The Ninth House

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THE NINTH HOUSE

Dane Rudhyar

Experiences related to the ninth house are essentially those encountered by an individual in the course of his search for the meaning of things. This House, being a "cadent" House, also refers specifically to matters which enable partnerships and all kinds of group activity to operate most successfully and to expand within the framework of a particular society and culture. This requires a knowledge of the over-all conditions, procedures, and laws which structure a particular society's way of life and the possibilities this way of life presents for success and expansion. The ninth house is traditionally the house of philosophy and religion, but it also deals with all legal matters. It refers in general to whatever expands a person's field of activity or the scope of his mind — long journeys, close contacts with other cultures and with foreigners in general, and those "great dreams" which reveal to the open consciousness facing life-changes the meaning of past, present, and expectable events as well as the trends of individual and collective destiny. Experiences with seers, prophets, fortunetellers, future-oriented statisticians, extrapolators, etc., also come within this ninth house field.

The ninth house opposes and complements the third house. While the third house refers to the need of an individual to come to terms with, and thus to know and understand, his close and personal environment, the ninth house is an area in which he seeks to discover the significance of larger fields of social existence which he may not experience directly but which his mind may explore through the use of analogy, generalization, and abstraction. These two houses symbolize the two polarities of the human mind, the concrete and the abstract. Any fully developed mind operates in terms of a combination of both types of thinking, but nearly everyone will tend to favor one over the other. In our analytical and empirical age, the man with a scientific bent will naturally focus his attention on third house experiences; Louis Pasteur typifies this trend, as his birth chart reveals a complex aggregation of planets in the third house.

On the other hand, the metaphysician or the philosopher whose function is to synthesize data and to discover general principles could be expected to have a full natal ninth house. Such an expectation, however, is not too often justified, because planets in a house do not necessarily indicate that the individual will have outstanding experiences or produce great things in terms of what the house represents. A planet in a house indicates that the function signified by this planet should be used to its best advantage in dealing with the experiences to which the house refers; it should be used because problems will arise in that field of experience which can best be solved in this way. Where, however, there is no great problem in that field because the person is spontaneously able to handle what he finds there, the house may well be empty. One must look for another kind of indication in the zodiacal sign at the cusp of the house or in its ruler. The presence of the Moon's nodes may be significant and, as always, the whole chart has to be considered, for sometimes what seems to be an outstanding feature in a person is actually the secondary result of some more basic trait or faculty. An apparently great thinker may actually be a medium or channel through whom the collective mind, or even the mind of a partner whose influence may or may not be consciously acknowledged, operates.

In Albert Einstein's birth chart, Jupiter at Aquarius 27° is in the ninth house in opposition to Uranus in the third, and Pluto squares Jupiter. This can be considered remarkably symbolic as well as prophetic. Einstein's famous formula made possible the atomic bomb, a bomb which uses uranium and plutonium, the latter element unknown when Einstein was born and even when he established his Theory of Relativity. But while Jupiter in the ninth house obviously expanded his capacity for abstract thinking, and Uranus in the third house made his analytical intellect sharp and impatient with old concepts, these planets refer just as much to the type of problems he had to face and how he solved them. These problems, of course, had a great deal to do with social factors — Jupiter — and with his natal environment, which he had to leave. Jupiter being the ruler of a very full Piscean tenth house dynamized by the Sun's presence would normally suggest that he would gain maximum professional and public influence in a foreign country.

In matters concerning the mind of an individual, one should always differentiate between "knowledge" and "understanding." The act of knowing belongs to the third house because it implies merely the direct contact of a person with something in his environment. Knowledge can be derived directly from sensations or, in a psychological and mystical sense, from an equally direct and as incontrovertible inner perception or realization. Understanding is a far more complex process because it involves the synthesis of many factors and known data. It is the result of a holistic process which actually implies as a background the experience of a people and their culture. One does not, strictly speaking, "know" the meaning of anything; the experience of meaning comes from understanding.

A synonym for understanding is comprehension. To comprehend something is to apprehend a togetherness of factors on which that thing depends for its existence and its behavior. In the deepest sense, to understand something or someone is to take into consideration the relationship of this thing or this person to the whole universe. You may "know" that a person committed a crime, but you can "understand" this action only by seeing it in its personal, social, and even cosmic — thus astrological — frame of reference. Newton "knew" that ripe apples fell down from the apple tree, but he"understood" this only when he could relate it to a universal law, gravitation. The most difficult form of understanding, of course, is one which refers to an action or a person in which the knower is personally involved.

The complex nature of the process of understanding and of the search for meaning leads in most cases to the use of symbols. The ninth house is the house of symbols. All words are symbols. Most gestures are symbols being consciously or unconsciously enacted. The mating dances of birds are symbols, and so are the human acts and body attitudes in courtship. All arts are symbolic, even if the artist refuses to admit this in his preoccupation with what he calls "objectivity" or random elements. This preoccupation in some modern artists and musicians is in itself a symbolic expression of a particular phase in a culture, and the artistic results symbolize such a phase. The clairvoyant who is asked to solve a client's problem usually visualizes a symbolic object or scene, or hears within his or her brain words which are also symbols.

