Chaldean natural rulers of houses

1
Hello,

We all know the importance of house rulers. There are many levels of house rulers that I have seen:-

1) Accidental house rulers, this is easy as ALL astrologers (i.e. ancient, medieval, arabic, renaissance, modern) agree on their definition. Simply look at the lord of the sign of the house cusp in question. The astrologers may get different house rulers but this is because there are many house systems, not that there are many definition of accidental house rulers.

2) Natural house rulers - Now this has a few definitions.

Traditional:-
1 Chaldean rulers. Simply assign the first house "natural" ruler to Saturn (the first planet in Chaldean order - what else?!!!), second house to Jupiter, etc. You see this in many places in traditional texts.

2 The three triplicity rulers of a house - but this is more for refining the meanings of the houses.

Modern:-
1 The equivalent of sign = house. Hence, Mars (ruler of 1st sign, Aries) rules first house, Venus (ruler of 2nd sign, Taurus) rules second house, etc. This I simply don't use - for the obvious reason!

2 Cusp of signs that are in one house also have share in rulership e.g. if you have Taurus and Gemini cusps on 2nd H, then your 2nd house rulers are Venus and Mercury. This means you could end up with 3 rulers if you have those "stretched" houses!

Are there any other?

As for me, I do not use any of the modern co-rulers of houses. I still use the Chaldean natural rulers but more for academic purpose. It is quite interesting to observe the relationship of Chaldean natural rulers of the houses:-

1st H: Saturn, the planet that gives structure is well suited for 1st H as 1st H governs body of native.

2nd H: Jupiter, the greater benefic, universal sigfinicator of substance/money/finance, also suitable to govern 2nd H as 2nd H = moveable possesions, money, substance...

3rd H: Mars also is suitable to govern 3rd house - house of siblings as Mars is universal significator of siblings, Mars (warrior planet) governs brothers as it is your brothers that are supposed to fight (martial) your enemies with you

4th H: Sun, also is suitable to govern 4th house (parents esp. father and sun is universal significator of father).

5th H: Venus, why of course! the house of pleasures and Venus!

6th H: Mercury, Mercury and servants and maids and messengers or the ones who we send to do errands...

7th H: Moon, moon = public, other people, marriage=7th H

8th H: Saturn ohh! the old man, universal significator of death = 8th H

9th H: Jupiter = religion, wisdom, long trips = 9th house

10th H: Mars eeeh...I am stumped unless career also means hard work!

11th H: Sun, good spirit, friends, 11th H

12th H: Venus Venus??? natural ruler of 12th Ohh dear!!! don't know how to relate 12th to Venus

2
Hi Astrojin,
Mr. Lilly, CA.p53., : Venus does joy in this (5th) house, in regard it`s the house of Pleasure, Delight and Merriment.
And look at the p. 38 of Deb`s "Temples of the Sky" about the 5th house.
(pregnancy, fertility, children)

12th is a house of temptations and our sins, connected with Venusian pleasures.

Best wishes
Trojan
Reges Subjucent Legibus Stellarum

3
Other than career another signification for the 10th house is one's "actions" and Mars suits well for actions.

Except for the 12th house (=Venus?), Caldean system of signifacations makes pretty much sense.

One more thing to add..Once I read somewhere that Mercury was assigned to the 1st house by the ancients on grounds that Mercury signfies soul and mind and speaking.

I think this fits in too but maybe as a co-ruler with Saturn. In that case Saturn can be taken to signify body (structure) as you said, and Mercury to signify mind (head/brain).

Another idea that has just come to my mind is that, in a normal birth, "head" of the infant comes out of the womb "first"! So Mercury seem to associate with the concept of being first too as it is the very moment (for most astrologers I believe) when the newborn baby's astrological clock starts to run!.

Cheers,
Sigma

4
10th H: Mars eeeh...I am stumped unless career also means hard work!
In hellenistic astrology the 10th was the house of praxis, our action in the world (as sigma4 mentioned).
12th H: Venus Venus??? natural ruler of 12th Ohh dear!!! don't know how to relate 12th to Venus
Delilah cut Samson?s hair and he became a wimp ('Samson' is derived from the word for 'sun'). It undid him. A real man should be on the battlefield and not in the bedroom. Love and lust weakens the man. (Ok, 'could be.... It does make one think about the modern fixation on porn.) And then there?s Plato and his warnings of listening to too much music.

I've found that historically astrology has had an active/masculine bias. The notorious 12th fits for the suspicious and pernicious softening of love, beauty, art and music.

5
John Frawley writes about the twelfth house as "the house of sin" and puts self-undoing and addictions there; and Indians say that the twelfth is the house of "pleasures of bed". If the 5th house is the house of sex as dating and having fun, then maybe the 12th house could be the house of sex as an addiction (also porn).

