages of life. From the time that you're a little child, you have things you don't understand that you're afraid of that are little parts of your personality that are more unconscious, and I can see this already in my kids, who are just five and seven.

It can look a little bit different to grapple with 12th house material and childhood. For example, in childhood, a 12th house transit or planet might show up as undermining or unconscious, disturbing, challenging elements in the environment that are outside of your control that stand as real shadows or the seeds of shadow material that you'll deal with later in life.

Alcoholism in the family, for example, or deaths in the family, or maybe you were adopted and you don't know who your birth family was, and it may not be so much later in life that you have some deeper understanding of you know, what that lack of contact with your birth mother was or something like that. I'm just making this up.

Similarly, it doesn't really matter what stage of life you're in; you're always going to be looking at or working with unconscious materials. As far as I can tell, there's no difference between 35 and 75 in that respect. Every client I've ever seen is still working with unconscious material, right? Things that elude our understanding are clear that we don't have control of, that we're working on, that constitute our fears, our shadows, the unconscious, unintegrated parts that we are grappling with. That we're afraid of or that we don't understand. Sometimes, they are our own worst enemies, the things in the 12th house.

Other times, they are the hidden angels that we're afraid of but are seeking expression within us. You know, I really honestly, throughout all stages of life, I don't see a huge amount of difference between how 12th house stuff shows up.

I would say that maybe the biggest difference is earlier in life when, you know, we don't quite have the psychological sophistication to be like looking at my own unconscious material as like a five-year-old, you know, or it's like an eight-year-old or something.

But that doesn't mean that it's not there and that it's not at play somehow, and often earlier in life, 12th house material seems to show up as other people, places, things, events, etc., as opposed to, say, maybe starting late teen years through all the way through adulthood where you have maybe a little bit more of a chance that that material that shows up in the 12th house is something that at least in part belongs to your own unconscious choices, habits, behaviors, modes of perception, and so forth.

But let's not get it twisted at any stage in life. The 12th house could show up as someone else, not just it's like we don't want to think; sometimes you'll hear the phrase self-undoing. Well, yeah, maybe.

But there's also, you know, like if you grew up in a family with a sibling that was a drug addict and going in and out of jail or something that could show up in the 12th, the ruler of the third could show up in the 12th or something like that.

Or if you had a sister that was really troubled and, you know, taking your parent's attention away from you constantly, you could have Venus in the 12th who rules sisters or Mars rules brothers. So you know, there's so many different ways in which unconscious and somewhat undermining material can show up, and it's not always just your own crap. You know what I mean?

Especially again, in childhood, you'll see that it's often not the kid but something in the environment that they're contending with that may start to shape their psychology or behavior, which is why, as astrologers, it's great if you know some astrology to be really aware of what's in your kid's 12th house. Because then you can be a little bit more on the lookout for that pattern that might start to take root and, you know, almost like meld itself to their character.

But it's actually coming from some kind of conditioning that, you know, you're contributing to as a parent. It would be really helpful to understand 12th house material in that sense. You know, but yeah, maybe later in life, one thing that I have noticed is that 12th house material becomes more familiar to us.

We've encountered it over and over again. In ancient Greek, the house was called malas daimon, which means evil spirit. But this you have to understand too that like, you know, almost like the book of Job where, you know, evil, good and evil are not seen in this kind of like, you know, eternal duking it out for the champion of the universe.

Good and evil are sort of much more relative everyday terms, you know, stubbing your toe and being in a bad mood might be kind of like there's an evil influence in the air, you know. Whereas, you know, good, good spirit or, you know, the good daimon might be a little bit more like, oh, things are kind of flowing along nicely and working out or conspiring for the good or something.

So you don't want to think about evil in a super like, I just want to say like a super dualistic kind of Christian way. You want to think about evil more as, like, just a word that we have used over time to denote the kind of, you know, almost like bad luck or just bad vibes and as well as the need to understand those things and to explore the unconscious and make it conscious, so to speak, which is not really a process of making something bad into something good and so at a certain point, the phrase evil spirit becomes sort of unhelpful.

But it's also not something to be ignored because you will find that some of your demons do live in the 12th house; you know, demons and shadows are an appropriate way at times of talking about the 12th house. Later in life, that might change a little bit; you get a little bit better at your shadow material, you get a little bit more familiar with it, and you kind of know what you're dealing with.

So I have noticed that, say, my older clientele from maybe 50 onward are just going to be veterans when it comes to dealing with 12th house. I'm sure, of course, some people, and I don't mean to be trite because, like, what do I know? I'm just, I'm just a whipper snapper, you know, but I would say some people never learn.

