IV · Subterraneous | The Sky

IV · The Fourth House

The fourth lies deep beneath the earth, at the bottom of the sky. Counted fourth from your rising sign.

The Fourth House

The House of Roots and Endings

The hidden foundation under every standing thing.

The fourth house is the angle beneath the earth, the Subterraneous place, opposite the Midheaven. Tradition assigns it parents and especially the father, the ancestral home, land and buildings, buried and hidden things, and the end of every matter, for what begins at the Ascendant settles at last into the ground of the fourth.

Classical nameSubterraneous

QualityAngular, one of the four pillars of the chart

Kin by analogy Fourth of twelve, as Cancer is fourth of the signs

What the house holds

father and ancestryhome, land, and fixed propertythe family line and inheritance of placehidden and buried thingsthe conclusion of any matterold age and final rest

When a planet stands here

The Sun here ties the native's story to the father and the family seat.

Saturn here holds fast to old land and long memory.

Jupiter here is said to bless the household and its foundations.

Hypogeion in Greek, the place under the earth. In quadrant reckonings this is the Imum Coeli; in whole-sign practice it is simply the fourth sign from the rising sign.

A house is personal. It exists only in a birth chart, cast from your own horizon at your own hour; the sky holds no fourth house until someone is born under it. The kinship with Cancer is an analogy of order, not an identity.

Kin by analogy to Cancer ›

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