Why the 4th house?
The origins of the House of Origin
Part of my initial exploration into the 4th house was about frustration. Ancient significations of this place are sometimes outdated or simply out of reach for those of us living in modernity. Fathers? Land? Home ownership? Ask any millennial who’s never owned a home how optimistic they feel about that prospect. I have a big-ass 4th house stellium and while some more recent psychological astrologers, like Rudhyar, gave some interesting insight into the nature of the 4th house itself, none of it ever went into sufficient detail about the experience of the 4th house. What do planets feel like when they move through the depths of the underworld? What is the experience of say, having your ascendant ruler in the 4th house? We could sit here and make a list of significations for each planet and sign combination in the 4th house, but that doesn’t do anything for people who are looking for a language to describe the experience of inhabiting the 4th house.
When considering the diurnal journey through the Gates of Hades (the 8th and 2nd houses), the 4th house comes right after the deepest part of that journey. The sun emerges from the fertile soil of the 5th house, having bathed in the purest essence of creation, and is ready to begin the path toward a new day. Foundations are set. The clock strikes midnight (ish). The day has already begun at the very second it has ended.
There are beginnings everywhere for those with eyes to see, and there are endings in the 4th house.
There’s an inevitability to this journey, the sun’s rebirth and death every single day, and one of my favorite words for the 4th house is inevitable. It’s the things you cannot change about yourself, no matter how hard you try. There’s a Haruki Murakami quote that sums this up perfectly:
Genes I'd gotten from my father and mother—not that I have any recollection of what she looked like—created this face. I can do my best to not let any emotions show, keep my eyes from revealing anything, bulk up my muscles, but there's not much I can do about my looks. I'm stuck with my father's long, thick eyebrows and the deep lines between them. I could probably kill him if I wanted to—I'm sure strong enough—and I can erase my mother from my memory. But there's no way to erase the DNA they passed down to me. If I wanted to drive that away I'd have to get rid of me. There's an omen contained in that. A mechanism buried inside of me. A mechanism buried inside of you.
My dedication to the 4th house is about uncovering that mechanism inside of me and you, and then figuring out how it works. Everyone’s mechanism is wired uniquely, and we have all stuck our fingers in it to some degree, whether we were aware of it or not. Maybe the result was you got electrocuted, and backed off from investigating that inner mechanism any further. That’s okay. We can go slowly. We have nothing but time.
Time is an aspect of the 4th house which is omnipresent but not often explicitly named—more specifically, the past. The whole of human history is contained in the 4th house, because we are walking summations of genetic expressions passed down from the beginning of time. Astrology in general is about beginnings, but the beginning of the end is found in the 4th house. As soon as you’re born, you begin to die.
Humans began with land, and we return to the land when we die. Cultures are shaped by the flora and fauna available to them, and the architecture of the landscape they live on. What constitutes a people is wholly based on where they began, and what that land necessitated. Our bodies require that we eat, so we turn to the land. The flora and fauna don’t just dictate the terms of existence, they also nourish existence. The amalgamation of these emergent properties becomes a story, and that story becomes layered on top of other stories, and the stories we build our identities, cultures, & societies upon are all based upon the past.
When we go into the past, we go down into the earth. This is not just a spiritual experience for the dedicated few, but a requirement to access the wholeness of your personhood. I think Rudhyar said this best:
[The fourth house] carries the meaning, above all, of the center of the globe. In the fourth house the person can and should reach the experience of center – the center of his own global, total personality as well as the center of global humanity, of a firmly established and concretely real brotherhood of man. Without such an experience of center, an individual can never demonstrate in its fullness his human stature. He remains a creature of the flat layer of productive soil which constitutes the surface of the Earth, whether he roams upon it like a superior animal or settles in rigid vegetable rootedness to a particular spot called “my home” or “my country.”
The implication here, which I will embrace explicitly, is that there is no greater rootedness than that which occurs within the self, and all imaginary boundaries erected across the surface of the earth do not dictate the conditions of personhood. Rudhyar himself was an immigrant, so I wonder if this experience colored his understanding of the fourth house. But I digress.
The 4th house, and our collective understanding of it, feels more prevalent than ever as the hydra monsters of genocide & anti-immigration continue to grow new heads during the death rattle of the American empire. There is no greater crime than to forcibly remove a people from their land, whether by death or relocation, and there is no greater loss than for an individual to be disconnected from the past. All that we know and have ever experienced has arisen from the past. It is constantly expanding, like our universe. I think your inner universe is doing the same thing, and it’s worth the effort to create a home inside of yourself, to find comfort in your inner universe.
It’s worthwhile to tune into the rhythms and transits of your fourth house and examine how your inner universe shifts and colors itself around these rhythms. When you’re experiencing a beginning or an end, or intentionally creating a foundation in your life for something else to grow on, this inner knowledge can act as an anchor. The fourth house is at the bottom of everything.
Thanks for reading!
If you haven’t already noticed, things are changing around here. This publication is now called House of Origin, and it’s all things 4th house. Stay tuned for more—including a fun new series featuring some of your faves.
While you’re waiting, don’t forget to grab my 4th house guidebook, Homecoming.