Like it's amazing to me that sometimes, you know, I'll work with older clients, and I'm like, I'll go back through five, six transits over this course of 40 years. So the 12th house, it's like the exact same thing keeps happening, and there's no insight. There's just like a very sometimes, it's kind of a victim like poor me. This thing keeps happening, and I'm like, geez, I would think that by this age, you know, we would do a little bit more reflecting and be able to see at least part of our own participation in the pattern.

I don't think that everything is like I create everything or that everything just happens to me from the outside. I think it's a real interesting and mysterious dance between our choices and external influences, you know.

So, I'm just surprised, you know, sometimes it's true. People will be dealing with the same old stuff and not really learning or having any insight into it even later in life. So it's not like it; just because you're older means somehow your 12th house stuff gets easier.

Most of the time, though, I would say it does, like most of my clientele, as they age, seem to get a little better at doing 12th house stuff. It's also a place that forces us to lose control or give up control on some level, and that act of surrender to things that are in the unconscious is, you know, kind of part of that dark night of the soul or encounter with suffering that almost all spiritual veterans can speak to, you know, or in all traditions have spoken about.

So again, that does seem to be like a mark of spiritual experiences that you are better at doing 12th house stuff, or you're better at knowing how to move through it. It may still come up, but you know how to work with it.

Okay, well, it's very important to understand, too, that in ancient astrology, there was no conflation between planets, houses, and signs. So, the 12th has nothing to do with Neptune or Pisces. That's not a thing in ancient astrology. The rationale for the meanings of the houses is not linked to any one-to-one correlation with the 12 signs. They have a totally separate rationale for how they're understood.

Okay, so let's continue. I'm going to put the Sun in the ninth house. So that's a bit about the 12th house. Now, the ninth house is interesting because the ninth place is declining away from the 10th. Now, remember, the 10th was called praxis or action. It's related to the worldly activities that we take up in the society in which we were born. So, the ninth house has this kind of reflective relationship with the 10th. So, the ninth was called God. It was called the Joy of the Sun. The 12th was called evil spirit; it was called the Joy of Saturn, by the way.

This place also metacosmia, meaning not so tethered to the world and a little otherworldly, and again, I find that this house has almost universal application for all stages of life. The ninth has pulled away from the place that is associated with success, mastery, recognition, fame, development of your reputation, career, worldly activities, and anything that tethers you to the world in action.

This place exists in a reflective relationship with it. It gets a much more positive meaning than the 12th because this house, unlike the 12th, has an aspectual relationship by trine to the first house, and so that aspectual relationship between any house and the ascending house generally would lend itself to more positive meanings.

Anyway, this house reflects upon the actions and activities of the world and the greater society in which we live. That would mean, for example, that this place reflects upon human action with a desire to understand its meaning to understand the laws that govern it. So this is the place of religion, of mysticism. You have to remember in the ancient world that, math, science, art, and music all were connected.

Also, this brought back this kind of interconnected, interdisciplinary, universal spirit of education in the Renaissance, bringing back of the ancient Greek sort of ethos. Well, you have in the ninth house, you have an active reflection upon the activities and pursuits of mankind that exist in the 10th house.

All of their aspirations and goals and so forth, and in this house, you're reflecting upon them, which is why we have the study of astronomy, math, science, religion, spirituality, mysticism, and astrology. This was the place of the gods and oracles, places where you gain higher insight and perspective as to why we're here or, what any of this is about or why we pursue the things that we pursue that exist in the 10th house.

This is a place of higher meaning, of higher learning, of the pursuit of wisdom and the gods of religion and mysticism and astrology itself. So this house has that kind of universal meaning, again, that all of the cadent or declining houses have. They're not so tethered to the world and, therefore, lend themselves more easily to all stages and ages of life because they're universal in that sense.

Whether you're a child or an adult, there will be a gradual, sometimes accelerated or explosive, depending on transits and so forth, interest in what makes the world work the way that it does.

Why people are here? What does it all mean? My five and seven-year-olds are actively interested in these subjects, actively interested in astrology. I sit down; I have a little whiteboard that I use. It's like this little whiteboard with markers, and I draw the glyphs of the planets and teach them about the meanings of the planets; we have little lessons, and they love it.

They absolutely love it, and I can ask my five-year-old, literally, I can say, why do you think that the Sun is associated with birth and death and rebirth? Why is the Sun associated with something that is born and then dies and then is reborn? What does the Sun do every day that's like that? And my five-year-old can look at me and goes, well, it rises, and it sets, and then it goes away, and then it comes back again.

