Version en Español aqui. Gracias, Señor Shaman!
The fourth house is the last of the angular houses in the order of strength assigned to them when calculating planetary dignities. You can look up Asteria for more detailed information on that. Señor Shaman and I speak of both essential and accidental planetary dignities there, alongside many other topics of great relevance in astrology with respect to its use occult applications. Like all angular houses, its energies are strong and so they have a great impact over the native.
If we are to look at a natal chart, the four angular houses form a cross that represents the four major areas in the life of the person: self, relationships, career, family. Life usually pulls a person into many directions, but these four houses have the strongest pull because, aside from being the strongest, they form squares and oppositions between them that have the potential of generating great tensions in the life of any individual and they do so in many cases. The first and seventh houses are in opposition meaning the native needs to balance their life with respect to their self and their partner, but the squares between these two houses with the tenth and fourth can produce many problems for them when it comes to finding that balance.
This happens from the perspective of all houses, especially that of each angular house in part. When it comes to the fourth house, the native's home and family are opposite his or her career and this can play out in many ways, people finding themselves in situations in which their home life prevents them for making advancements in their career or they have become so successful in their career they end up neglecting their family. Again, one needs to find balance between these areas of life. Also, this house is square the first and seventh, meaning family life can be subjected to tensions because of personal needs and those of the couple. The home itself can suffer because of this, in a sense the actual physical location can degrade due to negligence. A brief example would be a house that becomes untidy because the native is too busy with his or her own endeavors (first house), or because the couple living there is too busy with one another (seventh house) in ways that can be more or less pleasant.The saying "a man's home is his castle" has been adapted from the bible. It does allude towards the fact that, in a mostly patriarchal society humanity has been living for the past several thousand years, the man is "king" of his home (fourth house) as opposed to the actual king who ruled (tenth house) over the entire land (country). This is probably why the father was attributed to the fourth house, since the father was the head of the home. The tenth house was then attributed to the mother because it was the seventh house from the fourth, thus representing the spouse of the father.
So we can see how the older astrological considerations might have been applied as such based on various religious beliefs and teachings (ninth house) and, whether this truly applies in this particular case or not, we have shown in Asteria that, without a doubt, many astrological considerations were based not only on mythology, but also on philosophy and advanced mathematics. (It is no wonder then astrology falls in the ninth house, but one can surely wonder how yours truly came to understand and apply it. In the words of Xellos Metallium: "Sore wa himitsu desu!")
Modern astrologers usually attribute the mother to the fourth house, probably by conflating this house with the sign of Cancer based on the universal attribution of signs to houses. Cancer is the sign of generation (giving birth) while mothers end up being mothers simply because of that, so it is easy to understand how people might have come up with this simplistic attribution. However, if I were to act like myself and I will do so because, following the words of meanie Nick Farrell, I am here in this life to be myself the best way I can, I would look for additional symbolism and correspondences, even if they can come across as being simple speculation. Yet bare with me.
I have briefly mentioned why I also discuss each of the four principal angles alongside their respective angular house in the article covering the first house. The Imum Coeli is usually called the "bottom of the chart" for the sole reason it is the "lowest" point a planet will reach with respect to the position of the observer and the fourth house is (usually) dependent of it. I have talked about this angle in the article on the eighth house and I mentioned it is responsible for generating a person's conditioning system each individual has from early on in life. Again, I am not into psychology and you will get better answers on the conditioning system from Scott because he knows a lot about it and he also has a degree in psychology. Going through it briefly, the conditioning system is something the likes of automatic behavioral patterns created into someone's personality (first house) and these patters begin to form from a young age under the influence of the family. I have also mentioned in this series how these patterns are influenced by the third house.
