The pretty fifth house

Version en Español aqui. Gracias, Señor Shaman!

I am calling this house pretty because for the most part, it is. It does have its darker sides to it and I will discuss them further on. I was going to call it prettiful as a gesture of appreciation towards someone I highly admire, but I think that will make things harder for Señor Shaman to translate :D

The fifth house is a succedent house and so it is stable energetically. This does not mean natives will benefit from its pleasures all the time and with the same intensity, but that it does provide a stable environment for them to manifest themselves. It also does not mean the natives will be successful when it comes to indulging in its pleasures, but they are free to try all the time. 

Based on the universal attribution of houses to zodiac signs the fifth house is a Fire house, meaning it calls for action. It is also trine the first house, making it easy for the native to enjoy its spoils in some form or another. Being a house of pleasure and fun, this house covers quite a few areas of life and more than enough activities that can range from eating a strawberry breakfast to a romantic candlelight dinner and from drinking a beer while watching a sports match from the comfort of your armchair to sipping expensive champagne in some exclusive nightclub. (And to snorting coke off of hoes' tits on a tropical island - had to say that!)

The fifth house is located below the Ascendant-Descendant axis, thus being a personal house. It is also located in the western hemisphere of the chart (to the right of the MC-IC axis as one looks at the chart) and so it is interpersonal. What this means is that the fifth house focuses on the individual's personal needs and desires when he or she is interacting with other people or the environment at large. Thus, it is a house of personal pleasure and fun, opposite to the eleventh which focuses on collective activities that are meant to satisfy the needs of a group. 

Pleasure and fun might appear abstract at first, but on a closer inspection one will uncover a whole universe of possibilities. While being general, these possibilities can be grouped together based on each human being, as no two people like the same things. While there can be similarities between tastes and preferences between people, there are many nuances that differentiate even the closest similarities and those nuances are based on each person's subjective preferences. For example, two people prefer to enjoy a glass of dry red wine after dinner but whereas one prefers wine of a more earthy flavor, the other is inclined towards fruitier flavors. The same applies to food, music and art in general, sports and all other activities covered by this house, including those of an amorous nature.

This is because the fifth house stimulates one's emotions and feelings and allows him or her to express those states of consciousness. It is thus a house of creativity which is again a broad topic that covers many areas. Creativity is the process through which one puts his or her imagination and ideas to work in order to manifest them into the world. It can start from an early age, the best example being children's drawings, or later on in life depending on each individual person. As in, someone can develop certain hobbies later on in life or they can start writing, cooking, painting and so on. Creativity implies one is passionate about what they are doing and draws pleasure from it, which is why love and sex can be attributed to this house. 

This subject is very complex, as not everyone sees love and sex in the same light, some people being more open and easygoing than others, the latter being more conservative in nature. Being closely linked to the angular house that precedes it, the fourth, the fifth house allows one to express their creativity but in many cases only based on the conditioning that was generated in their fourth house (and Imum Coeli). I have found that besides conditioning, certain other energetic patterns of the fourth house can hinder or facilitate a person from expressing themselves in the fifth house. 

I will not go too much into detail regarding this because it represents a whole different topic. I will say that certain energetic imprints can perpetuate themselves through one's family line and they can have a great impact on descendants. The fourth house is the house of ancestors as well and, although not everyone might agree with this, several cultures around the world are aware of the fact the "sins" of the parents (extending to the grandparents and beyond) can affect the children (grandchildren and so on). The word sins is not to be given a religious connotation, but it is to be understood as various transgressions against cosmic law of one's forefathers which generate certain energetic patterns that perpetuate themselves through the family line, ideally until such time they are corrected in one way or another. 

That aside, the fifth house is also the house of children, as a direct result of a family, since without children a couple cannot consider themselves a family even if they are married. Children are also a direct consequence of sex, an act that can also be performed for personal pleasure and throughout time many children have been the result of non-marital sex, with or without the native's or their partner's will to conceive. But children are also a means of conservation of one's essence and perpetuating it after they are gone. The fifth house is square the eighth (death) and second (personal possessions, self-esteem and self-worth), so the tension between these houses can explain certain people's desperation to procreate. The fifth house is also one of fame after death, in a sense that the deceased will be remembered as a great person by the living, or not so much. 