I'm so impressed. So I will tell you right now, I think that one of the things I've learned about kids and having kids, I hadn't spent the most time in the world with children before having our own. One thing that I've observed about children is that from the time we are very, very little, many children are actively interested in questions about God, divinity, the universe, the soul, and where we go when we die. Why do we die?

All sorts of things. So, I see the ninth house as innate and not just belonging to the university years and beyond. You know, it's not like you and David Attenborough; once you reach 21, start endeavoring to understand everything about the way nature works.

But rather that as soon as you have eyes to see and you look around, and you see the activities of humankind, dad goes to work, and mom goes to work, and this happens. You have cars, and there's traffic, and there's stuff. All this stuff, and you go, well, like, why and how does it work, and it's natural.

So there is no stage of life where we aren't asking those questions, or we aren't constantly befuddled, enlightened, and then befuddled all over again. This is a house of the signs and omens of the gods as well as the riddles that they present us with. This is a house that was associated with the Sun in so far as it's a place of illuminating and higher intelligence. It is at a reflective distance from the world and its activities, and that, for many people, will actually describe a good part of their lifetime. You know, for example, the moon in my chart is in the ninth house.

So, a huge amount of my lifetime with one of the luminaries will be spent in that environment. I grew up a preacher's kid in the church looking at the stained glass windows. I used to break into the church at night with my dad's keys.

I guess it's not breaking in, but I wasn't supposed to. So I would take his keys, and I would go into the church, and I'd have the whole place to myself, and I just walk around, and I would sit in the dark sanctuary, and I just have the church as my playground because I needed some place at night, the moon in the ninth house, to just reflect on what is all of this? What is it to me? Not what am I being told on Sundays, but I needed some personal experience of it. Some, I don't know, a little bit of ownership, I guess. I mean, it was a really mischievous in another way.

Those are some of my most powerful memories of childhood was a period in junior high where I started taking the keys late at night after my parents were asleep, taking my bicycle, riding under the cover of night, going into the church, and just wandering around, looking through all sorts of things that I never otherwise would have had access to. Asking those questions, why are we here? What is this all about?

That ninth house, honestly, is there from the time you're a child to the time you're an adult, and it can change certainly like our religious experiences aren't the same at 75 as they are at five, but in a way, they are. In a way, there's really no difference. I think in a way the ninth house is childlike in so far as, well, I mean, sometimes people can develop a real righteous certainty about stuff that can be very ninth house-like, but in so far as the house appeals to all ages, all stages, all walks of life, it is just about asking why am I here? How am I orienting myself through the lens of beliefs or belief systems or something like that?

Pilgrimage, too, is associated with the ninth house or travel abroad, but generally speaking, you're gaining some distance from the normal world or the normal activities of the city you live in or the state or country you live in, and you're getting some reflective distance from it, and that's why it's also associated with travel and pilgrimage.

So, okay, let's go on. Nothing to do with Sagittarius. That's not where the meaning comes from. There are interesting connections that can be made or associations, so that's not where the rationale comes from. All right, let's get on to the sixth house.

Okay, well, let's look at the sixth. So the sixth has that same kind of cadent falling, declining relationship with the seventh house. It has fallen out of that angle and is looking at it but from a distance.

The seventh was called Kama, which means bliss or ecstasy, happiness, or pleasure, especially with other people. This house, because planets had traveled through the whole sky from rising to culminating to setting, was also called the conclusion of work and rest and relaxation belong to this house. So, the pursuit of pleasure that is represented by the evening or the nocturnal space.

So, planets in the sixth are trying to get back to a place they've fallen out of. They're looking at it, but from a reflective distance, and this house, like the twelfth, does not have an aspectual relationship with the first. It is in aversion to the first house. So considered to be more difficult, again.

This place was called mala fortuna, or bad fortune, and it was also called the Joy of Mars. So, this house is associated with the frustration that we feel in trying to reach a state of peace, happiness, bliss, rest, and conclusion of work, but we're unable to do so.

We've been pulled away from that state of rest, and we're unable to get back to it. So this house, not surprisingly, is associated with work and frustration and labor and toil and chronic conditions, or things that we have to sacrifice or work in service to with a good amount of blood, sweat, and tears. So it can be a very sacrificial house.

A lot of hard work is done in this house, laboring or suffering nobly toward things that we believe in or, things that we fight for, things that we suffer on behalf of, or things that we selflessly sacrifice for.