6
As far as the Chaldean system for house rulerships, maybe more study into the really old sources is needed. I'm just as stumped as everyone else is here for some of them. I?ve seen it said that Saturn is associated with the 1st house as it?s where the soul descends in matter at birth. So that fits Saturn?s associations with falls and with gross matter. But because the Chaldean order is fixed and progresses from Saturn to Jupiter then to Mars etc., that means that any houses that get assigned to any planet are going to be in some way arbitrary. So why is the 12th house associated with Venus in this system? It would seem to mainly be because it was her turn in the order of planets. We can suggest that sexual sin is a form of undoing, but besides that mainly being a guess, Venus in the abstract is not sexual sin, but pleasure.

I don't use the Chaldean house rulers at all and I've never seen anyone else use them in a chart. That?s not to say that no one ever does, just that I haven?t seen it.

My angle on most of these matters goes more to the practical level, what kind of information can I use in a chart. In the area of what planets are associated with what houses, sometimes in natal charts I'll look for the Sun for the 10th house, the Moon and Mercury for 9th house in issues of travel, but Jupiter if you?re looking a the religion of the person, etc. This is all based on the natural qualities of the planets.

There?s a good article about house rulerships by Dylan Warren-Davis on this site called Decumbitures.

My overall guideline for judging any chart is to know a lot about underlying theory like you?re doing here with understanding the Chaldean order, but to always look at the chart and be creative in your approach to it.
Mark F

7
10th H: Mars eeeh...I am stumped unless career also means hard work!
The association of Mars with the tenth, being the house of the mother, always had me stumped. Then I thought about it and realised why this might make sense. When we are born, it is an event of terrible agony for the mother, and Mars is of course pain. Even in caesarian birth, the mother still goes under the knife, and Mars is surgery. Mars rules the tenth because we are always originally associated with mother via what is essentially an act of violence.
12th H: Venus Venus??? natural ruler of 12th Ohh dear!!! don't know how to relate 12th to Venus
This is another difficult one to understand, but Venus is sin. If the twelfth is bondage and imprisonment, think of drug addiction, or any addiction, for the addict it is essentially pleasure that keeps them coming back and back again, lured into captivity by the temptress. Also, according to Frawley, the twelfth is the house of masturbation.

8
The idea of associating the Chaldean order of the planets is intended to describe the meanings of the houses, not necessarily to help delineate a chart.

The primary meaning of the 10th house is action and Mars embodies that concept prefectly. In traditional astrology the tenth is not, strictly speaking, the house of the mother. Parents (ancestry) are shown by the 4th house where the Sun is in the Chaldean order. The 10th is the mother when it is necessary to differentiate the parents. the 10th is the 7th of the 4th.

Venus may be the lesser benefic, but she has always had a dual nature. She represents love and venereal disease for example. Robert Zoller says Venus is lust. Whether the lust is appropriate (marital lust) or inappropriate (adulturous lust) is what determines whether Venus is benefic or malefic. Secret affairs and unacceptable sexual behavior are both 12th house and Venus.

Tom

9
I think the idea that the essential meanings of the houses stems from the Chaldean order is taking it a bit too far. We seem to be stretching some things to see how the origins for the meaning of the 12th house can possibly come just from Venus. There's a lot more bad mojo in the 12th house then just lust.

The house meanings don't come from one source to the exclustion of another. To me the esential nature of the 12th house is from it receiving no light from the ASC, from it's odd angle to the ASC. The same is true for the 6th house. The Chaldean order puts Mercury there. It's a stretch to get from the messenger of the gods to illness and small animals.

Perhaps in their own time a long time ago, their version of the 12th house had more to do with their understanding of Venus. But remember the Chaldean order is something that predates the classical period when the Greeks and Romans took these earlier systems and grafted them together to make something new. And then what they created evolved to what we know it. So at best, we're only going to see dim echoes of how we understand the houses in something as old as the Chaldean order.

These are the kinds of things that are fun to think about, but I wouldn't spend a huge amount of time worrying about.
Mark F

10
I think the idea that the essential meanings of the houses stems from the Chaldean order is taking it a bit too far. We seem to be stretching some things to see how the origins for the meaning of the 12th house can possibly come just from Venus. There's a lot more bad mojo in the 12th house then just lust.
The response was to how Venus could be associated with the 12th house of self undoing, and that is pretty easy to see. Venus is also associated with luxury, and in and of itself, luxury is not good or bad, but if one pursues luxury through evil means (e.g. crime = self-undoing) the luxury is still Venus. It is also pretty easy to see how the Chaldean order is associated with the houses, but no one argued exclusivity only association.

Tom

11
It is likely that at the time of the Chaldeans the quadrant system of houses was not in use but rather the system of whole sign houses. If this is the case, the Venus connected with the 12th house would mean Venus associated with the 12th sign = Pisces where she is exalted.

12
The Whole Sign system is not the same as sign = house. It?s relative to whatever sign is ascending at the moment. There isn?t any sort of permanent ?natural zodiac? assigned to it. The 12th house is simply the 12th sign from the Ascendant for the particular chart under consideration.