Here you find:
• How the Houses’ System works
• The House of Concrete Values
• The 2nd House and its opposite, the 8th House
• Declarations of the 2nd House
• Main themes of the 2nd House
One of the most frequent question during the interpretation of a Natal Chart is about money, especially for beginners who attempt to understand their own one.
Nothing wrong with this, but issues come often when they focus everything on the 2nd Astrological House, because: – “I heard that it is money” -. Now, the point is that the 2nd House is even about money, but money is just a consequence of the psychological mechanisms ruled by that House. Money could be one of the effects of this House, but we need to know the causes to really understand what kind of effect will manifest.
When I was a complete beginner, I believed that the 2nd House was the money itself, so, like any other beginner, I was able to make just “cookie-cutter” interpretations about it, something like: – “You have Jupiter in the 2nd, so you will have a lot of money” – or – “2nd House in Pisces, mh… I think not so much money” -; I don’t need to say that it’s the wrong approach.
As I said before, money is just an effect of the 2nd House, so this House doesn’t represent money itself. It can speak to us about how is your psychological attitude toward money, and this is still not exact, we need to complete that statement: the 2nd House speaks about your psychological attitude toward the concept of possession.
Before going ahead, first we need to understand in depth the fundamental concepts that create the base for the psychological meanings related to the 2nd Astrological House, then we will master its intimate essence.
• How the Houses’ System works
Astrology speaks through symbols, so analyzing every symbolism behind the 2nd House we will be enlightened about its meaning in the Birth Chart.
The Second Astrological House is the first one of the Succedent Houses.
In fact, the 12 Astrological Houses are divided into 3 classes:
• The Angular Houses [1st – 4th – 7th – 10th]
• The Succedent Houses [2nd – 5th – 8th – 11th]
• The Cadent Houses [3rd – 6th – 9th – 12th]
This classification is similar to the Qualities of the Zodiac Signs: Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable, because it’s a similar symbolic concept: the 3 phases of a cycle – the beginning > the stability > the change –. In this case, the Succedent Houses are placed on the apex of the day’s phases (stability).
The Succedent Houses are those Houses that follow the Angular Houses, which are the beginning, the foundation, the pillars of the psyche’s projections; remember that the Astrological Houses are the main projections of the psyche toward the external world, that’s why they create your own reality (sectors of life).
So the Succedent Houses symbolize the stability, the consolidation, the crystallization of the concepts began by the Angular Houses, and even of the psychological tendencies of the Quadrant they belong.
The 2nd House is the Succedent House of the Winter Quadrant or Midnight Quadrant, that psychologically represents the Active-Concrete Quadrant.
In fact, if you look at the Birth Chart, you will notice that the sky is divided into 4 Quadrants through the 2 axes: AC-DC and MC-IC [Ascendant-Descendant and Midheaven-Imum Coeli], the Angular Houses, that as we said are the foundation of the entire system.
We will see that those Angular Houses mark the main psychological tendencies of the human psyche:
• AC – Active tendency
• DC – Passive tendency
• MC – Abstract tendency
• IC – Concrete tendency
So the quadrants between them form the mixed types:
• Winter or Midnight Quadrant – from the AC to the IC: Active-Concrete type
• Autumn or Twilight Quadrant – from the IC to the DC: Concrete-Passive type
• Summer or Noon Quadrant – from the DC to the MC: Passive-Abstract type
• Spring or Dawn Quadrant – from the MC to the AC: Abstract-Active type
(For more details about this, read also the bottom of this article)
The Second House is the apex of the Active-concrete Quadrant; if the 1st House (Angular) is the beginning of life, the life breath, the primordial impulses and the instincts, the 2nd House is the next step, where what began at the 1st stabilises itself and becomes concrete action, supported by the first manifestations of the conscious thought. The pure instincts of the 1st House become needs in the 2nd House.
Need for refuge, need for secureness, need for food, need for satisfaction, need for love, need for sex; the 2nd House is the place where the human needs are, especially everything that can give concrete satisfaction and tangible results, and the need is so strong that it pushes to act and doing everything to satisfies it. As we said: Active-Concrete House.
• The House of Concrete Values
That’s why the 2nd House is – The House of Concrete Values – it’s the part of your psyche which works actively to create everything can give you the sense of secureness, the sensation to be safe, everything necessary and useful to support your life [the Succedent House which supports and stabilises what began in the Angular House: Ascendant-Life].
