posted October 04, 2002 05:07 AM            

I think the Equal House System is a good one to start out with - when you are first learning. After that you can then start to look at the other systems to see which you personally prefer - because that's what it comes down to in the end. Placidus is probably the most commonly used one at the moment but a lot of people also like Koch.

There are many different house systems - a lot of which are not at all popular.

You can basically divide the different house systems into 3 types......

Ecliptic
Space
Time

The Equal House system is an Ecliptic System.
Placidus & Koch are both Time Systems.
Campanus is an example of a Space System.

posted October 04, 2002 10:51 AM              

The ancients simply divided the chart into 12 equal houses, for the same reason they divided the zodiac into 12 equal signs: because it was the clearest representation of the archetypes they were trying to present. Modern astrologers tend to want to distance themselves from this mythical/archetypal thinking and become more scientific, so they look at the fact that the ecliptic (where the signs of the zodiac lie) is in a different plane from the equatorial plane of Earth (where the planet turns in 24 equal hours each day) - and they note that since these planes are not identical, they don't mathematically map to each other in 1-to-1 correspondence. In the summer, for example, the Sun spends more time in the upper six houses than in the lower six (that is, there are more hours of daylight than night-time), while in the winter it is the opposite (for the Northern hemisphere). As a result, all these different house systems were developed to try to represent the houses more "accurately" from an astronomical point of view.

My own thought about this is that it is a misplaced emphasis on science. If this were supposed to be scientific rather than symbolic division, then the signs themselves should be divided unequally! That is, each contellation does not "really" take up exactly 30 degrees in the space surrounding the earth, some take up more and others less. Nonetheless the signs were divided equally because that best expressed the concept of the zodiac, and each sign was named for the constellation that "mainly" coincided with it at the beginning of the first great age. (Now, of course, they don't coincide even roughly because of the precession of the equinoxes!) To me it makes perfect sense to divide the houses equally according to the same reasoning: it accurately expresses the archetypal idea that there are 12 "departments" of life, none of which are more important than the others.

For that reason it doesn't bother me at all that the MC does not coincide with the 10th house cusp in the Equal house system -- which was the original impetus for the development of all the other house systems. If we think that the 10th house cusp MUST coincide with mid-day, then why don't we think that the 7th house cusp MUST coincide with sunset? But it doesn't, in ANY of the house systems (except on 2 days out of the year).

Linda Goodman was a traditionalist in this sense, which is why she used the Equal house system, as ALL astrologers did until the 1700's when Placidus was devised. In my own view, all of the alternate house systems that have been devised since then are attempts to solve a problem that doesn't really need to be solved, any more than the zodiac itself needs to be adjusted to "solve" the problem that the constellations are not really divided into 12 equal segments. Astrology uses both accurate scientific measurements AND symbolic constructs, and to me that's exactly as it should be!

Just my two cents on the subject -- I don't think the other house systems are "wrong" (any symbolic organization is useful, as long as it is consistent) just unnecessarily complicated for no really good reason.

posted December 19, 2002 09:11 AM            

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"Never mentally imagine for another that which you would not want to experience for yourself, since the mental image you send out inevitably comes back to you." Rebecca Clark