The 12 Houses of Astrology, Explained Simply
Houses are where astrology stops being vague. What each of the twelve governs, how to read an empty one, and why two chart calculators can disagree.
Angular house · Uxor
The 7th house
The seventh house begins at the Descendant, exactly opposite the Ascendant, and it covers everyone you meet as an equal and an other: spouses, business partners, and in the traditional phrasing, open enemies. The common thread is a relationship with terms.
At a glance
| Governs | Partnership, marriage and open enemies |
|---|---|
| Traditional name | Uxor |
| Type | Angular |
| Associated sign | Libra and Venus, by analogy |
| Opposite house | The 1st, self, body and first impressions |
The first, fourth, seventh and tenth, which begin at the four angles of the chart. Traditionally the strongest placements: a planet here acts, and is visible doing it.
In a profection year, this is the house that runs the whole year: the 7th takes over at the birthdays when you turn 6, 18, 30 and every twelve years after.
What the 7th house covers
That it holds both marriage and declared opposition is not a joke on the tradition's part. Both are relationships conducted face to face and by agreement, as opposed to the twelfth house, which holds the ones conducted behind your back.
The seventh is also read as what you do not own in yourself and therefore keep meeting in other people. A seventh-house Mars is often described as attracting assertive partners, and read more carefully, as somebody who has outsourced their own assertion.
What an empty 7th house means
An empty seventh house does not mean an unpartnered life. Venus and the sign on the Descendant carry most of the reading.
There are ten planets and twelve houses, so at least two are always empty and usually more like six. An empty house is the normal case, not a deficiency, and the sign on its cusp carries the reading instead.
A planet in the 7th house
What a planet does here, one page each. A planet says what, the house says where in a life it happens.
- ☉ Sun in the 7thIdentity, vitality and what you are becoming
- ☽ Moon in the 7thNeed, instinct and what settles you
- ☿ Mercury in the 7thMind, language and how you process
- ♀ Venus in the 7thValues, attraction and what you find beautiful
- ♂ Mars in the 7thDrive, anger and how you go after things
- ♃ Jupiter in the 7thMeaning, growth and the risk of too much
- ♄ Saturn in the 7thLimit, structure and what has to be earned
- ♅ Uranus in the 7thDisruption, independence and the sudden turn
- ♆ Neptune in the 7thImagination, dissolution and what you cannot see clearly
- ♇ Pluto in the 7thPower, compulsion and what will not stay buried
- ☊ North Node in the 7thThe direction of growth, and the thing you have no practice at
- ☋ South Node in the 7thWhat comes easily, and what you hide in
- ⚷ Chiron in the 7thThe injury that does not close, and what it made you able to do
- ⊗ Part of Fortune in the 7thWhere the three most important points in the chart agree
Houses need a birth time. Signs do not.
Your Sun sign depends only on the date. Your houses depend on the horizon at the moment you were born, and the whole framework rotates by one house roughly every two hours. An hour of error moves half of it.
This is why a Sun-sign horoscope cannot use real houses. It counts them from your Sun sign instead, which is a genuine traditional technique called the solar chart and is an approximation. This site uses it for the daily, weekly and monthly readings and says so on each of them; the transit calculator uses your real houses when you give it a time, and withholds them when you do not.
The same is true of where you were. A horizon is fixed by a moment and a place, so the 7th house is drawn around the one you were standing on. Read the same chart from another city and every planet stays at the identical degree while the houses are rebuilt around a different horizon, which is what a relocation chart shows.
What is in your 7th house?
The chart is free and computes all twelve from your birth time, alongside every planet, the lunar nodes and Chiron.
More on reading a chart
How to Read Your Birth Chart: A Beginner's Guide
A seven-step method for reading a natal chart from scratch: what to look at first, what to ignore, and how to turn symbols into an actual person.
What Is a Birth Chart? A Complete Beginner's Guide
A birth chart maps the sky at the exact moment you were born. Here is what every part of it means, and how to read yours from scratch, no jargon.
Questions about the 7th house
The two that come up most.
An empty seventh house does not mean an unpartnered life. Venus and the sign on the Descendant carry most of the reading.
Yes. The houses are fixed to the horizon at your birth moment, and the whole framework rotates by one house roughly every two hours. Without a birth time a chart can give you every planet's sign and no houses at all.