House 4

Which parent lives here is an open argument. Lilly 1659 gives the fourth house to fathers and the tenth to mothers, and Broughton 1898 follows him. Sepharial 1920 reverses it, with the mother here and the father at the top of the chart. Alan Leo, writing before 1917, says only parentage and hereditary tendencies, and modern books continue to split.

The house sits at the lowest point of the chart, called the Imum Coeli or the angle of the earth, and Lilly counts it among the four powerful angles. Its older contents are solid and local: land, houses, tenements, inheritances and the tilling of ground, along with the end of any matter.

Modern popular astrology has made it the house of home and private roots, a natural step from Lilly's land and dwellings. Under Placidus this house and the tenth are fixed by the meridian, which is one reason the calculator needs the birth place as well as the hour.