Friends, what follows is the introduction to a much longer series from my course The Lunar Apothecary. I think that the Houses can be a really interesting stepping stone into the world of astrology for those of us who are more likely to be gazing at the earth below us than the sky above us. They are a beautifully grounded, cyclical, and immensely understandable part of the birth chart.

I spent a year writing about each of the Twelve Houses of the birth chart because I’m always trying to expand on the “lunar dictionary” of words and ways of thinking-feeling that students of The Lunar Apothecary can draw upon for their practices as they come to understand who they are as healers and how their stories and gifts shape the way they serve their community. If that sounds like the sort of learning space for you, come this way.

So without any further ado, please enjoy this introduction to the Moon through the Houses of the birth chart!

The Doors of the Year

The astrological Houses were the first part of the birth chart that I connected with in a way that made sense to my earth-centered practice as a young herbalist and witch. While I didn't remember the name of the class or who taught it or how I even found out about it, the same year that I started Worts & Cunning Apothecary I was sitting in a room at the top of Munjoy Hill in Portland, Maine, listening to a woman talk about the importance of the Houses as a way to connect to the seasons of the year.¹

I remember loving the class and being overcome with a feeling of understanding - suddenly the abstract, formulaic, and patriarchal forms of astrology that I'd been exposed to split open to reveal something far more expansive and inclusive. At the end of class, the teacher held up a text and said that if you ever came across a copy of this out-of-print book to buy it because it explored the Houses in a way not often found in many contemporary astrology books. She was holding was The Book of Houses by Robert Cole.² I immediately searched out a used copy, found one, read it, and realized that there was a whole world of astrology that was far kinder and more useful to me than the limited version of horoscopes and bits in magickal tomes that I'd been exposed to. Suddenly the Houses weren’t something to just think about, but places to visit, and doorways to the seasons within and around us.

As someone whose astrological practice focuses on lunar currents, I spent a year exploring the Moon through the Houses, trying to invite folks into the world of astrological wisdom that is accessible and empowering in the same ways that I had been invited in. What I learned from that class in Maine inspired by Cole's work nearly two decades ago, is that each of us has our own inner cycle of the year, shaped by the stars and planets at the moment of our birth, woven into the seasonal changes all around us.

For our series in The Lunar Apothecary exploring the Moon in the Houses, we'll be focusing on the twelve Houses of our birth chart and the way that lunar energy flows through them as a way to connect to our inner cycles. We'll also be journeying through the Houses looking for wisdom within them as healers with our own energetic needs as we serve our communities, honoring them as living boundaries within our own inner landscapes and shared spaces of collective myth and need.

The Houses

The Houses take all the myths, philosophies, and abstract concepts of zodiac signs and their elements and ground them firmly in the realm of our lived experiences. While the interpretation of Houses in medical astrology or astroherbology focus on which external influences are affecting a disease, imbalance or healing need, general astrology focuses on Houses as the place in our life where the planets through the signs are affecting us. In other words:

The Planets represent WHAT energy is showing up
The Signs represent HOW energy is showing up
The Houses represent WHERE energy is showing up.

Sometimes astrologers will describe planets as WHO is showing up, which is useful if you work with the planets on an archetypal, personality-driven level. Whatever approach you use, the Houses represent the place where any of these energies, archetypes or personalities show up in your life.

Generally, the areas of life the twelve Houses represent are:

The First House: You, individual identity, self-expression, inherent vitality, health constitution, and physical form. Who am I and what am I feeling? Your Rising Sign or Ascendant will always be in your First House.

The Second House: Material security, money, earnings, possessions, what we place value on and deem worthy including self-worth, and experiences of abundance or lack. What do I want?

The Third House: Learning, education, siblings, extended family, exchange of information, communication, neighborhoods, and social networks. What am I learning and how am I learning it?

The Fourth House: The home, family, especially caretakers including parents and grandparents, and nurturing (or lack thereof) environments. When, where, how, and with whom do I feel most at home?

The Fifth House: Creative self-expression, love affairs, children, taking a chance, gambling, and the unexpected nature of living. When do I feel most secure in my relationships?

The Sixth House: Health and healing, places of healing, day-to-day work, labor, service, responsibilities and duties. What temple of healing am I helping to build?

The Seventh House: One-on-one relationships, committed relationships that influence all areas of life. When do I feel most seen and known by those I love deeply?

The Eighth House: Desire, especially for emotional security, sex, secret and psychic knowledge, and power. When do I feel I can share/get what I really want?

The Ninth House: Philosophy, spiritual practice, travel and exploration (both inner and outer), life experience, the unknown. Where is my inner world guiding me?

The Tenth House: Life calling, vocation, career, public life, reputation, ambition, authority, achievements, social position, what we feel called to contribute to the world. What is my calling?

The Eleventh House: Social groups, community, the collective, where we feel at home outside of our home, chosen family, good fortune, hopes and dreams. Who is my community?

The Twelfth House: The personal and collective unconscious, esoteric studies, intuition, dreams and visions, coming of spiritual age, rehabilitation and recovery, transcendence, spiritual unity, sacred initiation, and that which happens deep below the surface. What am I devoted to?

