*
THE SKEIN OF CONVENIENCE
The tumultuous mood which Percy Bysshe Shelley captured in his Ode to the West Wind has its final line in the query, if winter comes, can spring be far behind? This provided a title for A. S. M. Hutchinson's best-selling novel of the twenties, and gave popular affirmation to the mind's instinctive faith in what, by and large, is a dependability of existence. Order may be limiting, but it is also most convenient. Tuesday is the sure prediction of Wednesday, and four o'clock a prophecy of five. The observation of Plautus, that there is no smoke without fire, expresses the commonplace realization that life and reality are actually built upon simple consequence. The faulty assumption is merely that existence stands of necessity at one end of the process. Order gives form to chaos, and while this may regiment subservience it also makes free will of use to man.
In the everyday context of choice, chance, risk and uncertainty of every conceivable sort when taken from a cosmic perspective, or seen as an infinity of potentials there is an almost absolute certainty of outcome along any one given or immediate line of relationship, provided the special sequence of relations be maintained in its own terms. It is this high predictability of things that supports normal action or reaction. An individual knows that by eating he will satisfy his hunger and, by drinking, his thirst. The average youth well realizes that, if he continues to fling little attentions and objects of thoughtfulness at the head and heart of a happily acquiescent miss of his acquaintance, she will respond with the yes he covets. Experience is put into train continually by the operation of order a statistical correlation or convenience which is usually dismissed without conscious attention and man constantly reassumes his identity, or establishes his various horizons of reality, by entering upon or leaving various chains of consequence at will. He is limited simply by the degree to which his act of ingress or egress is oriented properly in the universal economy. His action must be consequential, or a manifestation of order, in its own special frame of reference. Thus the driver of an automobile, who expresses free will in stopping at a railroad crossing to avoid a tragedy, merely sets up new lines of cause.
Consequence is therefore the ramifying context of act or choice of chaos or freedom not the compulsion of other and prior act or choice, except as this enters into the given or immediate relationship as a definite convenience. Most metaphysics goes astray at this point, assuming the universe to be static in its basic make-up, and so finding itself driven to one or the other of extreme views in (1) accepting everything in life as foreordained making man as ineffective as in Coleridge's immortal simile of helplessness, the painted ship upon a painted ocean or in (2) presuming action to be entirely subjective that is, largely immune from consequences in any dependable way, and so encouraging the individual to count upon chance, or to echo the remark of Ovid, "to Fortune I commit the rest."
Harry Carr, conducting his column, The Lancer, in the Los Angeles Times during the early thirties, was fond of explaining that a man who married a Mexican girl thereby married all Mexico. As far as end results were concerned, the groom had established relationship with a set of mores quite different from familiar American standards. He had to be prepared to face the fact, on the ridiculous side, that if he became financially successful the whole body of her relatives or at least the less fortunate ones would regard it as quite the thing to come and live with him, or compromise by accepting his support at a distance. This was not a matter of favor, kind-heartedness or penalty, as Carr explained it, but merely the proper procedure, part of the meaning of marriage in Mexico.
Life everywhere is made up of situations which for the principal part, in their background and ramification, are the complex of the shifting cause-and-effect sequences which converge most conveniently in the given reality, whether this be from long acceptance or for any other reason. Free will is gained, not in avoiding these necessities, but in taking advantage of them, that is, using and shaping them to conscious purpose. In other words, man constantly conforms to the consequences of the prior act or reaction about which he does nothing, since these constitute, collectively, the dependability of his own private world. In the same way he creates or re-establishes those to which he gives pertinency, wittingly or otherwise, at the threshold of every move or decision, since they become the continuum which constitutes his being at root. Thus he is sorted out statistically, or made to be what he is in the universal totality of things, precisely as he chooses, directs and selects rather than suffers the events which come in train through his experience. Order modifies him as he modifies order, and this two-way modification is what reality is found to be by any possible definition.
The houses of the horoscope chart the pattern of consequences. What does this mean, in non-technical language? First, they show the probable results of direct act or reaction, both immediately and ultimately. Then, and perhaps much more importantly, they reveal the skein of convenience in any given situation. Here are the everyday probabilities in events, as demanding either activity and decision or else acquiescence, whether witting or otherwise. All this comprises, in human experience, the CIRCUMSTANCES of life. Astrology can be said fundamentally to measure experience as the establishment of sequence, or as the process by which order becomes the manifestation of free will in any immediate relationship.
