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Which astrological house represents your aunts and uncles? The traditional answer is the 6th house. The reasoning behind that idea is a classic illustration of the theory behind derived houses. It goes as follows.
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Your home – and thus your parents – is represented by the 4th house. The 3rd house refers to siblings. Who are your aunt and uncles? They’re your parents’ brothers and sisters. Thus your aunts and uncles are the “3rd house counting from the 4th house,” which is the 6th.
As you can see, the basic idea behind derived houses is simple. Don’t let that blind you to the miracle it represents. The fact that it works at all – that it’s not just some kind of crossword puzzle we play in our heads – is actually kind of astonishing. There are layers of internal consistency behind astrology’s wheel of houses that hint at depths of meaning that resonate with some fundamental twelve-fold mystery of the universe.
If that weren’t true, derived houses wouldn’t work.
That‘s a truly fascinating subject, but it’s not the one I want to pursue in this essay. I just want to use derived houses as a springboard for exploring a troubling area of astrological inconsistency and confusion – and hopefully finding a way through it.
Our road toward that trouble starts off with a seemingly innocent question about aunts and uncles. Say your interest is more specific. Say you want to know what house represents your aunt on your mother’s side. She’s your mom’s sister, so you would just count three houses starting with the house of your mother, right? Many traditional texts would say that your mother is symbolized by the 10th house – which is the 7th house counting from the 4th house. The idea is that the 4th house represents your father, so his wife – your mom, at least back in the old days – had to be the 10th house.
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But wait a minute! Every astrologer knows that the Moon symbolizes the Great Mother! And the Moon rules the 4th house, not the 10th. Shouldn’t the 4th house represent your mother? Why give her to the 10th house?
And, hey, come to think of it, the 10th house is ruled by Saturn! Doesn’t that clinch it? Saturn is the traditional symbol of the father. So the 4th house should represent mom, the 10th house should represent dad – isn’t that the way it should be?
Yes indeed – but our traditions say the opposite.
There’s the problem.
Even those quintessential modern psychological astrologers, Liz Green and Howard Sasportas, in their book, The Development of the Personality, say “planets in the 10th, and the sign on the Midheaven, seem to describe many of the essential components of the mother.” In horary astrology, the verdict seems unanimous. The 10th house is mom and the 4th house dad in both Ivy M. Goldstein-Jacobson’s seminal Simplified Horary Astrology and Anthony Louis’s brilliant Horary Astrology.
What is going on here? In a nutshell, I believe that the culprit is the effect of thousands of years of patriarchal culture. I don’t intend this to be a predictable rant against male domination – nowadays, you can write one of those diatribes for yourself in your sleep. What I am aiming for is really just an observation of history. We’ve been living in a male dominated society for so long that it’s practically in the air we breathe.
What I am about to say is less true year by year, but still for the majority of us our surname is our father’s name, not our mother’s. Many of our mothers, when they left home to marry and create their own homes, no longer used their father’s name and instead adopted their husband’s name.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, in other words.
That’s what we mean by patriarchy. Think of the difference between the words patrimony and matrimony. That really says it all.
THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGING
Nowadays, gender roles are much less stable. We live in revolutionary times. Marriages and families often fall apart and re-form in new ways. This enormous instability has created a far more fluid gender situation than humanity has perhaps ever seen. Today we even see families with two mothers or two fathers. That’s a big subject and I only bring it up here for one reason:
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I believe that this cultural fluidity has allowed the naturally maternal form of the 4th house to begin to reassert itself.
It’s an epochal change. Here’s my evidence: when a marriage breaks up, who’s most likely nowadays to wind up being the primary care giver of the kids? How many children today are being raised by single mothers? Or single fathers, for that matter? I Googled it and here’s what came up. “While 69% of U.S. children live with two parents, 23% live with a single mother, and 4% live with a single father.”
Those are figures for the United States, where the single-parent pattern runs about three times higher than in the rest of the developed world.
All of that represents a radically new human situation – and as always, if astrology is going to remain relevant, it must adapt to cultural change. In practice, here’s what I’ve found that seems to work best in the modern counseling room.
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For people raised in more-or-less intact traditional families, often in practice the 4th house does indeed reflect the father’s influence and nature more effectively than the 10th house. Meanwhile, the 10th house points more in the direction of the mother. Like it or not, all of that is exactly as those older astrology books would predict.
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For people today who were raised in less traditional homes – ones typically influenced far more by their mothers than by their biological fathers – in practice the 4th house shades a lot more toward reflecting the mother.
None of this is about politics or philosophy. None of it is thumbs up or thumbs down for either side in the endless culture wars. These are just my own experiences in the real-world context of counseling. This is just my attempt at finding out what works.
My own dad built and flew a biplane. I remember him at grass-field airports with his leather helmet and a white silk scarf streaming behind him. If you know your old movies, he reminded me of Errol Flynn in Dawn Patrol.
I have an Aries Moon in my 4th house. My dad rang that bell in the most obvious way possible. To me, he looked like an adventurer or even a warrior. That’s how I experienced him.
Meanwhile, my mother would often fake a Chinese accent and encourage me “to bring honor to family.”
In my 10th house, you’d find Saturn in Virgo. There’s my mom.
I grew up in a happy, but very traditional, family. As I just demonstrated, when it comes to my parents’ impact on the development of my personality, Liz Green and Howard Sasportas would have nailed me.
WHAT DOES ANY OF THIS HAVE TO DO WITH DERIVED HOUSES?