Symbols have to be interpreted. Each individual interprets them in terms of what he is, what he knows, or what he feels — and/or has personally felt in the past — against the background of his culture and family tradition. A birth chart is a symbol as well. It symbolizes the complex relationship existing between a newborn organism and the universe. Likewise all religious concepts and mystical visions are symbolic of such a man-to-universe relationship. To speak of a "God experience" — a typical ninth house experience — is an awkward way of symbolizing in a word, God, the "feel" of the so-called "unitive" experience in which the whole universe is reduced to a unity upon which the person projects the answer to all his conceivable needs.

This does not mean that God does not exist! The very fact that we know we are surrounded by a multiplicity of objects, motions, energies makes it necessary for us, or at least for some human beings, to conceive or to feel the existence of an opposite factor, unity. The metaphysician may understand this fact, and its inevitable consequences, in terms of mental concepts, and he may formulate a cosmology or theology. The devotee and the mystic, in probably two different ways, feel it, and experience it as a consciousness-transforming intuition so realistic that it takes shape as some kind of Presence. But the word, unity, and the embodied Presence are nevertheless symbols. The whole universe, as we perceive it, is a symbol of our human and individual stage of evolution. This is why the Hindu philosopher called it maya, a word usually but not adequately translated as "illusion." Symbols are not illusions! They are projections of what we are, generically, collectively, and individually. But we need them in order to operate as human beings. They are the expressions of the quality of human togetherness at any particular time and place.

What we call "the law" is also such a symbolic expression. The laws of a society reveal the basic character of the togetherness of its members — and often the ideal rather than the actual quality of a particular way of life. Social reality often gives the lie to the ideals embodied in laws. Yet from the point of view of a business operation, or even of a conjugal relationship, these laws must be "known" — the ninth house is a third house starting from the Descendant, principle of relationship—even if they are to be circumvented. The ninth house represents the environment of the relationship, just as the third house represents the environment of the self. Knowledge of conditions in any environment enables one to function as successfully as possible.

In this sense knowledge is power, or rather knowledge is the way to achieve power. And while power at the personal level is represented by the fourth house, at the social level it is a tenth house matter.

The danger one faces in terms of ninth house experiences is over-expansion caused by ambition and greed for power or the symbol of social power, money. Ambition is the negative aspect of understanding, for it implies a compulsive egocentric approach to human relationships. The ambitious egocentric person uses relationships to increase his power and/or prestige; he makes a relationship his servant, and those to whom he relates slaves to his purpose. Thus the relationship is perverted and eventually becomes at least potentially destructive of the harmonious and wholesome life of the greater whole — the society or the planet itself.

I stated above that selfhood and relatedness are the two principles basic to all existence; harmonious and sound living demand their interplay. One waxes in strength at certain times while the other wanes, and vice versa. But each should retain its true nature. When one of them succeeds in adulterating the character or the essential purpose of the other, human life takes on a discordant, tense and inherently destructive quality. The disharmonic process begins in most cases in terms of third house experiences, that is, because of destructive environmental pressures or shocks to the sensibility, the nervous system, or the personal mind. It may be focused further in the fourth and fifth houses, as the personality of the growing individual becomes frozen in fear, distrust, or resentment and he experiences repeated frustration in his efforts toward self-expression. Then, he learns through sixth house experiences that the basic choice left to him is between being a master or being a slave. As a result, he can no longer experience love, sharing, trust; so he begins to act within groups and with his partners in terms of greed; he seeks to hoard the power generated by society and by group relationship. This may mean amassing a large amount of capital as a means to reach the top level in society, and it implies twisting the laws — natural as well as political — so they become tools for his rise.

In such cases there is no question of harmonic understanding, only of the kind of knowledge which serves ego ambition. It is knowledge that can be used against the harmonious fulfillment of relationship, against love. It is the knowledge of a perverted mind, or it may even be the knowledge gained by researchers who seek knowledge merely for its own sake and in the process add to their personal fame. It is knowledge in which wisdom is absent, knowledge which does not consider the end results of what is known and formulated for general and nondiscriminating social-political use. Indeed, it is the kind of knowledge that our society holds in high esteem because ours is a society imbued with the competitive and ambitious spirit, worshipping success and power with no concern for the means used or for what these means have done to the quality of the relationships which made possible the rise to power of the ego-centered individual.

In such a society the mind all too readily becomes an instrument which tells how to use the energy released by group relationship and cooperation — often compulsive cooperation — to achieve success. This is the mind of the politician, and of the black magician as well, for magic was the original way in which human energies could be used for a group purpose. The purpose may be one of healing or of providing the group with whatever is vital to its existence or spiritual growth. In such a case one speaks of "white magic." When, however, the motivation for the use of group power comes from group ambition or from the greed of the leader, when it is based on hate, or rooted in fear, then it is "black magic."

The eighth house field of experience witnesses the release of collective group power, whether physical or psychic — occult. In the ninth house one learns the laws and the techniques which make such a release truly effective. In the tenth house the power itself is experienced in a focused state; it has become a social force, for better or for worse.

The Astrological Houses