Many modern astrologers recognize every House also having an inherent guardian sign and element:

The First House: Aries & Fire

The Second House: Taurus & Earth

The Third House: Gemini & Air

The Fourth House: Cancer & Water

The Fifth House: Leo & Fire

The Sixth House: Virgo & Earth

The Seventh House: Libra & Air

The Eighth House: Scorpio & Water

The Ninth House: Sagittarius & Fire

The Tenth House: Capricorn & Earth

The Eleventh House: Aquarius & Air

The Twelfth House: Pisces & Water

Knowing a House's inherent sign and element is one of the ways that we can understand a House's energy in addition to the areas of life that it represents. Sign and elemental rulership of the Houses is both useful and also not - so I wouldn't worry about getting too hung up about what Aries in the First House means, but when it is useful, it's useful!³ Cancer, for example, with its hard outer shell but tender inner world, helps us understand the Fourth House as shelter and the security of belonging, and the element of water points us toward this House as a place of feeling in our lives.

The Houses are also an interesting map for charting out the ways the four elements move through our lives. The energy of Cancer in Fourth House represents water as feeling physically secure, while the water of Scorpio's Eighth House represents feeling emotionally secure (often in response to experiencing the uncertainty of mystery), and the Twelfth House of Pisces has us exploring our feelings of collective, even cosmic, emotional security.

While each House has an inherent guardian sign and element, unless you have Aries as your Rising Sign or Ascendant, you will have different signs and elements for your Houses on your birth chart. We'll explore more of that below, but simply, if you have Pisces in your First House, for example, you might interpret it as a mingling of Piscean energy (your inherent energy) with Aries energy (the inherent energy of the First House) happening in that area of your life.

Exploring the Houses can take us along all sorts of paths, but for our time together we'll be taking the lunar path through the Houses, journeying through their wisdom under the shelter of night.

The Moon Through the Houses

Whenever a transiting planet, star or illumination (like the Sun or Moon), visits one of our Houses, we are receiving a mirrored guest into our homeland. With this ancient visitor we have an opportunity to sit with them and their reflections on our life, shaped by their own unique celestial prisms. Since the Moon cycles through all of your twelve Houses throughout the year, your lunar self will be revisiting these same places within your life every year at roughly the same time. This lunar cycle through the Houses creates an opportunity for some long-term, cyclical, and steady healing explorations. While I have some samples of finding the Moon in the Houses below, you can also check out my tutorial on finding your Moon in your birth chart.

To understand how the Moon moves through the Houses of our birth chart, begin by pulling up your own birth chart and take a look at what sign guards each of your Houses. If you have Virgo as your Ascendant or Rising Sign that means that Virgo will be the guardian of your First House and that whenever the Moon is in Virgo it will be visiting your First House.⁴ Since the Moon travels through all twelve signs of the zodiac every month (roughly every 2 1/2 days), once a month the Moon will be in each one of your Houses.

While these monthly lunar visitations can be interesting to pay attention to, what I find most useful for working with the Moon in the Houses is to focus on significant points in the lunar phase - for me that is typically the Full and New Moon. I recommend this approach if you're just starting to explore or become reacquainted with the Moon in the Houses of your birth chart. New Moons carry contractive and focused energy - when a New Moon shows up in a particular House it can help us hone in on, settle, and set intentions for change within that particular area of our life. Full Moons carry expansive and bright energy and when a Full Moon shows up in a particular House it can help to illuminate, energize, and expand upon the energies of that area of our life.

The sample birth chart of Celina for *The Lunar Apothecary*

To understand how to track significant points in our year where the Moon is illuminating and stirring up the energy in our House, let's start by looking at the sample chart for our imaginary student of The Lunar Apothecary, Celina. Celina has a rising sign of Pisces which means that the zodiac sign of Celina's First House is Pisces. Knowing the Rising Sign or Ascendant of a person's chart means that we now know what sign is in every House of their chart since the zodiac always goes in a counter-clockwise order around a chart. So knowing that Celina has Pisces for their First House, I know that she'll have Aries for her Second House, Taurus for her Third House, Gemini for her Fourth House and so on. Understanding simple rules of astrology, like the zodiac always going in the same counter-clockwise order around a chart, helps to demystify the structure and meaning of the birth chart, making it more fun and interesting to work with.

Knowing the guardian zodiac sign of each of Celina's Houses, we now have a rough idea of when the Moon will be illuminating the energy of each of her Houses throughout the year.

Let's say that Celina is working with Full Moon energy this year. If she wants to know when the Full Moon will shine in her First House she needs to look for the Full Moon in Pisces, since Pisces is the guardian sign of her First House. In general, the Full Moon in Pisces happens in September each year.⁵ For 2026, the Full Moon in Pisces will happen on August 28. Celina now knows that the energy of the Full Moon will be illuminating her First House on and around August 28 for this year. In the years ahead, Celina now knows that the Full Moon will be shining in her First House in roughly late August through late September (e.g. sometime during Virgo season).