The main way to satisfy this need for secureness and certainties of the human psyche is through the possession of material goods. You must have a home as refuge to feel at safe, you must have access to food and water to assure your surviving, and all of this can be obtained with the possession of material resources, in one word: Assets.
Real estates, valuable goods, companies, and money of course. The 2nd House represents how you relate and interact with all this.
So “money” associated with the 2nd House is just a consequence of the psychological projection made by that part of the Self it represents: the necessity to get access to resources, and in our current world, money is the vehicle to access to every resource.
If we were humans of 50.000 years ago, in a world without money, our 2nd House would work to get food through hunting and farming or pushing us in building a hut as refuge, and to claim a piece of ground as our territory to mark the limits of our safety. Those are fundamental necessities of our psyche, embodied by the 2nd Astrological House.
Someone could think that this is too materialist, but the 2nd house, as we saw, is the materialist House, and there is nothing wrong with this, because we live even in a material world with material needs. We are not pure Spirit, and the separation between the material world and spiritual world is an illusion, a lie of our senses and our minds. Material plane and Spiritual plane are tangled, that’s a fundamental cosmological law.
Those who say that money is evil and spirituality is the only important thing, are wrong like those who think the opposite, and too often those people are those who use “spirituality” as an excuse for their failures or because they don’t like working hard in reaching a goal. And often they have a weak 2nd House on their Birth Chart.
So, the financial affairs are surely a theme of the 2nd House, but we just saw that we cannot reduce its complex meanings in a trivial word like “money” because this would be incomplete and consequently we will make only incomplete and rough interpretations about this House on a Birth Chart we are examining.
Money is an effect, but we have to know the cause to get a refined psychological profile, and the primary cause is the need for secureness acted by the 2nd House.
Needs are a powerful mechanism very ingrained into the psyche, even if they are often unconscious and not manifested. That is normal because the 2nd House belongs to the not-manifested part of our psyche.
• The Gate of Hades
The 2nd House was named “The Gate of Hades” by the ancient masters. This had confused often many amateurs or even (profane) astrologers who were not able to understand the connection between that name and the House’s meaning. Because of that, a real Astrosopher needs at least some knowledge of Cosmology.
In the alchemical and gnostic Cosmology, everything in Universe is dual. The World is composed of two opposite, but tangled planes: the Manifested Plane and the Not-Manifested Plane; the Manifested Plane is the material world and everything can be perceived by senses, while the Not-Manifested Plane is the invisible world, the mental dimension, the spiritual dimension, something that cannot be perceived by senses.
For the ancient masters, this invisible world is the world under the horizon, that place where god Sun goes after the twilight to emerge again from it at the dawn.
That is even the reign of Hades, the subterranean reign where the human soul will go after the death of the body, the Underworld precisely, in its real meaning: – the world below- .
So, on the Natal Chart, we have the AC-DC (Ascendant-Descendant) axis which marks the horizon and divides the sky in 2 hemicycles (half circles); they represent:
• the “Underworld” – Not-Manifested Plane [the hemicycle below the horizon]
• the “World” – Manifested Plane [the hemicycle above the horizon]
And this gives us the second classification of the Astrological Houses precisely:
• The Underworld or Subterranean Houses: 1st – 2nd – 3rd – 4th – 5th – 6th
• The World or Heavenly Houses: 7th – 8th – 9th – 10th -11th – 12th
In the ideal path from the 1st House to the 12th House, the 2nd House is the first Astrological House we encounter in the Underworld, the first astrological point we find in the reign of Hades: that’s why it is “The Gate of Hades”.
You could think that the 1st House is the first point below the horizon, but this is not exact. We have to remember that the true core of the Houses are the Cusps (read even this article for more info about it). So the 1st House (AC) is positioned between worlds (dawn-horizon), while the 2nd House is the true first astrological point (Cusp) under the horizon.
Despite the word “Hades” has today a sort of bad reputation because of the negative association between the god Hades and the Hell, this is just the religious and dogmatic distortion of those concepts. The word “hades” in ancient greek simply means “invisible”, and it was used to identify two concepts: the “place” Hades, the invisible Underworld; and the “deity” Hades, the king of that invisible Underworld.