The Imum Coeli represents one's upbringing (something also connected to the third house) and earliest memories in life. I have talked about brain waves loosely and how they work in a child in the article on the third house, but the fourth house is a Water house based on the universal attribution so a person's earliest memories are mostly emotions and feelings. As such, the Imum Coeli also represents the native's deepest emotions and, over the course of their life, their ever so intimate thoughts. A human being is far from being a "what you see is what you get" flat plane, regardless of how much anyone would say that about themselves. Come to think of it, some people who insist on saying that are likely to suffer from major psychological problems, judging from my experience alone.
Instead, people have multiple layers and most of them are not aware of many of those layers. We have seen in so far in this series how the Ascendant is kinda like a mask the individual shows off to the world and which they start removing when they "switch" to their Descendant, thus revealing more of themselves to the person they are interacting with more closely. This process of revealing more about one's self involves sharing more personal (sometimes more intimate) information and I spoke in the article on the eighth house about trust and how people can end up having their trust broken by others.
Ofttimes people will use whatever intimate information they learn about others to their benefits through several methods, something which has the ultimate goal of making themselves have power over the others (tenth house). This is why many people are very careful when it comes to revealing certain details about themselves to others and the amount of details they share is directly proportionate to the amount of trust they have in the other party. As a result, people in general can share certain things about themselves to the general public, including strangers, while they reveal other things only to people who are closer to them (friends, associates - eleventh and seventh houses). They can offer more in-depth details about themselves to family (fourth and third houses) and their significant other (seventh house).
However, it is likely that every person has at least one thing about themselves which is so intimate they will reveal to no one, ever! They will "take it to the grave" (eighth house) as they say. The native wants to keep this information of a highly intimate nature a secret (twelfth house) and in doing so, it is even possible they will suppress it to a certain degree, "pushing" it towards the eighth house. We have seen how the trine between the fourth, eighth and twelfth houses greatly favors such transfers of energy.
If we were to extrapolate on the nature of the Imum Coeli, its location at the bottom of the chart implies it represents the very roots of the person. Also, the fact that it is located in the lower hemisphere of the chart means it is very much earthly. By combining the two associations we can see that this angle is probably the energy in the chart that best signifies one's earthly roots. With that in mind, people's earthly roots are inside the womb because it is there where their body is created, their body being very much earthly in nature. As such, since many modern astrologers mostly make use of house systems in which the Imum Coeli is the cusp of the fourth house, it kinda makes sense to assign the mother to this house based on what I just said. Honestly though, I have no idea whether people associated the mother to this house using these considerations as they are mere speculations on my part that resulted after I thought about this issue for a while. So don't take my word for it!
Another interesting fact about the womb and the association I made between it and the Imum Coeli is that people tend to seek protection when they feel vulnerable. I am not referring to actual physical protection against actual physical attack, but protection of an emotional, nurturing nature. The fourth house is the strongest Water house based on the universal attribution and therefore it makes sense its energies are able to provide such protection. From personal experience and what I've noticed so far in others, people feel emotionally vulnerable when someone has done certain damage to them upon learning of their most intimate secrets, by using that information against them in some form or another, or in other cases when someone has hurt them so bad it has damaged their sensitive emotional core (Imum Coeli).
Naturally, some people have a stronger core based on the location of their Imum Coeli (any aspects to it, and more), but even so, they too are likely to have certain vulnerabilities. Whenever their emotional core gets damaged due to whatever reason, the person often crouches into a fetal position, the same position its body had when it was inside the uterus. This is likely to generate debates on whether the soul actually enters the baby's body at birth or at a certain point during its stay inside the womb, but unfortunately this does not make the subject of this article. I will say though, that even if the soul does enter the body at the time of one's birth, their body has to have been influenced by some sort of consciousness during its stay inside the womb and that consciousness (or at least traces of it) remained inside the personal sphere of the baby after birth and will remain there for the entire length of the person's life.
