The Fifth House

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THE FIFTH HOUSE

Dane Rudhyar

In the fifth house what has been assimilated, stabilized, integrated, or built in the fourth house produces potential energy. Power becomes available for use. At the biological level this is not only the energy needed for intercellular exchanges and for adjusting the body to changes of heat, humidity, or magnetism occurring in the physical environment, but the nervous and muscular energy required to get food, meet obstacles and enmity, and satisfy basic physiological needs, for instance, the need of the species to reproduce itself through mating. In a mentally and emotionally developed individual, personal power is available to a lesser or greater extent for self-expression in terms of social or cultural values.

Creativity is referred to the fifth house because to create, in a human sense, is to impress upon one's community some characteristics of one's own personality. It is to make one's own mark upon one's society, or upon mankind in general. This obviously can be done in various ways. Giving birth to a child and raising him to become a person of social-cultural importance is the biological way. Producing a work of art or of literature, founding a cultural institution, imagining and developing a great invention which affects men's way of life, leading one's nation to a notable achievement — all these activities exteriorize and put to use the power of the creator, inventor, or leader.

In some cases, however, the exteriorized power and the projected vision originate in a realm that is actually superpersonal. The person becomes the agent for some great collective or planetary and evolutionary purpose; he is like a translucent and perfectly shaped lens through which light is condensed and brought into focus. At this focal point power can operate and work can be performed. This work — the creative act and its products — is undoubtedly conditioned by the nature and temperament of the person, yet even more basically it is determined by factors which transcend personal idiosyncrasies and even perhaps personal desires or attempts to control the creative process or direct it toward a consciously defined end.

We should realize, however, that when a person performs a work of social significance in terms of his profession and under the pressure of a collective need, and when this work has, as it were, the conscious or unconscious backing of a social institution, a business firm, or of the whole community, such a performance — creative though it may appear — refers just as much or more to the eleventh house as to the fifth. In the fifth house theoretically the person acts as strictly as possible as an individual. He is not concerned with collective social results or, if he is, then it is mainly to the extent that these results will bring him fame, prestige, and ego-satisfaction. In the fifth house a person seeks to enhance his own nature. He is more concerned with being "original" than with orginating. Whether or not it is consciously acknowledged, the question "What can I get out of it? How can this act make me feel better, more fulfilled, happier, greater?" always lies behind his acts. This applies to nations as well as to individual persons, as exemplified by our American approach to -international affairs.

If the fifth house traditionally is considered to be the section of a birth chart referring to love affairs, while the seventh house refers to marriage, it is because, at least in the old-time society, a love affair was supposed to be merely a release of emotional-sexual tensions and/or personal frustrations and unhappiness, or often a mere play or pastime, or a contact determined by personal ambition. On the other hand a marriage or a steady business partnership implied the permanent union of persons who conceived this association as a means to produce biological, social, or cultural results — results that were considered functional in terms of the whole community. Marriage until quite recently did not mean the freely sought union of two independent persons seeking in this union a way of greater personal fulfillment in love, for a marriage was most often arranged according to class and financial status for the purpose of preserving the human race and the values of a particular culture and religion through the procreation of children properly educated to perform this role — a point which today is very often misunderstood or conveniently forgotten.

The fifth house is the area of experiences which are essentially the outcome of emotions, and we should be careful to distinguish emotions from feelings. Feelings are experienced in the fourth house because they constitute the spontaneous reactions of a whole organism to a life situation, whether at the purely biological and instinctual, or at the psychological and individualized level. It may be an inner situation — as when a person feels pain in some part of his body because an organ has been injured — or an outer situation caused by an encounter with another person. Feeling is a holistic process involving an organic state of consciousness, or at least semi-consciousness. This state then seeks exteriorization, and the exteriorizing process is both an e-motion — a "moving out" — at the psychological level, and at the physical level some kind of muscular or chemical reaction. The lie detector and related instruments have shown conclusively that all emotions — whether fear, love, depression, happiness, or anger — are synchronized with organic changes and muscular movements, however slight and unconscious these may be.

It is such responses to confrontation or to inner happenings — making definite mental images in meditation can be one of these — which should be considered fifth house experiences. The fifth house has been associated with "gambling" in any form, from gambling for love to taking risks in promoting artistic or financial enterprises. Such an association is valid whenever the gambler strictly follows his hunches or imagination, or succumbs to the pressure of an inner frustration or complex. But when the risk-taking is discussed with a partner and based on an intellectual evaluation of social and business processes, then it should be referred to the eighth, or in some cases to the eleventh, house.

It is also traditional to speak of the fifth house as referring to childbearing and education, at least in its earlier stage. The reason for this is that most parents tend to consider their children projections and extensions of their own personalities; they often expect their children to be what they have failed to be. They may seek to give them opportunities they did not have in their own youth, or project upon them their own longings and ambitions, perhaps so they can vicariously enjoy their achievements and even their loves. Parents may also feel that it is their duty more or less forcibly to impart to their children the culture and the manners which they themselves received from their own parents.