Sequence as the Measure of Experience
The ascendant is only designated the first house as a matter of convenience, although there is no deviation from "this practice in natal horoscopy. Any other one may be the initial mansion in some particular sense, whereupon those that precede are prior, and those that follow are consequent in the terms of the special case, as suggested in the diagram. This possibility is the foundation of horary astrology, a branch of the science to which reference has already been made, and it is of importance here in showing the immediate reference of all sequence.(1) The astronomical and mathematical elements charted by astrology do not, of course, actually put the factors of experience into these chains of consequence. There are no causal forces on the order of high-frequency waves or electronic vibrations which radiate from the stars and planets or from geometrical points in the heavens and compel organic entities to act or respond, be or do, in some specific fashion. As Heraclitus said succinctly in the fifth or sixth century, B.C., character is destiny. Human existence is always, ultimately, the consequence of itself. The houses merely measure the potentiality of this through a scaling of sequence.
(1) Thus it was possible, in meeting the special needs of beginners in How to Learn Astrology the smaller introductory text of this series, to which attention has been drawn in the footnote on page 29 to present the houses in groupings of 12-1-2,6-7-8,9-10-11 and 3-4-5 instead of the 1-2-3, 4-5-6, 7-8-9 and 10-11-12 groups, or normal quarters of the equator, used in the prior chapter to dramatize the initial sequence of circumstances in natal astrology.
Horoscopy, therefore, can only forecast the probability of events as it has action of a statistically identifiable sort on which to base any predication. The action, however, can be taken for analysis at any convenient point in circumstances. The unlimited possibility of sequence round the twelve houses provides the mind with a self- containment which duplicates the closed system of energy in which the earth and its inhabitants have their existence. This circularity, whether of the mind or nature, defeats any supposed bondage to an infinite regression of experience. Things are seen as they primarily make use of each other, or as they actually build the immediate reality which sustains them. The astrologer is especially equipped to serve his fellows because he can answer the ever-important why of what follows upon what in everyday life.
The first house, of course, is always the occasion for the why, usually a personality struggling to fulfill itself.
(1 TO 2) The second house rules possessions as the simple or first normal consequence of existence. Nothing can continue to be except as it continually assimilates substance to itself. Growth is the condition of life. Man's resources may be largely subjective or spiritual, but his organism still gathers, expends and replaces flesh and bone. The living fact of personality is the tangibility by which it is evident in its immediate circumstances, or the degree to which it can depend upon external existence. This is marked in the success with which it mobilizes what it needs to substantiate itself.
The sequential relationship represented by the immediate factor of consequence, in the single remove from any mansion to its next, can be understood more effectively by observing the one-step progression in significance as this continues through the twelve houses in order. Each of them ,in turn, counterclockwise around the equator, is the focus of some certain stage in experience, but only because this represents the possessions, assimilations or accumulations of the one preceding it, both astrologically and in life.
(2 TO 3) The third house, or environment, describes man's effective or genuinely real possession of his resources in a broader ramification of his private reality. In other words, what he may collect or otherwise make representative of himself, constituting it his property in the first or simple sense, will have no meaning or significance, or will retain no value as a possession, except to the extent it fits into the scheme of reality which is pertinent to its being. An individual's personal context is that in which his direct self-substantiation is most definitely convenient, or in which, in a very true fashion, his possessions are able to continue the assimilation of their own practical existence to themselves. This is the taken-for-granted phase of circumstances, such as characterizes the third-house rulerships most fundamentally.
(3 TO 4) The environment in its total potentiality cannot really be experienced, or possessed, in any conscious sense to continue this one-remove progression in house sequence until it in its turn is similarly substantiated or made more tangible in some special phase of itself. Man achieves such an end by specializing a part of his private world as more particularly his own, i.e., where his environment has particular resources. This is the fourth house, or home as the truly self-sufficient and highly personal milieu of experience.