“Hades” has not negative meanings, not more and not less than other deities, that have all positive and negative sides. In fact, god Hades is the king of the whole afterlife: the Hell (Avernus) and the Paradise (Elysium).
Sorry for the little digression, but it was really important to understand the symbolism behind the Underworld Houses and then of the 2nd House.
Speaking psychologically, the Underworld Houses represent the hidden areas of the human psyche (under the horizon), invisible (hades) from the outside. They regard the intimate and personal fields of our lives, the basic structure of our Self, as we can see looking at some of the main themes of those Houses:
Now it’s clear why the 2nd Astrological House, the House of Concrete Values, of the personal needs, of the personal possessions, of the personal secureness, is the door for the reign of the invisible (gate of hades), the most intimate part of our psyche not visible for the others, and often, neither for ourselves (unconscious).
• The relation between the 2nd House and its opposite, the 8th House
According to the cosmological “law of duality”, the World Houses are like the opposite pole for the Underworld which we can considerate like their cause: the other side of the heaven which is manifested and talks about the Self’s action into the external context, like our social life or social role, but even about our ideals and our elevation from the earthly needs (subterranean).
That’s why even analyzing the symbolism of the opposite House can give us hints and confirmations again about the meanings of the 2nd House, because they mirroring each other: opposites but deeply connected.
The 8th House is the opposite reflection of the 2nd. It is the House where the Self starts discovering that there is more in life than the material world, so the materialistic needs (2nd) become high needs. The 2nd House – House of Concrete Values – becomes – House of Deep Values – in the 8th, and both are Succedent Houses.
So the 8th House is the House of doubts, in fact, the 2nd is the House of certainties. The 8th is the House the mysteries, the risky will to indagate the unknown, in fact, the 2nd is the House of the secureness, the need to feel at safe. The 8th is the House of the “Hieros Gamos”, the sacred sex, sex as spiritual practice, in fact, the 2nd is the House of the hedonist sex, the need for physical sex. The 8th House is the House of possession and money as power, in fact, the 2nd is the House of possession and money as secureness. The 8th House is the House of the death of the Ego, the awareness of the caducity of life, in fact, the 2nd is the House that sustains life through the needs and keeps the Ego at safe.
Furthermore, through the word “hades”, we find again the bond between the afterlife and those 2 Houses, and above all, with the concept of possession and richness related to the 2nd House.
The god Hades was named also Pluto by Romans. – Pluto – in latin means – rich –, because Hades/Pluto was even the god of abundance and prosperity; of all kinds of richness: spiritual, as Hades the god of the invisible World of the Truth in afterlife (8th House), and material, as Pluto the subterranean god responsible, with the help of his wife Persephone, about earth’s fertility, farming, and consequently about abundance of food/assets (2nd House).
• Effects of Planets in the 2nd House
As we saw, “possession” is a main theme of the 2nd Astrological House, a need for possession which extends itself to any field of life, even to love and sexuality. The necessity for secureness and certainties of this House develops often possessive love.
In a Birth Chart, the Sun or even a sexual Planet like Mars, Pluto or Venus in the 2nd House can indicate a possessive way to love, so jealousy and attachment. It can indicate also an aggressive sexuality, not physically necessarily, but used to psychologically remark the need to possess the partner. In fact, we find even in the language those expressions: “I have possessed her” or “He has possessed me” to say – I had sex with him/her –.
This is also a further recall of the Gate of Hades, through the myth of god Hades who kidnapped Persephone from her mother Demetra, to bring her in the Underworld and possess her for the eternity.
You can easily understand that Planet Pluto (Hades) “rejoys” in the 2nd House, despite someone could say the opposite because of the modern misconception of assimilating Signs and Houses together.
The assimilation and coincidence between the 12 Zodiac Signs and the 12 Astrological Houses is part of an oversimplification and vulgarisation of Astrology started in 1800 and pushed in 1900 (probably because of the lack of knowledge about esoteric disciplines); there is no track of that before those centuries. Ptolemy, Firmico, Al-Biruni, Marsilio, Galileo, Bruno or even Lilly in late 1600; no one of those authors, for example, talks about the assimilation between Signs and Houses, conversely, they talk about other different rules for the Astrological Houses.
The task of today’s astrologers should be expanding and integrating Astrology, not throwing down thousands of years of studies and knowledge.
