How many books on your astrology shelf contain a phrase like this one: If your Mercury is in Gemini or the 3rd House . . .? With two cents’ worth of logic, the conclusion is inescapable: the author is telling you that the two configurations mean the same thing. If A equals both B and C, then B equals C and there’s not a single scrap of wiggle room about that anywhere.

The trouble is that in this case, B does not equal C. Houses and signs are not the same. They do overlap in meaning, as we will see. They are far from unrelated. But if you treat them as if they were interchangeable, your astrological work loses focus. Still, this is a painfully common error among astrologers. Even though many of those books I mention contain useful perspectives in other areas, when it comes to this issue they are the culprit. 

Learning to avoid this pitfall is not hard and it will take your work to the next level.

 

WHAT EXACTLY ARE SIGNS?

Signs are motivational and psychological. They represent your needs and your drives. They symbolize what you value – what you’re chasing after in your life. They are deeply connected to what makes you want to get out of bed in the morning. You can call them “your energy.”

Here’s an illustration: when we meet someone and we quickly sense a certain simpatico between us, we’ll often say something along the lines of “I just like Jackie’s energy.” Everyone knows what we mean. Astrologically, that kind of spontaneous “liking” has a lot more to do with signs than with planets. Maybe her Sagittarian Venus trines your Leo Ascendant, for example. Or maybe you both have Water-sign Moons. 

Even in the most simple-minded kind of astrology where we might read that “a Taurus should marry a Virgo or a Capricorn, but never a Leo or an Aquarian,” we still see the same basic point – the idea that getting along with someone is about signs, not houses. 

That’s because signs are about that mysterious X-factor that we call “energy.” And so are relationships.

Meanwhile, no one says that if you have a 2nd house Sun, you should marry someone with the Sun in the 6th house or the 10th house – but just stay away from those nasty 5th or 11th house types. 

WHAT EXACTLY ARE HOUSES?

What about the houses? What do they signify? And how are they different from signs? First, houses tend to be much more oriented to actual behaviors. They’re about actions and choices. They can surely have deep, psychological dimensions, but invariably each one of them also has outward, obvious behavioral expressions. Even the more interior houses – the 4th, the 8th, and the 12th – involve some kinds of outward activities. All three of them are big subjects, but briefly the 4th is about creating a home, the 8th is about bonding with a partner and facing the experience of mortality, and the 12th is about active spiritual practice and the experience that sooner or later, everything falls apart.

You can see people’s houses in action without even knowing them. They’re built into everyone’s obvious outward biography. To sense people’s signs, you actually have to know them personally.

• In a nutshell, we are our signs and we do our houses.

AN EVEN DOZEN

Twelve signs, twelve houses – and twelve is astrology’s sacred number. Understanding the many parallels between the twelve signs and twelve houses is astrological bedrock. The trick is to not forget about the “perpendiculars” between them. Certainly we can learn a lot about the first house by thinking of Aries, the first sign. Ditto for the third house and Gemini, and so on around the two circles. Some of the language we would use to describe the sign might also be helpful and relevant in describing the house. They do blur – that’s part of reality. But missing their distinctions can be a fatal mistake. 

Let’s say you have a certain motivation or desire – that’s sign symbolism. What might you actually do about it? That’s house symbolism. 

Pisces? Among other possibilities, that sign is about the desire to experience a wider framework of consciousness. If you feel that way, how might you express it or actively go about exploring it? That’s a house question – and in this case we’d be thinking specifically about the 12th house, which can be understood as a behavioral expression of Piscean energy. 

What’s the 12th house about? Actually sitting down to meditate. Noticing the vibe of a room or a person. Visiting a temple or an ashram. Entering Holy Orders. Those are things we might choose to do if we feel that Piscean pull inside ourselves. 

Let me demonstrate just how important it is to keep the distinctions clear in your mind.

BLAKE AND JAMIE

Meet our two imaginary friends, Blake and Jamie. Blake is a 9th house Cancer while Jamie is a 4th house Sagittarian. To keep all the principles stark and clear, we’ll leave it as simple as that. Note that in both cases we are talking about a mixture of “4th phase symbolism” with “9th phase symbolism.” That’s because Cancer is the 4th sign and Sagittarius is the 9th. 

If you have an equal sign in your head between Cancer and the 4th house or between Sagittarius and the 9th house, get ready to experience a shipwreck. 

As a Cancer, Blake is very oriented to home and family. That’s his natural path. He’s a sane adult, but he is still connected lovingly to his parents and his siblings. They all live near each other in the New York City area. His sister is pregnant and he’s excited about becoming an active uncle. 

All of that reflects Blake’s basic Cancer values. He’s making a healthy response to the sign Cancer, in other words. For everyone, staying true to the basic values indicated by your Sun sign is what keeps us feeling on track in our lives. Blake is “majoring in psychology” in this lifetime, and for that effort, there is no better university than family dynamics. There are other ways to do it, but experiencing home life is a classic method. 

Meanwhile, whether he likes it or not, circumstances of a 9th house nature tend to arise in Blake’s life – remember, that’s the house position of his Cancer Sun. That’s how houses often work – they are the “theaters of life” and they are often thrust upon us whether or not we welcome them. I don’t like the word “fate” very much, but our experience of the twelve houses invokes that word more than anything else I can think of in the world of astrology.