(4 TO 5) Home is barren and meaningless, however, unless in turn it has its possessions in the assimilation of the personality's characteristic actions to the values which constitute its existence, so putting its stamp upon certain special acts or reactions as the self-expression revealed by he fifth house. The creative release of self thus becomes, at all times, the experience through which self, for the moment, is sufficiently at home to act freely and without inhibition.
(5 TO 6) Self-expression on its own account is not adequately representative of any man until it is refined or more definitely possessed through real effort in some disciplining pattern, as ruled by the sixth house. His expressiveness gains its reality in his consciousness when he develops the necessary ties of duty with his fellow participants in a general social adjustment. He must be genuinely stirred within himself to have any true resources in creative activity, and it is his frustration here which becomes sickness.
(6 TO 7) Labor and suffering, the balance in obligations shown at the sixth, is not effectively personal until it has some special focus through the tete-a-tete relations charted by the seventh house. The sense of contractual potentials, or the social vision and capacity for special fellowship with others revealed at this angle, are the most direct resources of human service in effort in the raw adjustments of living.
(7 TO 8) The seventh-house opportunity or enjoyment of genuine partnership, whether in transient relations or through the whole of life, lacks personal resource or satisfaction unless there is an enduring change in self, such as is disclosed by the eighth house.
(8 TO 9) The regeneration or rebirth of the eighth is meaningless unless it has its fruits or possessions in the ideas or concepts of the ninth house, that is, the inner consciousness of personal achievement, or an enlarged and dependable realization of selfhood.
(9 TO 10) The general attitudes of the ninth - including whatever may be know, reasoned or deduced from by the mind - are the resources of thinking, or the possessions of the rational being, only when the personality can place or recognize them, definitely and surely, in the general social reality or pattern of community affairs identified at the tenth house.
(10 TO 11) Place in life, or the gaining of a pertinent realization of social reality as such through some generally recognized achievement, is never actual in personal experience, or sure in everyday living, until confirmed by the resources in objectives and vision shown by the eleventh house, that is, made a matter of true individual concern.
(11 TO 12) The hopes and wishes, or advice and counsel, together with the general momentums of life revealed by the eleventh, have no personal pertinency, and are of little importance to the self, unless they create the special resources of subjective sustainment indicated by the twelfth house. Lacking all inner orientation, or direct relationship to personality otherwise, they often remain little more than dreams, idle words, and external assumptions, and so never become the potent moral dynamic they ought to be.
(12 TO 1) Subjective sustainment, or confinement and institutionalization as the protection of man however much against his conscious wishes and efforts are of no direct value to him except as they establish the tangible possessions and resources of pure personality in and of itself, such as are given a focal identity at the ascendant, and are thus preserved in their individual existence.
Sequence in a Regression of Immediateness
Sequence around the circle is dictated by the nature of the geometrical divisions in which the sequential factors are identified (here the twelvefold scheme of mansions). The simple transition shown by a move from one house to its next provides the nearest possible measure of an immediate or relatively unconditioned consequence in events, while the relations of a more intricate sort, traced out by a pattern of houses separated from each other, is a consideration of the necessities in a progressively greater measure of order, such as is in even sharper contrast with chance, choice or chaos. It has already been suggested that there is an obviously increasing degree of limitation at the hands of other consequence for better or worse whenever any given impetus of relationships expands out from its own center in original action, or ramifies into the complex of infinite potentials about it. The skein of convenience reveals the more general no less than the specific necessities in man's everyday affairs.
The next degree of complexity in circle relationships, charting the wider or more involved consequences of free act, is the chain of sequence when each equatorial mansion is taken in connection with the second one following that is, by skipping one or in its tie with what in horoscopic language is its own third house. Any possible ambiguity in these number relations can be avoided if it is remembered that ordinal indication of this sort can be a reference either to the additional or the total items. Astrology's counting is always inclusive. The third-house or skip-one relationship provides a forward step in the regression of immediateness in experience by moving on from the direct substantiation of reality around the circle, indicated by the houses in their positions adjacent to each other and outlined in the section just preceding, to an analysis of what becomes a more limited or generalized ordering. Reality is dismissed to automaticity, or anchored in momentary fashion, by an acceptance or utilization of purely taken-for-granted consequences. Here is where attention or effort is freed, in a sense, to be of greater service elsewhere in the pattern of circumstances.