Mars, of course, in part, is related to the idea of martyrdom. That's where they share the root, mar in martyr. So this place can have a kind of noble, self-sacrificial serving quality. It's unable to reach a peaceful resolution, and so it carries a burden perpetually, a suffering servant in the sixth house or people who fight. This house was associated with soldiers and, warfare and military service.

It's also associated with laborers, and it was associated with slavery and indentured servitude and anything that would be kind of like the shackles of hard work and also chronic health conditions that don't resolve. Why? Because everything in this house has been pulled away from the place of peaceful resolution in the seventh house, the completion of work and the enjoyment and pleasure of the seventh house are not there.

So that doesn't mean everything in the sixth is bad, but again, the meanings here are pretty universal. As far as I can tell, from the time we're little to the time that we're of an older age, the sixth house struggles continue. You sacrifice on behalf of things you love; you sweat and bleed for things you care about, and that doesn't stop. That's a part of life, no matter what age or stage you're in.

Sometimes again, in earlier childhood, before we have such a conscious sense of what we want to work or fight for or believe in or sacrifice for or serve or work hard toward, the sixth house will show up as the afflictions or obstacles that are frustrating or overwhelming that are starting to teach us perseverance or that are starting to teach us the value of hard work or sacrifice or that present themselves as kind of chronic, frustrating conditions that are in some ways training us to be strong.

That's a very positive way of looking at it. At other times, the sixth house, depending on what's in there or what's ruling it, can show up as the kinds of health afflictions that we have, or it can show up as sometimes the moon in the sixth shows up because you had a single mom who was at the poverty line just working her butt off, and that was the environment you grew up in with your mother.

Sometimes, the sixth house will also show up. You've got a couple of planets in there that indicate that, hey, I've got parents who really believed in something morally, politically, spiritually, and they were kind of suffering servants on behalf of what they cared about. When you're younger, like the 12th house, it's a bit more about things that are in the environment that are giving you those kinds of sixth house initial hardships or service projects and showing you what it looks like to have to suffer through something.

Now, the worst is when you have a lot of afflicted planets in there in a child's chart can sometimes show up as, okay, there were some losses and hardships and struggles early on that I had no control over that set me up to start believing that life is hard and sometimes it takes a lot of work for us to realize that I don't just have to survive. I don't just have to chop wood and carry water my whole life or bleed and sacrifice or overcome and persevere.

These are great. Actually, the sixth house, like for all of us who believe in anything or want to get good at anything, you got to kind of do your sixth house. But my point is that children don't; sometimes, it's like stuff that's more out of their control earlier in life. Later in life, you'll see more of a sense of a person's own agency and involvement with sixth house things. That's the most general thing I could say about the presence of the sixth house in childhood.

But it can be that way throughout life. If you have your like in this chart, you can see right now if this were a birth chart, the seventh house ruler is in the sixth with the south node, that could mean that the spouse or marriage partner has a health problem and that's a challenge that you somehow are overcoming or working with as much as they might be.

So you could describe something that's challenging for them but also a challenge that is going to be part of your life. Now, I'm just making that up. There would be many other significant potential delineations of that.

But as far as I can tell, the delineation really doesn't change later in life. I mean, maybe later in life, it's more common to see physical health afflictions showing up through sixth house placements or transits as the natural process of aging occurs, and chronic health problems are just a part of, you know, moving toward the exit ramp of this lifetime.

The body breaks down. It's a very sixth house like thing. But also, there's no less amount of sacrifice, service, and things that we are passionate about passion to suffer alongside the passion of Mars in the sixth house is to suffer for things that we care about; as far as I can tell that doesn't really change at any stage in life in terms of its relevance or importance to the soul.

People who are retired are certainly, you know, being grandparents suffering alongside their children and still helping their children out through the challenges of their own middle lives and whatever else, and there are causes, and there are religious practices, and there are service projects, and there's art and hobbies that, you know, are going to show up as things that we burn for and with that, we sort of serve and suffer with.

So that's a pretty, again, really universal, a metacosmia type of environment. It's not when we suffer with things; it feels like we want to get to a place of flow. This is not a place of flow as much as it is a place of enduring and persevering and sort of chugging along in choppy waters. So that's a part of life that we all deal with energetically at all ages and stages if that makes sense.

Okay, let's go to the last of the cadent houses, which is house three, so we have now the third house has fallen out of the fourth by primary motion and by secondary motion, sort of looking at that fourth house, but it's been pulled away. Now, this house has a sextile to the ascendant, so more positive meanings generally.