Although this is simply my supposition since I have no actual proof towards that, nor have I experimented on this subject using magical means, I did talk in the article on the first and fifth houses about certain energies of the parents that pass along into the child and further on to the child's child, etc. So maybe these energies generate one's instinctual need to crouch into a fetal position when they are hurt and thus feel vulnerable. I could probably be mistaking, but it is as if the body remembers the safety of the womb and the person's mind is seeking that safety and protection during such hard emotional times. And since the womb belongs to the mother, it would thus seem logical to assign the mother to the fourth house, even exclusively by those who make use of house systems which have the Imum Coeli as the cusp of that house.
To close it off with the Imum Coeli, it is directly opposite the Midheaven and, just like in the case of the Ascendant-Descendant axis, one has to find balance between these two energies as both of them affect each other. The Imum Coeli also represents one's intimate motivations which, if they are put to use in a healthy way, will feed the highest aspirations represented by the Midheaven and allow the person to reach out for them more easily. The Midheaven in turn will either empower or waken then Imum Coeli depending on whatever experiences one encounters during the process of actually reaching out for their highest aspirations. It should be of no surprise that in some cases one suffers great emotional blows as a result of their quest towards their highest aspirations being brought to an abrupt ending.
One can also suffer tremendous emotional blows from experiences through the Descendant, like for example when the love of their life ends the relationship or turns down their proposal for one. Endings are also a fourth house theme and people usually get very emotional during various situations that result in endings, especially when they lose a loved one and especially when that loss comes through death (eighth house). And there are scenarios when someone suffers a great emotional blow from experiences through the Ascendant, like when they find themselves deprived of personal power as a result of a crippling illness (sixth house) that greatly weakens their body.
When it comes to one's earthly roots, this can be extended to their family line from which they came into being. This means the parents' parents and naturally, those who assign the father to the fourth house will assign the grandfather to it, while the mother and grandmother are assigned to the tenth house. Others assign things the other way around and others still can assign maternal and paternal grandfathers and grandmothers by "rotating" the chart in various ways. At any rate, one's ancestors are also assigned to the fourth house, being the family line from which the individual comes. They can still be around even after they are gone, in the form usually known as ghosts (eighth house) and the trine between the fourth and the eighth houses favors the "return" of past relatives. Indeed, many people in the occult perform all sorts of operations with the help of spirits of their ancestors. This is not a recent practice, its roots reaching as far back as prehistoric times.
In general, people think of comfort and warmth when they think of home. The saying "home is where your heart is" suggest the strong connection between the fourth and the fifth houses, meaning someone will find comfort where they are happy. This explains how some people leave their modern homes and the benefit of having utilities behind and relocate into remote areas and in many cases live in conditions most people would find hard from being accommodating. Yet those people choose to live as such because they feel a lot happier living that way and that is all that counts, regardless of what others might say. Evidently, this is their objective choice based on their subjective wants and needs and it is because of that and more that no two people are alike.
And since the fourth house is in the lower hemisphere of the chart, being at "the bottom" of the chart, it is not only the most personal, but also the most intimate as we've seen so far. But the home also means the actual house the native inhabits, whether with their family or all by themselves. Since the home is usually people's safe haven, they are free to behave in certain ways that differ from how they manifest in public (tenth house). I have talked in the article on the tenth house it is best for someone not to show up in their pajamas at the office (sixth house) because it is likely to affect their career (or at least people's impression of them), but they are free to spend all day in their pajamas at home or wear as many or little clothes as they want.
Whereas at the office they have to show a certain etiquette, at home they can act more or less polite. And whereas the office is usually a colder environment which dictates (tenth house) professionalism, the home is a warmer climate that invites towards familiarity. There are cases when people go for a visit and are told "make yourself at home" by the host. This invitation reinforces the initial one, calling for the guests to make themselves comfortable as if they were in the comfort of their own home. Of course, this usually does not mean one is to throw themselves on the couch and rest their feet on the coffee table, although this can often be the case if the relation between the host and the guest allows it. On a more subtle level this invitation signals the guest they are entering a safe environment in which they can loosen up, lower their guard (Ascendant) and open themselves more (Descendant), while hinting towards the possibility of having a good time (fifth house).