(1 TO 3) Thus the normal third house of the horoscope charts a general environment in which personality can lean upon a host of details in the minutiae of life relationships, without either interest or concern, and this is almost the sole condition of civilized existence. The infinite regression is defeated by the fact that these taken-for-granted phases in the pilgrimage of man are progressively limiting with the thinning out of vitality in the self. Relatives and neighbors, communication and routine activities of living, all constrict man to the degree he fails in the simple impetus of being himself, just as they multiply every convenience of normal living to the extent he succeeds in continuing alive in any truly positive fashion.
(2 TO 4) Possessions and money affairs show the extent of their foundation in free potentiality on the one hand, or in limitation by any external situation on the other, through the home, that is, the conditions in the fourth house as the third of the second. Man's residence is where he can, at the best, dismiss the cares of worldly possessions to a complete automaticity. Money spent on this personal domain often remains a possession in transformed fashion, or a continuing asset. Indeed, accumulations of property in the form of an estate, or capital funds invested for security and income rather than used in an effort towards their own increase, are ruled by the nadir angle. Here is where the native's resources are actually taken for granted, and where, at the worst, he may be the most financially constricted, since the demands at this point are those from which he is least able to extricate himself.
(3 TO 5) Environment, when properly understood and utilized in the light of its potentials in convenience and community support, yields an ordering in an enlarged, uninhibited and creative individuality, i.e., when man is equipped with a surrounding aura of self-sufficiency. The taken-for-granted complex of life in this phase the third house of an original third is revealed ultimately as a culture, a body of self- expressive acts-in-common, a series of characteristic types of instinctive self-expression, which naturally aggregate men into groups and thereby distribute the genius of the whole through each person according to his own talents or pleasure.
(4 TO 6) Home has its ultimate ordering in the many and various ways it contributes to the balancing of personal effort, or in the happy organization and discharge of duties. It dismisses rest and security to automaticity in the sense of making labor a prerequisite of being, that is, a privilege and an assurance of greater rewards. The spirit which preserves man's residence and retreat becomes actual in a cheerful performance of chores, and in the adjustment of every division of labor otherwise limitation at the sixth to the exaltation of individual reality within the family.
(5 TO 7) Offspring and creative artistry, sports and self-expression of every sort, are enhanced, dramatized and given self-maintaining actuality by the opportunity in vis-a-vis contact and partnership, i.e., a limitation or ordering at the seventh house. The relationships at the descendant permit the tentative experience of the fifth to be dismissed to the automaticity of a life- involvement. Courtship, through the serious contemplation of marriage, is forced to direct the projection of self into channels of circumspection, after any preliminary self-discovery through trial and error. Pleasure has its surviving sentiment in an adult responsibility, an acceptance of life as a challenge to individuality.
(6 TO 8) Duty as the over-all designation of the work, labor and adjustment of the sixth has its ultimate refinement or permanent limitation in the regeneration and rebirth of the eighth. The relations between inferiors and superiors are exalted and clarified in the dismissal of brute or unordered struggle to the automaticity achieved in distinction. Here is a recognition of a personal importance whereby self-expenditure, or the exercise of individual differences, becomes a spiritual transformation, an immortal self-realization.
(7 TO 9) Partnership and the affairs ruled at the seventh are brought to a genuine individual ordering through the discipline of consciousness in the ninth. The internal development of a sense of values is a dismissal of tete-a-tete experience to an automaticity of idea, an escape from the annoyance or difficulty of loosening or dissolving the direct or immediate ties of life when they have served their purpose. The limitation of knowledge preserves any relationships of permanent worth, and facilitates the dissolution of all others.
(8 TO 10) Regeneration or rebirth has its practical ordering or limitation through the established place in life acquired by the native at the tenth. The recognition of his self-achievement, in the form of an honoring by others, is the true dismissal to automaticity of his eighth-house self-realization or social training.
(9 TO 11) Understanding in the ninth, as an individual's thinking or outreach to norms and standards of judgment, gains its dependable orientation through his refinement or establishment of objectives in the eleventh. These may be evident in his widening circle of friends, or in an ordering of simple external reality as this shows itself by the irresistible momentum in his affairs the dismissal of his progress to automaticity by the cosmos itself but in every case his hopes and wishes are the practical limitation of his thoughts, and of his efforts towards any evaluation of reality.