As we saw earlier, say you’re interested in finding out which house in your chart specifically symbolizes your aunt on your mother’s side. Would that be the 6th house, as we described it at the beginning of this essay? Or would it be the “third from the tenth”– the 12th house – as our traditions would imply?
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I believe that before I could answer that question today, I would need to ask you some questions about what it was like for you growing up. Was it your father whose name and vibration dominated the formation of your identity? Or did your family actually hue to a more matriarchal pattern? How do you feel about the last name that you have? Which side of the family did it come from?
Once again, astrology teaches us that while some things are eternal, some things are definitely not – and all good astrologers need to surf the waves of cultural change.
SATURN AS THE SYMBOL OF THE FATHER?
If the 4th house, Cancer, and the Moon are the natural symbols of the mother, the logic of derived houses would point clearly to the 10th house, Capricorn, and Saturn representing her husband and thus presumably your father. I am on shaky ground here like everyone else who is practicing astrology in the 21st century, but I am inclined to think that, once the dust settles, that is the emerging reality.
While we can make a solid case for Saturn-as-Father, given Saturn’s negative reputation it does leave a bad taste in the mouth.
Ask any astrologer: Saturn is logical and responsible, but emotionally distant. Ask any psychotherapist: that “unavailable” quality has certainly been a recognizable pattern in fathers for a long time. Perhaps we see it less nowadays as gender roles become more fluid, but it’s still there.
Actually, in the present world, instead of father being emotionally absent he’s often not there at all – which is like Saturn’s tendency to be emotionally absent, only this time on steroids.
It all fits experienced reality – but note how this way of talking about Saturn tends to cast fatherhood in a negative light.
We’re all accustomed to feminist perspectives today. As we try to make sense of this “absent father” syndrome, let’s try a masculinist one.
Throughout much of the past twelve or fourteen thousand years, the vast majority of us were farmers. A man supported his family by working the land or raising animals. He may have been out in the fields all day, but he was still “home.” Those fields were home. Often his children would be working beside him as they hit double-digit ages. Because of the practical realities of an agricultural lifestyle, many of them, especially the boys, would actually spend more time with their fathers than with their mothers.
In good healthy Saturn-fashion, that farming father was doing his duty. He was providing for his family. And he was also “there” for them, certainly physically and probably emotionally too.
Along came the industrial revolution. Now, for a man to “do his duty,” he needed to leave home before dawn and go to work. Presumably he’d come home exhausted and dispirited at the end of the day and, unlike when he was a farmer, his kids would not have seen him at all that day. And what they did see was a tired, and quite possibly bitter, man – in a sense, a “Saturn man,” but only in the darkest sense of the term.
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Good men don’t abandon their children, but good men provide for their families – and as the Industrial Age gathered momentum, providing for them came to mean effectively abandoning them. It was the very definition of a “damned if you, damned if you don’t” situation.
In my head, I have a collection of book titles that are so evocative that you almost don’t have to read the book. In the world of astrology, my favorite is the late, great Donna Cunningham’s masterpiece, Being A Lunar Type In A Solar World. But my all-time winner in all categories is a book about male depression called, I Don’t Want To Talk About It by Terrence Real.
It’s worth reading! But the title is the heart of the matter.
Remember how our exploration of Saturn as the archetype of the Father took such a negative spin? He emerged as emotionally distant, absent, unavailable, longsuffering, and depressive. Astrological science? You can read about those same Saturn qualities on the pages of any astrology text, and you can experience them directly today in many living, breathing fathers. They “don’t want to talk about it” either.
But every one of them is on the dark side of the Saturn spectrum.
Meanwhile, any good Saturn news is conspicuously absent in those books. Where is the reliable, loving, rock-solid, committed face of Saturn? What happened to Saturn’s integrity, honor, and desire to do the right thing? What happened to its radical commitment to personal responsibility? Where are those fathers?
They exist. They are actually plentiful. We astrologers need to talk about them more. And we need to do some serious re-defining of exactly what we mean by a Moon-Mother or a Saturn-Father. How? I have some guesses, but I respect the fact that the responsibility – and visionary insight – for creating these new understandings rests with new generations.
One thing I will say is that the trouble with the word “feminism” is that it subliminally frames everything as a female problem. But of course you can’t corrupt half of any system without harming the other half. Men have been hurt by these distortions of life’s natural order too.
When “mother” became the 10th house and the Moon was ripped from her, she was damaged. Her dignity, magic, and self-confidence were diminished.
When “father” was given the 4th house, it only confused him and faced him with impossibilities. Meanwhile, his natural Saturn energies were sapped of their higher meaning, and he was left only with the Saturn dregs.
Could you use some good news?
In the present world, we are witnessing a resurgence of mother’s relationship with the Moon and the 4th house – and along with it the early stages of some corresponding process in men. The natural order is slowly being restored. I have something between a prayer and an expectation that this restoration bodes well for a healing of the Saturn energies in men.
A moment ago I wrote that you can’t corrupt half of any system without harming the other half. I suspect we can safely turn that idea on its head and say you can’t heal half of any system without contributing to the healing of the other half as well.
Perhaps as we put the mother archetype back where she belongs in the domain of the Moon and the 4th house, we also are beginning to witness the early stages of the restoration of Saturn’s lost soul to the spiritual mysteries of fatherhood.
I also strongly suspect that the words “father” and “mother” will become increasingly decoupled from physical gender and eventually will be replaced by new terms that better reflect the social realities created by our children’s children, and their children, and the children who come after.
Steven Forrest – https://www.forrestastrology.com/blogs/astrology/the-conundrum-of-mother-and-father-symbolism?__s=4noa6enipks0lmb6bhi7