Locating your brother’s ex-wife’s neighbor in your chart
Astrology is a complete system; your birth chart symbolizes absolutely everything—and everyone—in your life. From your mother to your best friend in high school to the cabbie who cut you off on your way to work this morning, everyone who has or will cross your path can be found in your chart. You just have to know where to look.
Each house symbolizes places, situations, and types of relationships, but there are only twelve houses. How can they cover all the characters, both major and minor, in your life’s story? Derivative houses is a method of finding relationships through the inherent connection between the houses in your chart. The cusp of the house in your chart that symbolizes the essential nature of the relationship becomes the ascendant, and a new chart derived from this new ascendant will help you find the person or matter in questions.
Counting derivative houses
To use the convoluted but not unfamiliar example referenced in the title of this section, let’s say you’re trying to track down the neighbor of your brother’s ex-wife (you suspect he stole your teacup pig).
- First, find your brother. Siblings are found in your third house.
- Next, locate your sibling’s ex-wife. Spouses past, present, and future are represented by the seventh house. BEGINNING WITH THE THIRD HOUSE (your sibling), count seven houses – the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth. Your brother’s ex is represented by THE NINTH HOUSE.
- Now, to find that elusive neighbor. Neighbors are represented by the third house; so BEGINNING WITH THE NINTH HOUSE, which represents the ex-wife, count three houses: ninth, tenth, and eleventh.
- Voila! Your brother’s ex-wife’s neighbor is represented by the ELEVENTH HOUSE of your chart.
The pig is a different matter altogether. Livestock is associated with the sixth house. Should you find a connection between the sixth and eleventh houses (say, Taurus is on the sixth house cusp, ruled by Venus, which is in the eleventh house), it might be time to stand outside your brother’s ex-wife’s neighbor’s house and start hollering “Soo-eeeeeee!”
What rules what? Get the Rex Bills Rulership Book – most-used reference book in my library.
2011 by April Elliott Kent. Excerpted from The Essential Guide to Practical Astrology (Alpha/Penguin 2011).