(10 TO 12) Honor or place in life, and the individual's obedience to the scheme of authority within which he functions in any given reference, have their limitation and ultimate ordering in the subjective sustainment ruled by the twelfth. Man may wear a crown exteriorly, but his dignity will be little more than a nightmare in experience if he cannot carry the kingly realization deep within himself. He must dismiss any exalted position his social reliability to the automaticity of his own subsconscious realizations.
(11 TO 1) Friendship, practical ideals or expectation, the hopes and wishes of the eleventh house, have their end-satisfaction in the ordering self-awareness of the personality at the first. The eye of vision is limited by the well-being of self in its first and simple focus. Man's dynamic ambition for himself is what he may be, in a total automaticity of self-gathered selfhood, as an individual among his fellows.
(12 TO 2) Confinement, or the self-acceptance of some external frame of reality or convenient institution for basic or inner orientation the subjective sustainment of life ruled by the twelfth becomes externalized, ordered and given intelligible form for the conscious mind through the possessions ruled by the second. The dismissal of the inner reactions to automaticity is revealed, outwardly, by the available possessions or practical liberty of life.
Regression in a Cancellation of Difference
It has been pointed out that the movement from the single instance to a statistically adequate number of them is the root of all order in the universe. It has been seen that the exact principles of physical science are only possible because they deal with such an infinite quantity of atoms of phenomena that any individual difference is averaged out completely. The consequences which appear in sequence, when analysis around the astrological circle is in terms of houses removed from each other rather than adjacent, similarly exhibit much less difference among them than when these mansions are taken one after the other directly. The fact that every alternate house represents the dismissal to automaticity and order of things ruled by the prior mansion in this skip-one relation is an illustration of the point, since the taken-for-granted status of things is a definite species of indistinction. Moreover, when the houses are linked in a 1-3-5-7-9-11 group of odd-numbered or positive, and a 2-4-6-8-10-12 combination of even-numbered or negative ones, they are sorted into a group entirely derived from the horizon in the first case, and into one stemming wholly from the meridian in the other.
Here is the basis of astrology's positive and negative mansions in both great circles, and a further example of a regression from distinctiveness to complete generalization, or what in the skein of convenience is an increased limitation, whether utilized or suffered. The transition from one house to its next, the first or most normal consequence of free choice or act, eludes this later phase of consequence, and gains an added significance through that fact. The relation in adjacency, from one point of view, is the effective basis in any astrological patterning of life. It not only yields much vital detail in the horoscopic techniques, but provides a simple if uncritical explanation for the art as a whole. When man remains creatively alive, and is truly individual to the maximum extent of his own desire and interest, he is very active in the world about him. He blends, continually, the positive and negative elements screened ut by the special sequence of negation and automaticity which comes next in order. When he surrenders to his destiny, however, and tries to make a bargain of acquiescence with his world of reality, the limitation of mounting complexity then tends to crowd in upon him, leading ultimately to a complete frustration and self-degeneration.
The greatest of all cancellation of difference in experience is represented by mere repetition, or by the following along in chain of those things whose distinctions are significant only in a re-emphasized regression of relationship. Astrology as a result finds the skip-a-house sequence around the equator very valuable in identifying the members in any succession of relations which are more important in likeness than difference. This is a particular detail of horary practice, but one often useful in natal delineation. Thus the third house rules brothers and sisters, in general, and also the first or eldest one, with each alternate mansion then representing the others in the order of their priority in the native's experience (usually chronological age). By the same token, the fifth house indicates all children, and also gives a more specific charting for the first of them as his life is reflected in the parental economy, with a second child identified in the seventh, a third in the ninth and so on. Parenthetically, adopted children are treated the same as natural ones, and no distinctions are made between the offspring by various marriages. Miscarried or stillborn infants are taken in their proper place if accepted as individuals in the consciousness of the mother.