It is no wonder then that many cultures throughout time considered people who had no children to be inferior, something that affected the latter from a second house perspective. It is also understandable why many took to great feats to ensure their name will survive long after they die. In my country where the majority of people are of Christian Orthodox faith, there is a custom of people performing religious offerings to ancestors at various times throughout the year and they try to mention as many of their past relatives as possible in order to maintain a living name for them (besides nurturing their soul in the afterlife and all that). I'm pretty sure similar customs exist around the world. 

But enough about death! I should have mentioned this in the article about the eighth house, but as Señor Shaman beautifully wrote in Asteria, the chart is "an interconnected system and not a series of isolated elements" - the quote is paraphrased and adapted to fit the current context. This practice is a fifth house theme from the perspective of those dead people though, albeit it is performed through the ninth house from the perspective of those who actually do it, who also are influenced by the fourth and eighth houses.

Returning to sex, the traditional attributions were for non-marital sex for the fifth house, as marital sex was attributed to the seventh. This means that sex ranging from casual with an acquaintance to a one night stand after an encounter in a club or bar to calling on an escort service or visiting a pretty locale can be attributed to the fifth. As mentioned in the article on the eighth house, sex is still a one on one affair regardless if an orgy is taking place, which means the seventh house is connected to even fifth house sexual acts. The two houses are sextile one another which facilitates such acts, yet it requires some effort from the person since the energies of a sextile are not as potent as those of a trine. So in theory you can always get laid even if they have to pay for it, and the fact you have to spend money implies the effort you must make. 

The square between the fifth and the second house acts to hinder such activities by risking to compromise one's financial stability. In fact, it's not necessary to call an escort or visit a brothel to get laid, It suffices you go out on the town and mingle with people (eleventh house) in order to come across opportunities to satisfy your sexual needs (fifth house). But that usually implies you have to at least go to a place of fun and entertainment (club, bar, restaurant, amusement park, concert, etc.) and buy a ticket, which in turn affects your second house. You might very well have to spend extra later on in case you come across a person who seems willing to have sex with you, as you will generally need to increase the fun that will culminate with the actual physical event. 

While this may appear as if you are making the other person feel good (seventh house), the selfish fact you want to have sex with them implies you want to show off as being more fun in order to come across to them as even more appealing. This selfish act also manifests in the event you go to such a place with your friends (eleventh house) and come back with a guy or girl you're gonna shag (fifth house). Given the fifth and eleventh houses are in opposition, in many cases people's friends will be pissed at them when that happens. This opposition between the two houses also manifests through choices one has to make when it comes to spending time with friends or going out on a date, because a lot of times the scheduling of such events just happens to overlap the times in which those activities can take place. Because life. 

In general, many finer things in life (fifth house) are more expensive and affect one's budget (second house). There are many cases in which people borrow money (eighth house) from others in order to indulge in pleasure. This is often the case with gambling, another fifth house affair, and where the tensions between the fifth, eighth and second houses can eventually ruin the individual. They can very well propel him or her to (personal) glory (fifth house), but those are very fortunate and very rare cases. I forgot to add obsession in my article on the eighth house, but that plays a great role in gambling. So do addiction and compulsion, something I for one would attribute to the sixth house while openly stating this can very well be debatable.

Gambling is not the only form of risk taking (fifth house), as there are other activities a person can undertake in that direction. These activities also address one's need and desire for personal fun and enjoyment, but through other means. Extreme sports are a great example in this direction as one usually gets a kick out of the dangers they face while practicing them. Anyway, sports in general are a fifth house theme even if they are team sports (teams are eleventh house), because the individual seeks to have fun while doing them. There is of course the case of professional athletes who build up their career through a fifth house activity. In this case, in my opinion, they move from the fifth house to the sixth (job) whenever they perform such an activity for money. If they still enjoy doing it, then they will have harmoniously combined the fifth and the sixth houses, something worthy of appreciation in my opinion. This is because they have used the stable energies of a succedent house to better control the weak energies of a cadent house. 