The sextile to the ascendant, as well as the sort of reflective distance from the fourth house, makes this a pretty positive place. It was called the joy of the moon, or it was called goddess, as opposed to the opposite house called God and the joy of the Sun. The third is called Goddess and Joy of the Moon.

The moon, very broadly speaking, was called fortune and presided over the everyday environment and the fluctuations and changes of the environment, just as surely as the moon is always waxing and waning and moving more quickly than any other planet and disseminating the lights of all the other planets through many aspects that it makes as it moves so quickly through the zodiac.
So, the moon came to represent the everyday environment and its fluctuations and changes.

Now, the fourth place that the third is in reference to is called the resting place, the subterranean pivot, the place of home, and remember, the fourth house associated with Moksha, released from the world.

So you go home after you work and you release, you relax, you go to sleep at night. But you also find that resting place, that kind of homeostasis and flow in the fourth house, very similar in a sense to the seventh house. Seven and four have a lot in common in so far as pleasure and liberation from the world.

There's something in common there, but Moksha is a little bit more like this bigger universal idea of release, even as in enlightenment. But the fourth house is associated with parents, roots, home, and release from worldly concerns or cares.

The third house, as it adjoins the fourth but is at a kind of reflective distance, is about everything that circulates around, orbits around the roots, like a little satellite, like the moon, and thus, the third is maybe the most all-encompassing and non-specific house, which is why I can be frustrating to describe third house planets. It literally is describing the ebb and flow of everything in the immediate environment that surrounds your roots. This is why it's associated with the neighborhood. This is why it's associated with neighbors and siblings. Why? Because siblings all disperse outward but still constellate around the roots of the parents, which are located in the fourth.

You have third house topics like siblings, neighbors, the immediate environment, and the local folk customs of your city or village. You have everything that is kind of swimming. It's like I've said this multiple times before on this channel. The third house is like the water that the fish are swimming in. You don't even recognize it.

So the third house has a lot to do also with the environment of our body, our mind, our thoughts, our emotions, and it's just kind of like the third house is a little bit like a mood ring that you're wearing, and you're not even, you don't even know that you're wearing it. You're just like one of those squids that changes colors or whatever.

So this is an interesting one because I will say that this has some really distinct features at different ages of life. For example, the earlier you are in life, the more unconscious you tend to be about what's in the environment, and this is also the moon, in general, will often show up as more of the, you know, sort of sometimes you've heard psychological astrologers say that the moon will show up as a kind of early unconscious identification that the child has.

Whereas the older they get and the more self-reflective they become, oftentimes, it kind of grows into an awareness of the life path as described by the Sun. Whereas the moon is just kind of like what you naturally fall into as a matter of just the kind of unconscious default setting. It does not mean that it's better or worse or that you should go toward the Sun and leave the moon behind.
It's nothing like that.

It's just the moon is so natural; it's what connects us to the environment, the home. It's very, it's much more like a homeostasis setting. So, things in the third house for children will often be very much a part of the unconscious flow in the environment.

Now, you could see really difficult things in that space, and yet still, in childhood, it may take a little bit longer before you become aware of what kind of impact they've had on you. But also, as life goes on, the third house becomes about what we want or don't want in our environment, in our thoughts, our minds, our emotions, and our body. What kind of influences exist around us culturally that are positive or negative or those that we identify with or don't identify with?

For example, I think this is really interesting. My sister has a Capricorn moon in the third house, which means it's a moon that's in the opposite sign of its own domicile, sometimes called an exiled moon.

But the exile isn't really always the right word. It just represents a kind of archetypal tension. My sister has lived in and found herself identified with the cultures of other people from other parts of the world since she was in high school.

She's lived abroad, and she's marrying an Indian man where her wedding is later this month. A big Indian wedding for all of my Indian friends out there. How exciting and elaborate Indian weddings are in many days of activities.

Ever since she was little, she's always been interested in cultures other than her own. There's a moon in the sign opposite to its own domicile in that third house. Fascinating, right?

But at any rate, there are many other ways that you can see that kind of thing in the third house, too. Her soon-to-be spouses, an Indian family, lives with them, too. So it's like she's just steeped in a culture that's very different from the one she grew up in.

That's a very moon in the sign opposite its own domicile in the third house. There are so many interesting other ways of looking at the third house.

I give millions of stories from my career and seeing clients. But the point is that the third will be about the culture, the environment, the mind, the mood and as far as I can tell, again, like you have maybe especially in childhood, those characteristics, the third house has such a huge role to play in how the environment shapes us psychologically.