Subjective Sequence as Clockwise Relationship
There are not only the possibilities of sequence counter-clockwise around the circle, but also the same relationships in the opposite direction, with a reversed implication. This mode of analysis has little value except in the simple house-to-house progression, however, since all the more ordered relations of life and experience are essentially reversible ideas, as will be increasingly evident. Whereas free will and choice tend to establish straight lines of consequence, reaching out towards an illimitable potentiality, order at all points seeks to restore a balance in nature, or to defeat any regression towards infinity and so bring reality back to center. When it comes to mansions in simple adjacency, the forward or counterclockwise implication in any move from the domain of one to the other is a substantiation or validation of the first by the second, as has been demonstrated. It is in this positive direction, to use the astronomer's language, that man proves himself to himself. His backward lean, contrariwise, is not upon the consequences of act and choice, or even upon their potentials, but rather on whatever may sustain the stirring or impulsion to act or choice as this exists entirely within his own economy. Thus the relation of the first house to the second is transitive, or tending to set up sequence, but of the first to the twelfth by contrast, intransitive or inclined to encourage self-impetus. What is charted by the clockwise sequence, therefore, is what might be termed at least as seen outwardly, or as evident objectively the moral dynamic, or the inner stimulus to act.
(1 TO 2) Personal identity has its urge to be itself in the subjective sustainment of the twelfth house, or is motivated in all things by a desire to emerge from its confinement and feel that it is what it is.
(2 TO 1) Money affairs or possessions are subjectively dependent upon the continuing outreach of the personality towards its own self-discovery, i.e., its self-establishment through some one or another form of expenditure.
(3 TO 2) Man's environmental situation, his capacity to take more and more things for granted, is due to the dynamic resident in his possessions, or in his self-confidence as instrumented by tangible and expendable resources.
(4 TO 3) The home in its psychological adequacy, or similar poverty as the case may be, depends subjectively upon the environment in which it comes to be established, or upon the number of things that can be taken for granted.
(5 TO 4) Self-expression or offspring, as the most spontaneous out-spilling of individual existence, is stimulated by home encouragement, and has its moral dynamic even more importantly in the enduring values the native is able to anchor permanently in his own experience.
(6 TO 5) Duty or labor as an expenditure of effort, whether compelled or given freely, obviously must depend for inner dynamic or sustaining capacity upon the nature and degree of the native's development of a genuine self-expression. He works as he is able or willing to let himself go.
(7 TO 6) Partnerships and tete-a-tete relations are dependent subjectively upon an ability to work hard, or a gift for the adjustment of self to the external demands of others as well as to the individual or organic economy. The dynamic is in a sense of preparedness through real effort.
(8 TO 7) Regeneration or rebirth has it psychological lean upon a native's development of his active and changing relations with his fellows in the terms of a practical and functioning equality, a capacity to rise to opportunity. He recreates himself to the degree he is able to respect others.
(9 TO 8) Understanding and the higher mind depend ultimately, when it comes to subjective motivation, upon the individual's continual reconstruction of himself as a socially competent organism, or as he is moved to realization by the ideals he builds into his own being.
(10 TO 9) Honor, or place in life, is dependent upon a personal consciousness of reality, and any such achievement is motivated by the development of values which can be used to measure self and society, or which demand continual employment for their broadening reference.
(11 TO 10) Friends and the forward expectation or momentum in events depend subjectively upon whatever social position the individual has been able to make manifest among his fellows, thus encouraging him to seek new dimensions in human relationship.
(12 TO 11) Subjective sustainment, in its all-important inner organization of man's potentials for self-realization, leans psychologically upon the external momentums in life, the practical demonstration of any validity in the deeper reactions.
The Further Regressions to Order
The sequence among the houses set up by skipping over two of them in each case is an emphasis of the fundamental axes, as in the groupings 1-4-7-10, 2-5-8-11 and 3-6-9-12. This is the basis of the angular, succedent and cadent distinction, respectively, to which much attention has been given. When the sequence is created by passing over three mansions, or the fifth-house relationship in its application to the whole skein of convenience, the groups thereby established, 1-5-9, 2-6-10, 3-7-11, and 4-S-12, are the triads created in the original intra-hemisphere distribution. They are the foundation for the entire derivation of house meanings. A sequence of sixth-house intervals (or by jumping over four mansions in each instance) is significant in the fact that it returns the arrangement to the fundamental series of next relations, at least to the extent that all twelve houses are included and that a twelfth move arrives back at the starting place. The principal value of this grouping is its demonstration of the logical circularity or ultimate order which the equatorial houses chart for life as a whole.