As mentioned in the article on the fifth house, the fourth house is the house of family. In general, family offers the native with the most warmth and comfort in a sense of providing emotional support and nourishment. Although there are many cases when that does not happen or it turns out to be the opposite, the blood ties and energetic bonds between the people that make up a family represent powerful forces that allow for such a thing. Cases when the native does not receive enough support from their family or even the opposite of that usually represent distinct particularities of the native's life, which many times can be caused by hard planetary placements in the fourth house.
I am pretty sure I mentioned in at least one article of this series I will talk about conditioning in more detail in the article covering the fourth house. I also talked about babies and how their brains function in the article on the third house. Therefore, a newborn is usually introduced to its home and family at some point after birth (depending on various circumstances one can easily imagine) and he or she begins to familiarize themselves with those surroundings. Since the baby's sense of sight will not develop fully for some time, he or she will familiarize themselves with the home using their other senses, especially smell. Then they will gradually make use of their hearing and tactile senses and later on their taste, once they begin to consume food other than breast milk and also start chewing on their toys and various other objects that cross their path.
But most importantly, the baby familiarizes with the home and family by receiving various emotional energies of more or less intensity he or she captures in the environment, whether those energies have him or her as the recipient or not. Those emotions are stored inside the baby's Imum Coeli. In time, the baby will start hearing and seeing better and although he or she cannot understand the meaning of the words and any physical action that accompanies those words, they will feel any emotional energy behind those words and actions. The baby's mind then starts a process of associating emotions with gestures and later on with words and it does so automatically through its conditioning system.
As the child grows up, their mind will gradually begin to understand verbal language (third house) and he or she will start to make use of it as well, but that does not mean emotional energies cease to be felt. The child continues to feel them as well as to associate them with words and actions. At some point the child will cease to be a passive recipient of words and actions that pack emotional intensity and will become an active initiator of them. He or she will begin to initiate them in the manner most familiar, being that which he or she had been observing inside the family. They will continue to do so automatically from then on, but can encounter difficulties every time they manifest those automatic conditional patterns in unfamiliar environments or with people outside their close family. Such difficulties are likely to cause glitches in a person's conditioning system, which in turn can cause further difficulties for them and I have already talked about suppressing certain traits in the article on the eighth house.
I do not expect this explanation to be scientifically correct or completely accurate and I could speak more about it, but I am running out of logical means to express my abstract thinking over the subject. It is a short description of how I see things taking place in a human mind, based on what I have found along the way from people like Scott who are more knowledgeable than me, as well as from my own magical experiments done on myself and on others.
The home is also the actual house which the person inhabits. It is thus a physical construction that can range from a studio apartment to a mansion with many rooms. Moreover, the fourth house also covers the entire property, whether it is owned (second house) by the person or their family, or they are merely tenants. Thus, the property can be an apartment building, a bungalow, a shack, and so on. If that property also has a lawn or a garden, they are covered by the fourth house too. This house also covers real estate as a whole, including land and anything below it.
The fourth house was called the Subterranous Place in ancient times, alluding to the underworld. It thus makes sense for ancestors to be attributed to this house, since according to ancient Pagan beliefs the dead inhabit the underworld. But the underworld is also associated with riches, in the form of minerals and so on, so mining is also attributed to this house as well as agriculture.
I already mentioned in the articles on the third and tenth houses the fourth house covers the land, meaning land in general, one's natal town and their natal country. It also covers the town or country the person moves to in cases where people relocate, as well as patriotism in a sense of supporting one's country. As an ending note, the country differs from the state. Whereas the state is represented by the authorities (tenth house), the country is more than a just territory within certain geographical borders. It is a nation that has certain social and cultural particularities that although can be similar to those of other countries, contain certain elements that makes them stand apart. That nation also has its own history, as well as collective goals and aspirations and its people can be more or less united.
The angel of the fourth house is Kael and you can call on him for help and assistance with respect to areas of life connected to this house and the Imum Coeli:
The Great Gazoo
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