There is no time for a deep explanation about that here, we’re talking about the 2nd House today. I will write something about it in future.
However, the Astrological Houses have not the same Planet Ruler of the Sign they are associated or the same Element; to be precise, Houses have no Element. So, in this case, the Zodiac Sign Taurus is just the Co-signifier of the 2nd House and Co-signifier doesn’t mean “equal”. It means that the 2nd House shares some symbolic meanings with Taurus, like the need for secureness and concreteness, but the House doesn’t take all the other attributes or rules from it, like: Element, Ruler, Exaltation, Fall, etc.
So, thinking: – Venus is the ruler of the 2nd House because corresponds to Taurus, so Mars and Pluto are in Detriment here – is not correct, even if Venus works good there.
You have to remember that the Houses’ System talks about your individuality; it’s a deeper step into your specific psyche. Think about this: Every person born your same day has almost your same planetary positions, but just a few people have your same birth time, which defines your Ascendant -1st House – that gives the start to all the other Houses. So the Astrological Houses give a more refined and specific psychological portrait of a person.
Anyway, we can find that some Planet works good in the 2nd House and others that don’t feel at best there.
The Sun works good in this House, because the Ego (Sun) loves to feel at safe, so the rational mind works strongly to satisfy those needs for certainties and concreteness, and to find the best way to get assets, but always through saving or accumulating. This Sun isn’t for risky investments or business; that’s more for the 8th. Furthermore, in a male Natal Chart, the Sun in the 2nd can indicate a man who will be a possessive father.
All of this is also confirmed by the position of the Sun we find in the “Thema Mundi”.
Venus works well here, because loves getting concrete satisfaction from sensorial pleasures, and, you know, often you need money for sensorial pleasures. Luckily, the fertile nature of Venus acts very well in the 2nd House to make it prosperous. There is even the need for sentimental secureness. This Venus often needs confirmations about partner’s feelings, and could easily develop attachment and unjustified jealousy.
Of course, even Pluto works good in the 2nd House. As we already saw before, its richness and its role of king of the subterranean world match very well with the gate of the invisible reign of the human psyche.
On the other side, generally Mercury, Saturn or Neptune don’t feel comfortable in the 2nd House.
Mercury needs to be free to explore and to try something new always, so it could feel limited by the secure walls of the 2nd House. Saturn loves order and secureness, but it’s too rigid, heavy, passive and abstract, while the 2nd House wants action and concreteness. Neptune is much orientated toward the deepest aspects of the World, the metaphysic, arts, and dreams, so the materialistic needs of the 2nd House are not the field where it can express itself at the best.
Please note that I said on purpose: “this planet works good”, and not: “this planet has positive effects”; always remember that they are two completely different concepts.
Of course, it is important to analyze the whole situation of a Planet in the Birth Chart (dignities, debilities, aspects, etc.) to understand how it acts and what effects could have in an Astrological House. You can find indications and informations about that in this free guide.
• Main declarations associated with the 2nd House
Closing, we can find useful even remembering some of the main declarations of the Self connected to the 2nd Astrological Houses.
The 12 Astrological Houses are the 12 areas of our psyche and every time something stimulates a specific area, it’s like if our Self makes a strong declaration within to affirm its own power. So, remember that everybody has those areas, every human being, even if there are no Planets inside the House; the concept of “empty Houses” does not exist (read here for more info about it).
When the Self acts in the 2nd House, one of its main declarations is: “I have” or “I possess”, and I think it’s now clear why. Of course, we also find “I need” to remarks the real urgency of the necessities. Even “I’m safe” is a declaration that belongs to this House and underlines the necessity to feel the edges of our comfort zone. “I’m sure” is also a declaration from this House which is the place where our certainties are; real certainties or illusional certainties, it doesn’t matter, what matters is that Ego needs certainties to sustain and structure itself. That’s why that declaration regards even feelings, in other words, the need to be sure about our relations with other people: friendships or love relationships.
Well, I hope we understood why reducing a whole system of deep symbolism and meanings about an Astrological House in a single trivial word like “money”, is too superficial, even harmful during an interpretation of a Natal Chart, because it can easily lead to misunderstandings and wrong beliefs about our lives. We have to remember the true psychological concepts of: needs, possession and secureness, that the 2nd House embodies. Then we will become capable to see how this part of our psyche fit in our personality and which true effect it will have in our lives.