There are other risks involving the fifth house if you think about it. Overindulging in food and drink can lead to health issues (sixth house). One's child can be born with certain deformities. He or she can end up suffering from a sexual affair. If the person seeks an escort service or visits a brothel things could go wrong in some way, in which case they can end up having to deal with the criminal elements (I would place this in the eighth house for some reason that eludes me at the moment) that usually run such operations. Going to clubs and bars can have the person experience fights (seventh house), especially if they encounter rivalry (seventh house) in their quest to get laid. These are just simple, off the top examples of life experiences with respect to the less pleasurable areas surrounding the fifth house.

And to wrap it up with the whole money issue, one can find entertainment all by themselves by watching movies, for instance. But DVD's and BluRay's cost and so do tickets to a movie theater or subscriptions to online movie sites. The person can very well watch movies on all sorts of free sites, but in this case the level of entertainment will drop due to the lesser picture quality, poor streaming, overflow of ads and so on.  

Saving the best for last (I hope), love! Someone as gentlemanly, chivalrous and ever so romantic as Lord Manticore (I should start calling him Lord Romanticore!) would place true love in the seventh house because according to him, love brings as much pain as it does pleasure. Or something like that. Anyway, something alluding to the more violent nature of the seventh house. It is true that love is something beautiful in a couple (seventh house), but I for one see a need to differentiate between certain kinds of love that are offshoots of the universal concept. Without any connotations, there's motherly love and fatherly love, as well as brotherly love. The mother is tenth house as per older sources and fourth as per modern ones and that applies vice versa for the father. Brothers are third house, yet friends can also refer to themselves as being (like) brothers. There's also platonic love, trans-personal love and maybe more kinds. And there is also falling in love, which in my opinion is something very different than LOVE love. And there is the concept of making love as well.

Therefore, if at least one partner loves the other so much they are willing to sacrifice themselves for the latter's well-being, I see that as a seventh house theme for it is selfless love. If on the other hand, someone loves someone else only as a result of the latter satisfying their desires, it is selfish love and I would place it in the fifth house. I would also place making love in the seventh house too, but only if the couple seeks to attain a more elevated state of consciousness from the experience (ninth house), otherwise a sleazy fuck would "fall" into the fifth house in my book and cannot be considered making love. I know this can be my opinion alone, but I see the "making love" stuff as something beyond one's immediate need to satisfy their personal desires. The fifth house is trine the ninth after all, but as mentioned in that article the ninth is an area of life the native has the least control over and so accessing it through sex would require study and diligence in my opinion. Not to mention practice!

When it comes to falling in love, I for one see this as the stereotypical "butterflies in the stomach" thing people experience when they come across another they find attractive. The reasons why they find the other attractive are likely to fall into at least one other house, but the actual process of finding them attractive and actually falling in love with them is a fifth house thing. It's like you see a pretty shiny thing and you find pleasure into that, while at the same time you want it to be yours so that feeling of pleasure will last for longer. 

That's about it for now. Again, I might edit this article along the way. Oh, almost forgot! The angel of the fifth house is Oel. I find him to be very cool and kind and I hope you'll find him the same if you choose to work with him:

Edit: I wrote this article on my phone for the most part during several sessions so I forgot to say the fifth house it the house that allows one to manifest childishly and immaturely regardless of their age. This is something yours truly is very familiar, much to the horror and despair (eighth and twelfth?!) of... Never mind! Anyway, many modern astrologers consider this house being that of "the inner child" because basically anyone can be playful and have fun at any point in their lives, although some do it more than others.   

I also forgot to say that while having children can represent great joy, they are also a responsibility, something which falls in the sixth house.

I also forgot to say I see the second and third chakras (that below the navel and that in the solar plexus) to be strongly connected to this house, along with the heart chakra.

Hate on, dum-dums!

The Great Gazoo