Thus identity continues to be what it is, ultimately, through duty (1 to 6), which in its turn is strengthened through hopes and wishes (6 to 11), confirmed by the permanent values established in this process (11 to 4), and built into the fiber of self as understanding (4 to 9), thereupon making possessions possible in a truly responsible sense (9 to 2), equipping the native to meet others in co-operation and as an equal (2 to 7), and helping him to gain a subjective sustainment from any limitation or institutionalizing of life (7 to 12), so that his self-expression remains conditioned by his own inner reality (12 to 5), and thereby becomes competent to substantiate itself in a recognition of his own intrinsic worth among men (5 to 10), permitting him to dismiss the lesser things of his experience to automaticity (10 to 3), and to concentrate on his own self-refinement (3 to 8), in this continuous reconstruction of his own experience, or circular confirmation of his own identity (8 to 1).
Eighth-house intervals produce the same sequence, but in reverse order, showing the identical process in more intransitive form. The ninth-house sequence duplicates the fifth-house triads similarly. The tenth-house relations reverse the fourth-house axial ones. This reversibilty of astrological indication has its principal significance, however, through the houses which lie opposite each other, or which constitute what is hardly to be taken as a sequence in the ordinary meaning of that word, namely, six groups of two each, created by seventh-house intervals (skipping over five mansions). Here is a most important relationship in astrological order, used first of all to chart the succession of things which, in experience, can only follow each other by a process of elimination and reconstruction. Thus new parents or marriage partners (other than where polygamy is practiced) are possible only after the death or legal removal of their predecessors. Hence the seventh house indicates all partners of any given category, such as marriage or business, and then shows, in addition, the particular significance of the initial one. The ascendant identifies a second partner particularly, the descendant again a third, and so on. Foster parents are treated in the same fashion at the midheaven and nadir.
Every house has a particularly active relationship with its opposite, a fact which has been very evident in connection with the house axes, and which provides a real starting point for horary analysis. There are twelve of these polarities, as they are known to astrologers, although only six actual pairs can exist in the heavens. In order to indicate the considerable difference when a polarity is taken from one side, as in contrast with the other, each house is given an additional keyword. The ones emphasized in the preceding chapter serve to identify the more positive facet of experience, and the new designations will show the significance of each mansion in the same circumstantial connection, but from the alternative perspective. Here is sequence in its closest approach to absolute order, producing relationship around the circle in a double fashion, or in a continual reconstruction of the balancing stimulus upon which all phenomena must depend ultimately.
The Balance of Stimulus in Convenience
(1 TO 7) The beginning of all perspective on man is his identity at the first house. This is the center of his being, and it at once creates a necessity that he reach out to the periphery of his being, or know himself in wholeness. Here is the balancing of mere existence with a definite OPPORTUNITY in the seventh.
(2 TO 8) The initial step creates a necessity for discrimination or choice in the individual's experience, so that he must retain certain selected materials of his activity as a basis for his further self-unfoldment. The establishment of possessions in the second house in this way at once develops the need for a complementing release or surrender of accumulated but unused realities, which ultimately is a final accounting, a discarding of things, or DEATH, at the eighth.
(3 TO 9) Holding some things to self, and putting others aside, requires a context in which to act, or the environment at the third house. This promptly creates the need for some sort of a balancing and synthetic realization, or a capacity to arrange things in generalization, which is CONSCIOUSNESS or the corresponding indirect contact of the ninth.
(4 TO 10) With the developed sense of selfhood, resulting from the process at this point in the symbolical description, man's effort takes on the color of private interest. Therefore he has a home in the fourth house. The resulting responsibility immediately pushes him into BUSINESS at the tenth, the corresponding public interest in which he balances his existence at this stage of its development.
(5 TO 11) His private interest demands a continual and compensatory contribution of self to the outer world at large, setting up the phenomenon of offspring at the fifth house, or the definitely creative act of selfhood. This immediately has its balance in the symbolical act of creation on the higher level through imagination, or the projection of self through OBJECTIVES in the eleventh.