As we're growing, this is why it's called the Joy of the Moon. As life goes on, it's definitely true in my experience is you get a little bit older, you start becoming more conscious of the influence of those factors, and a lot of the work of therapy, for example, that has to do with understanding childhood or family influences is third housework.

People always say that it's fourth housework, and in a sense, it is because the fourth house can be very telling when it comes to family and parental influences in particular. But if you want to know about the culture that you were raised in and all different kinds of environmental factors and how they shaped your mind, body, thinking, perceptions, and communication patterns, you look at the third house. It's really so much of like modern therapy that we look back on our childhood as third housework.

I have a Cancer Sunn in Mercury and Cancer in the third house, and I went to graduate school for creative writing, specifically studying memoirs. Then, I wrote a book about the history of my family and the influences of the environment, religiously and spiritually, and so forth. Well, my third house ruler is the moon in the ninth in Capricorn. So, I have the opposite. I have the moon in the ninth, whereas my sister has it in the third.

I wrote about my roots, and the ability to reflect upon them religiously came from religious experiences in other countries, especially India and Peru. I mean, you know, so I've just tried to give you guys some examples, but maybe again, like middle life, you become a little bit more aware of what's going on in the third house, and you have a more active role in shaping it or changing it.

Like I would say, there's the most like feng shuiying of your third house that happens in middle life. I feel like in later life, this is just my reflection. I'm not saying that this is the only way of thinking about it. But I've certainly seen that my clients, the later in life they get, have become most of my clients because people who do astrology are, you know, generally speaking, they've adopted some spiritual practices. They've maybe done therapy.
They're trying to live a kind of reflective lifestyle.

Later in life, the third house, you have you've arranged it more. You've probably placed yourself in a culture or an environment that you feel more suited to. Or, at the very least, you've learned to stay away from ones that aren't so good for you.

You're thinking or you're perceiving your emotions, your mind body connection, and how they influence the experience that you have of your everyday life. You'll have gained more. You'll be more of a veteran. You'll gain more wisdom about that.

So the ninth and third houses progressively, there's a way in which we develop wisdom around them both, you know, the third house is very earthy. It's the wisdom of mind and body and environment, and that's why it's called goddess and the wisdom of the goddess.

Well, the ninth house called God, it's a little bit more like, you know, my practice of, you know, chanting mantra that I've had or meditation practices or ayahuasca or, you know, studying the Tao Te Ching or the I-Ching or astrology or kind of the bigger universal questions. For me, there's always a lot of mystery around those things.

I reach little plateaus of certainty, and then they fall away beneath my feet, and I'm, you know, free falling all over again, and the third house is kind of like, you know, there's spring cleaning that happens.

There's a constant rearranging that happens as you change in different stages of life. You're kind of constantly rearranging your third house. So I think it's the third house, in that sense, is an ongoing process, just like the moon is constantly waxing and waning.

Well, anyway, that's what I have to say about the third house, and again, metacosmia is very applicable through all stages of life. I think, you know, especially the third house in childhood, you know, you really are looking at those things that are going to be, the kids are not going to know that this is the water they're swimming in as fish, you know, and that gradually starts to dawn on them as they get older and it's really pretty amazing to see how, how reflective we have to become about the third house in order to feel like happier and more comfortable in our own skin.

I think a lot of therapy work happens around the third house, even though I think a lot of us have been taught in modern astrology to think that that's all fourth house stuff. So anyway, food for thought. I hope that you found this series interesting and that the final episode gave everyone a deeper, more universal understanding of the cadence or declining houses so that, you know, you don't feel like you're when we do horoscopes, sometimes you just have to hit on like the big easy, obvious stuff because you're speaking to so many people simultaneously. So you kind of have to go for an easy bottom line, and I wish that I could just like articulate all of this stuff about each house as we talked about each house, but then I'd have like six-hour horoscopes, and I don't have time.

So, but now that you know these house meanings, you can always remember these things whenever I talk about while this is in your third house, and you'll hear me kind of like in the horoscopes that I do, you'll hear me sort of tapping into little deeper, more universal themes with all of the houses.

Having had these houses illuminated in this way, I hope that, therefore, you will be able to take more out of those horoscopes, and especially that people who don't fall into one age, stage, or category will feel like they have an understanding that, you know, meets that meets all of you where you are. So anyway, that's it for today. Hope you guys are having a good one, and we will see you again soon. Bye.