Fourth House

The fourth house lies at the foot of the chart, and it is about what lies underneath a life. Traditionally it is the house of the father, of land, houses and property, of inheritance, and of the end of any matter: how things finally turn out. Modern astrologers read it as home and family, roots and ancestry, the emotional foundation laid in childhood, and the private self a person returns to when no one is watching. Howard Sasportas called it the root, and saw its task as making peace with the past in order to stand on solid ground. Many modern astrologers also give it the later years of life.

Angular, succedent or cadent

The fourth house is angular. Its cusp is the Imum Coeli, the lowest point of the meridian, which Lilly called the angle of the earth and the north angle. Angular houses are the strongest, and Lilly ranked the fourth fourth among all twelve, after the first, tenth and seventh. A planet here works powerfully, though often out of public view.

Natural sign and ruler

The fourth house corresponds to the fourth sign, Cancer, and to its ruler the Moon: belonging, nurture, memory, the instinct to shelter. No planet has its joy in the fourth house.

Lilly's significations

Lilly gives the fourth house fathers, and the father of the querent or native; lands, houses, tenements and inheritances; tilling the earth and hidden treasure; towns, cities and castles, besieged or not; ancient dwellings, gardens, fields, pastures and orchards, and the quality of any ground bought, whether woody, stony or barren. It shows the determination or end of anything. It rules the breast and lungs; its colour is red. It is feminine, and its cosignificators are Cancer and the Sun. He added that the Sun by day and Saturn by night also signify the father, and that the Sun placed here is not ill but shows a father of noble disposition.

Planets here, and the ruler elsewhere

A planet in the fourth house tends to describe the atmosphere of home and the family inheritance a person carries, emotional as much as material: Venus here may incline towards a gracious, much-loved home, Saturn towards early responsibility or a sense of duty to family. The ruler of the fourth placed elsewhere links roots to that house's affairs, a ruler in the tenth, for instance, joining family and vocation. Read them as the soil a life grows from, which a person can still tend and change.

Related

• Tenth House, the opposite house: public life
• Imum Coeli
• Cancer and the Moon
• House system