Education thus becomes a process of impressing upon the supposedly virgin mind and feeling-nature of a child a collective set of socio-cultural rules and patterns of response. If understood in this way the educational process takes only minimal cognizance of the child's individuality and uniqueness of being and destiny. This, more than anything else, is what has produced today's youth rebellion. This rebellion is partly the result of the fact that many parents are no longer convinced that their cultural and religious-ethical tradition is worth being passed on, or that changing circumstances of life in our technological age makes this impossible. It is also the result of the great increase in the many kinds of external stimulations — T.V. dramas and news, parental scenes at home, constant change of environment, etc. — which generate premature sensorial and intellectual development, while leaving the feeling nature without root- sustainment and examples of integrated and solid group living.

At the biological level the fifth house can still refer to one's progeny even in our chaotic society. Today, however, it has come to deal increasingly with the attempts at emotional self-expression and creativity of men and women who need to "let off steam" while engaged in dull and automatic activities, and who must find some kind of outlet for their frustrations and neurotic compulsions. This house nevertheless is also the field of experiences which refer to the truly creative activities of great artists and the glamorous performances of musicians, actors, and movie stars.

Every house of the birth chart refers to some great test, because every class of basic experience compels the developing individual to face himself in a new way and to deal with a particular category problems.* The sign on the cusp of a house and the character of the planets which may be found in this house should give the student of astrology clues as to the best way in which he or she can solve these problems. No planet can be considered to give indications which are in themselves negative, for they all refer to a type of energy which is essentially valuable, even if man at his present stage of evolution tends in many instances to use it imperfectly or so as to produce cathartic and perhaps disintegrative effects.

*These twelve basic tests of existence arc described in Part Two of my book An Astrological Triptych, entitled "The Way Through."

We may define the test involved in first house experiences as that of isolation, that is, emergence from the mass as a unique individual. In the second house the test is of ownership. In the third house The test is of thought, that is, how to take a conscious and intelligent approach to the challenges of one's environment. In the fourth house the test is of stability. In the fifth house the great test involves the ability to act out one's innermost nature in terms of purity of motive and using in a "pure" manner the means available for the release of one's energies.

The words pure and purity have been sadly abused. To be pure is to be exclusively what one is as a unique individual in terms of one's own destiny. Pure water is water that contains no sediment or foreign chemical substance; it is purely H20. A pure action is one which exteriorizes the essential character or nature of the actor. To be pure is to perfectly and exclusively perform one's dharma — the Bhagavad-Gita adds "with no personal concern for the fruits of the action," for such a concern indicates ego-involvement in what the act will do to the actor.

Every action implies a release and a conscious or unconscious use of power. Energy flows out of the actor. A pure act is one which uses energy according to the intrinsic character and rhythm of that energy. For instance, at the strictly biological level, the nature and function of sexual energy is essentially the procreation of children which will perpetuate the human race. The result of procreation — the child and his needs — eventually demands a vast expenditure of energy and work on the part of his parents. The male and female organisms in copulation act as carriers of the sperm and the ovum — this is their natural sexual function. They act then as servants of life, and life responds to their dedication, unconscious though it may be, by exalting in them their vital rhythms, which is the meaning of the orgasm. The moment of exaltation "feels" wonderful, and human beings therefore want to repeat it. But to repeat it under conditions which preclude the procreative purpose is, at the biological level, cheating life; therefore religious institutions, like the Roman Catholic Church, which consider biological factors essential foundations for basic rites and, in general, human values — whether or not they would admit this fact — oppose contraceptive practices.

Man, however, does not function only at the biological level where he serves the human species; neither does he operate only at the social-cultural level at which he is a carrier of values and traditions. Man can become truly individualized, at which time his immediate goal becomes fulfillment as a whole person. Sex at this level acquires an entirely different meaning, for it refers mainly to the possibility for two persons to find in each other what they need — that is, what they individually lack — for personal fulfillment and creative happiness. The interpenetration of their biopsychic energies can powerfully help to bring about in each partner a more wholesome approach to existence and to social contacts or problems. This then is the psychological and, secondarily, social value of sex. Such a value is denied if the sexual act comes to mean no more than self-gratification, a mere release of glandular energies, or the fulfillment of some egocentric personal or social purpose. The act then loses its purity. It becomes adulterated.

For the person to whom occult energies or subtle biopsychic forces are real and significant factors in his potential development, purity in relation to sexual acts may have a still different meaning. He may see in the sexual act a process of attunement, and perhaps identification with the great polarities of cosmic existence — the Yin and Yang of Chinese philosophy, the Shiva and Shakti of the Hindu Tantras. If this occult or mystical approach is earnestly followed, then any personal or ego-conditioned feeling and thought during the ritualistic act would constitute an impurity. In this approach, the personal characteristics of the partners lose all significance: what counts is the ability of the partners to avoid bringing personal cravings or unconscious compulsions into the act. It is very rare for a western man or woman to be able to conceive of and experience sex in this manner, but it may be that some young persons today awkwardly and intuitively are trying to reach such a level of sexual experience.

Everything I have said in the above paragraphs about the sexual experience can be applied equally well to the performance of any action. The Medieval Christian ideal of doing every act, even the most routine, as if in the presence of God, is another way of staring the same thing. Any action can be performed out of mere biological or social necessity, or it can be performed in terms of the demands, the passions, the frustrations, or the moods of the personal ego. At a higher level, the performance can be totally dedicated to God, or — what is essentially the same thing — it can be so open and attuned to the great rhythms of the universe that the performer truly experiences himself as an agent of cosmic powers, a single thread in the sublime tapestry of the universe.

The Astrological Houses