What does a Full Moon in her First House mean? For all of us, Celina included, the First House is primarily concerned with individual identity, self-expression, inherent vitality, health constitution, and physical form. It might be that Celina always plans on going on a healing retreat during this time period each year or performs a self-blessing ritual on this Full Moon in particular. But she can also just start by understanding the energy of the Pisces Full Moon better and how that shows up in the First House parts of her life. Like Celina, we can learn to ride these personal celestial energies to tend to all the areas of our life in a way that helps us feel balanced and in our flow.

Can Celina explore First House issues at other times of the year? Of course! The idea of working with the Full Moon and her birth chart is that she is tapping into energy beyond her individual reserves while setting up a cycle of practice that hopefully aligns with her unique needs and rhythms. If Celina is focusing on a particularly intense healing need within the First House area of her life, she might choose to set aside time each month when the Moon, in any phase, travels to that part of her birth chart, then choose to do more elaborate (and playful! and joyful!) healing and ritual work when the Full and/or New Moon arrives in her First House (which, typically, will only happen once each calendar year for the Full Moon and once for the New Moon).

In Practice

Within the Moon in the Houses series in The Lunar Apothecary we focus on how the lunar cycle illuminates opportunities for healing, connection, and insight as the Moon travels through each of the twelve Houses. As practitioners, it's another opportunity to step away from structures that don't fit our needs and into practices that allow us to connect to time and space in a way that makes sense to our being.

I hope this series will inspire rituals, for you as an individual and to share with your communities, of healing through understanding Moon cycles, as well as connecting with the seasons of the zodiac in a more lunar way. There is also the practical magick of spending a year, with regular intervals, exploring all aspects of our life and healing practice with the Houses as our framework - nothing too rigorous, but still engaging and meaningful.

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For those called to illustrate their birth chart with their own personal symbols and myths of power, exploring the Houses creates space for such art.

For those who like to make herbal remedies by the Moon, working with the Houses is an additional magick to add to your remedy-making timing.

For those with a divination practice, timing readings when the Moon illuminates a specific House can create a resonance for deeper and more insightful castings.

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You don’t need to believe in astrology to find the practice useful.⁶ I find that there is a specific type of joy when getting to know very old things in very new ways about ourselves and our collective legacy as a species that has tied our stories and lives to the stars for millennia.

I originally wrote this series as I was writing my book and as I reviewed old notes I began to realize how the seeds of exploring the seasons within, around, and between us were planted in some of these early experiences with the Houses. I love these cyclical moments of returning to old knowledge with older eyes but an expanded perspective - I hope you experience many such encounters throughout your life. Herbalism, astrology, and magickal arts are all practices that cultivate such encounters.

If you are looking for more about the Moon, I have a whole Moon Studies archive for you to peruse as well as a more general Astroherbology archive. Be well, friends, and may your travels by moonlight be ever revealing.

This post was made possible through patron support.
❤︎ Thanks, friends. ❤︎

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Footnotes

1. When I pulled out my copy of The Book of Houses after writing this introduction I found that it was filled with notes from the class! I'm always sticking notes and papers into books and then forgetting about them, but it's turned out to be a very good habit for filling in the gaps of memory. It looks like the class was taught by a woman named Delores who was a student of astrologer Wendy Ashley, who created AstroMythology, and was a kickass queer and feminist activist.

2. Another queer astrologer! Apparently, my foundational astrological education was far more queer than I knew.

3. Deborah Houlding's book The Houses explores the sign rulership and houses, including a delightful quote from herbalist Nicholas Culpeper complaining that people were just making things up. I mean, that is what astrology is ultimately - made up stories about invisible worlds through observational signs - but it is entertaining to see that arguing about what is authentic or not in astrology (and much of anything metaphysical) is a centuries old practice.

4. I use the whole sign house system because not only is it similar to that which was used by our traditional western astrology ancestors, but it is a very user-friendly system for beginners and advanced practitioners alike.

5. Another astrological short cut: the Full Moon is always in the sign opposite the current Sun sign - so in August the Sun moves into the sign of Virgo which means that the next Full Moon will be in the opposite sign of Pisces.

6. I don’t particularly believe in astrology myself as much as I find it a useful way of telling stories about ourselves (as well as a clever and well-worn mnemonic device), in the same way that I find myths and folklore useful in healing work.

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Further Reading

You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance by Chani Nicholas is such a great introduction to the primary players in your birth chart, including a section on the Moon through the Houses.

The Book of Houses: An Astrological Guide to the Harvest Cycle in Human Life by Robert Cole is a short and sweet treatise of the Houses as representing the cycles of life not just areas of life. While there are used copies of Cole’s book floating around, thank Goddess for the internet archive for making his and so much of the currents of queer wisdom available to us all.

The Houses: Temples in the Sky by Deborah Houlding is an overview of historical opinions on the Houses, including an organized overview of each of the Houses from multiple interpretations (i.e. interpreting the House for horary astrology versus medical astrology).

The Moon through the Houses

The Doors of the Year

The Houses

The Moon Through the Houses

In Practice