(6 TO 12) Self cannot continue to give of itself without a context of necessity, ordering and supply, and the manifestation of this is duty in the sixth house. This may be service to others, or the capacity to compel service, together with the organization and distribution of self-effort. In any case, the result is the beginning of a distinction among people, which calls forth the balancing PREDILECTION at the twelfth, that is, the psychical adjustment by which the individual is able to bring about different responses from various other people, or to adjust himself in mood or attitude.
TABLE III
The Polarities of the Houses
I IDENTITY - Center of being VII OPPORTUNITY - Periphery of being
II POSSESSION - Utilization of reality VIII DEATH - Surrender of reality
III ENVIRONMENT - Direct contact IX CONSCIOUSNESS - Indirect contact
IV HOME - Private interest X BUSINESS - Public Interest
V OFFSPRING - Act of Self XI OBJECTIVES - Purpose of Self
VI DUTY - Practical Adjustment XII PREDILECTION - Psychical adjustment
VII PARTNERSHIP - Relation to others I PERSONALITY - Relation to self
VIII REGENERATION - Life Reconstruction II LOSS AND GAIN - Life manipulation
IX UNDERSTANDING - Reality at a distance II PERCEPTION - Reality at hand
X HONOR - Final recognition IV IMMORTALITY - Present recognition
XI FRIENDSHIP - Potentiality sought V PLEASURE - Potentiality claimed
XII CONFINEMENT - Limitation used VI SICKNESS - Limitation refined
(7 TO 1) The discrimination of act towards others is responsible for a changing relation to them, and an equalization with them, or the reality of partnership at the seventh house ultimately, and this is balanced by the many-faceted self known as PERSONALITY in the first, that is, the social identity which only exists in order that all the shades of difference typified by these others may be unified in itself.
(8 TO 2) Partnership promptly sets up the need for a fluid co-operation with non-partners in its activity, which requires a regeneration of self in the eighth house, or a reconstruction of life to make use of the resources of others. This is balanced, of course, by the consequent necessity that the self also reconstruct the values and symbols which reveal the actuality of its own experience through LOSS AND GAIN at the second.
(9 TO 3) The social reconstruction of self is the whole basis for any organization of ideas any relating of the self to reality at a distance through the intellectual activity and understanding at the ninth house. This is balanced by PERCEPTION in the third, i.e., the practical and creative insight into the immediate usefulness of all things on their own account, or as they become available close at hand.
(10 TO 4) Understanding is the basis of all realization of worth in its personal or individual phase, and this puts down the foundation for the honor in the tenth house which, as balanced in the skein of convenience, becomes the fixation of achievement through an IMMORTALITY or wholeness of the conscious self at the fourth.
(11 TO 5) Honor calls to its own, and this has expression in the relation of friendship at the eleventh house, or the continual encouragement and enlargement of potential relationships for the self. The balance of the impulse to momentum in the more formal fashion is that PLEASURE in the fifth by which conscious individuality enhances its reality in a creative fulfillment of itself.
(12 TO 6) The self's driving determination to uncover potentialities in life leads it to establish a total reality which it can never really substantiate, and the result is a confinement of the conscious identity in the twelfth house by the transient boundaries it thus sets up. This is balanced by an employment of all such constriction in a creative self-mobilization, a figurative if not literal SICKNESS in the sixth, and the principal agency through which any limitation is faced or defeated.
The acceptance of a reality beyond the immediate possibilities of its substantiation makes it necessary for the self to reaffirm itself in its own identity, and this becomes a refocusing of its center of being on some new level of realization. It is then ready to begin the whole process over again, as often as is convenient or profitable.
Thus the diagram of life's circumstances charts a continual interweaving of free choice and ramifying consequences in experience. The analysis so far has concerned itself with the single individual, however, taken almost solipsistically in the pattern of his own potentials, or in his relations to other persons or groups as these are centered in himself. Now he must be linked to his fellows in a much more tangible way, because he does not inhabit this world of his alone, even if he does create it for himself, and does do so entirely according to his own convenience.
Astrology, How and Why it Works