Here’s what happens. Blake loses his job. Naturally, bills keep pouring in anyway. It’s a scary financial nightmare. Synchronistically, a month later his partner Jamie gets a magnificent job offer in Seattle, Washington, complete with a large raise. 

It’s as if God has spoken – they have a choice: they can be homeless in New York City or prosperous and secure in Seattle. Plus Blake’s beloved Jamie has just had a career breakthrough. He doesn’t want to stand in her way.

They move west. Blake deals with it. 

Here comes the second verse – and it’s not the same as the first. 

Remember Jamie, Blake‘s partner and our 4th house Sagittarrian? As a Sagittarian, she’s inclined to say yes to life. She’s more open to risk and wide experience than most of us. Good for her – those are healthy Sagittarian values. She’s lived by them. She always has a lot of faith that things will work out all right. To her, boredom and predictability are spiritually anathema. When she was young she would often say that she wanted to visit every country in the world. 

However, her Sun is in the 4th house – a house that often correlates with domestic situations and opportunities for quiet inner work. She loves Blake and his family, but she’s actually been feeling a little “stuck” in New York City. At age twenty, Jamie became pregnant and decided to have the baby. She loves her now-teenage child, but the circumstances in which she found herself for the next couple of decades have had a distinctly 4th house flavor. She may be a Sagittarian, but she’s also a mom. There are no stamps in her passport. In fact, she has no passport at all.

Like Blake, Jamie is also “majoring in psychology” in this life (4th house Sun) – but, unlike Blake, circumstances have to “herd” her in that direction. 

So they do. 

Blake, on the other hand, needs more “cross cultural experience” (9th house Sun) than he wants. That kind of mind-stretching disorientation is like the yeast in the bread of his “psychology major.” 

His 9th house Sun sees to it that he gets what he needs – even if sometimes it isn’t what he wants.

Like both Blake and Jamie, you and I have our own desires and intentions (signs!) – but meanwhile the universe has some unexpected plans for us (houses). Once again, for all of us, they’re often experiences that we need more than we actually desire.

Once again, we are our signs and we do our houses. In trying to offer astrological support to Blake or Jamie, any astrologer who said “if your Sun is in Sagittarius or the 9th house” as if they meant the same thing, would fail to connect meaningfully with either one of them. 

As you can see, Blake and Jamie are very different creatures. 

Out of respect for the deeper mysteries of life, let’s not forget to recognize that Jamie will learn a lot of Sagittarian lessons in the process of raising her child. Meanwhile, Blake’s horizons will be stretched beyond “the Crab’s shell” by his “fated” experiences in the Pacific Northwest.

For them, as well as for you and me, there is always a Higher Intelligence at work – and the more we learn to trust it, the happier we are.

Watch as we take this basic interpretive skill one step further . . .

A PAIR OF VENUSES

Everyone has a Venus. To be human is to want to feel connected with other humans. But how many different ways are there for doing that? Here on Earth, we’ve got hermits and party animals and every type in between. 

With Venus motivated by Gemini values, there is an evolutionary drive to experience intimate diversity. On the other hand, with a Venus that’s motivated by Capricorn values, deep commitment through thick and thin is the ticket. 

Similarly, we could go around the circle of the signs, placing Venus in each one of them and seeing a different underlying evolutionary intention in each case. Once again, that’s all about the life-defining energy of the astrological signs – which always represent our evolutionary agenda, whether we know it or not.

What about Venus in the houses? Here, as ever, we’d be looking for something outward, visible, and behavioral. One way of thinking about it has to do with where and how you’re most likely to meet the people with whom you have “business” in this life. Venus in the 10th house? Maybe it’s as simple as this: you meet at work. (Want to meet someone? Get a job!)  Venus in the 3rd house? Maybe you meet in pursuit of some kind of learning. 4th house? Perhaps a family member introduces you. 

All of this verges dangerously close to fortune-telling, but it often works pretty well – houses and “fate” strike again.

I think of how I met my own partner, Michelle Kondos. I was leading a class – and my Venus is in the first house, which represents leadership. If I hadn’t overcome my natural reticence and accepted a role of teaching and leadership, I never would have met her. 

Meanwhile, Michelle’s Venus is in her 11th house – she was sitting in the class with fifty other people: a classic 11th house experience. If she hadn’t chosen to fly from New Orleans to Napa, California, to study astrology in one of my old apprenticeship groups, she never would have met me.

Once again, we see the basic principle: signs are what drive us, while houses are where our lives happen. 

Two words – being and doing – are really the heart of the matter. Signs relate to being, while houses to doing. Do being and doing blur together in practice? Yes indeed! My point in this little essay is not that we should erect the Great Wall of China between signs and houses. That would be a mistake. It’s only that there are useful distinctions to be made between them, and the clearer we are about those boundaries, the clearer our understanding becomes. That improved precision is a gift to ourselves and to any clients we are trying to serve with our astrological work. 

We are our signs and we do our houses – it’s a catchy phrase, and maybe too much of an oversimplification. Still, remembering those nine words can be like putting on your glasses when it comes to realizing that “Blake and Jamie” have very different charts – and very different soul intentions.

 

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