The Moon in the houses: the joy of the Goddess and the Lot of Fortune

Astrological houses divide the local sky, at the moment of a birth or an event, into twelve sectors starting from the ascendant, the point on the eastern horizon. Each house concerns an area of life: the person, possessions, siblings, parents and so on. In the Hellenistic and then the medieval tradition the Moon had a special relationship with this system, expressed above all in two doctrines: the «joys» of the planets and the Lot of Fortune.

The third house, place of the Goddess

According to the doctrine of joys, each planet is particularly at ease in a certain house. The Moon rejoices in the third, which the sources called «the Goddess», while the Sun rejoices in the ninth, called «the God». The two houses are opposite and lie respectively below and above the horizon, an arrangement that reflected the opposition between the light of the night and the light of the day. The scheme appears, among other places, in the Mathesis of Firmicus Maternus, written around 335.

The bond between the third house and the Moon was also explained through the meanings of that sector. The third concerned short journeys, siblings and, in many sources, cults and religious practices, just as the ninth concerned long journeys, wisdom and divination. The Moon, a swift and changeable light that travels around the zodiac in little more than twenty-seven days, seemed suited to frequent movement and to the business of everyday life.

The Lot of Fortune

The second doctrine concerns the «lots» or «parts», points derived by combining planetary positions. The most important was the Lot of Fortune, obtained by measuring the distance between the Sun and the Moon from the ascendant. Many Hellenistic authors, including Vettius Valens in the second century, reversed the calculation for night births, while Ptolemy preferred always to use the same order. The Lot of Fortune was regarded as a kind of lunar ascendant, linked to the body and to material goods.

For this very reason, in the Hellenistic tradition, the Lot of Fortune could become the starting point of a second round of houses, the places counted from Fortune, used in particular by Vettius Valens to judge material circumstances and career. From the same positions of the luminaries the Lot of Spirit was then derived, the mirror image of the first and connected with actions and the intellect. The Sun-Moon pair thus supported an entire interpretive apparatus.

Angular and cadent houses

In ordinary interpretation, the Moon's position in the houses was judged above all by the strength of the sector. The angular houses, namely the first, fourth, seventh and tenth, were the most powerful; the succedent houses had middling strength; the cadent ones, such as the third, sixth, ninth and twelfth, were weak. The third and the ninth were exceptions precisely because of the joys of the luminaries, proof of how ancient systems preserved layers of different origin.

The Latin astrologers of the Middle Ages, from Michael Scot at the court of Frederick II to Guido Bonatti, inherited these rules through translations from Arabic. The term «house», from the Latin domus, came to stand beside and then replace the Greek topos, «place», creating some confusion with the domiciles of the planets in the signs. In Renaissance texts one thus meets two meanings of the same word, which the modern reader must carefully tell apart.

The Moon in the houses reveals a lesser-known side of the astrological tradition: not only a light passing through the signs, but a reference point for building the whole chart. The Goddess of the third house and the Lot of Fortune bear witness to an age in which the relationship between Sun and Moon, between day and night, was the key to reading every celestial configuration and every human destiny.