The Third House

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THE THIRD HOUSE

Dane Rudhyar

When an astrological textbook speaks of the third house as that of "brothers and sisters, and near relatives," it actually means the earliest environment of the newborn and of the growing child's relationship to it. Everything in this environment affects the baby and it is in contact with it that he comes to discover the extent of his powers and to differentiate what he is, as a living organism endowed with a special kind of consciousness, from an outer world. This world contains objects and perhaps animals and growing things, as well as members of his close family. Indeed, astrological references to members of his family — parents, siblings, relatives — belong to a type of life which is still closely involved in tribal relationships or kinship. In a society in which old-time family patterns lose most of their importance, more fundamental values have to be considered, values which refer to whatever the environment-as-a-whole presents to the growing consciousness of the child.

The relationship of the child to his environment is basic in the formation of his character and of his responses to life. Such a relationship exists simply because no living organism is born in a void. It is born under the influence of everything that fills the space around the boundaries of its inner world, that is, around its "skin" or, we might say, around the field of forces pervading all its organs and its cellular activities. Any organism must first conquer its "living space." In many cases this conquest implies a fight, even if it is only the fight for attracting and holding the attention of the maternal provider of necessary food — and the mother's love providing a sense of security and well-being.

Brothers and sisters may be or may appear to present obstacles to getting this attention, and therefore they may come to be regarded as competitors. But other people, objects, and the, to the child, incomprehensible activity of the food-and-love provider, when away from him, compete as well to deprive him of exclusive attention. It may not even be the actual mother whose attention the child requires and instinctively demands. Actual physical kinship may be much less important than is traditionally believed, and in cases where the baby received his milk from a wet nurse who also took complete charge of him, this kinship bond did play a secondary role. Still, there may be a deeply unconscious instinct at work linking the organism of a child to his close family, though undoubtedly the importance of this instinct, if it exists, is assuredly magnified and glamorized by all traditional cultures that give to blood relationship and to all ideals rooted in a tribal kind of consciousness and social organization a hallowed significance.

This instinct finds its primary field of manifestation in the fourth house, but before it can affect the consciousness of the child, he must learn to deal with his environment, and its impact upon him exists as a challenge. It is on this challenge that the development of the nervous system is based, for the nervous system of any living organism is the concrete organic manifestation of the capacity to come to terms with the environment.

In the child this "coming to terms" is at first entirely unconscious, or at least it is instinctual and does not demand what we call in a human sense, consciousness. It operates originally as "sensations" and as spontaneous muscular responses to them. The first cry of the newborn is a muscular response to the sensation of air entering the respiratory membranes. Gradually a definite system of connections between nerve cells is stabilized which is the foundation for human intelligence. By intelligence I mean the capacity to come to terms with any environment — first, physical, then also psychic — and therefore to adjust to its ineluctable demands and eventually to transform it as far as is possible. At its lowest level, intelligence is the cunning of animals as well as of primitive men and children. Cunning is the ability to play one factor in the environment against another — for instance, when the child plays one of his parents against the other.

In a sense this constitutes a "game," and the game of life becomes increasingly more complex and subtle as the social environment increases in complexity — and also as man seeks to survive in environments that are very different from his native habitat, such as on the moon's surface. Any game implies rules, and Nature sets the rules in the normal biological game of life. Man makes his own rules, however, in sophisticated social games, and even in national or international politics. In order to get along, one has to know and to understand the rules, meaning — in the biospheric environment and the solar system — the "laws" of the universe. From the traditional Hindu point of view the universe is the lila (play or sport) of the Creator. Man therefore must discover the rules of the universal game set by God. He asks God for clues by means of invocation and prayer, or by seeking to attune his intelligence to the mind of God. God in turn kindly rewards the seeker, and humanity at large, with various kinds of "revelations."

The third house, then, refers not only to the nature of the environment and to the persons who act within it — close relatives,etc. — but to the development of intelligence and eventually of analytical intellect and empirical science. What differentiates this house from its opposite, the ninth house, is that the third house refers to experience involving direct personal contact with the close environment of the individual, while the ninth house deals with experiences which can only take place in terms of cooperation between human beings. Ninth house experiences imply language a cultural background, and what Korzybski* called the time-binding faculty in man. Such experiences postulate a transfer of knowledge from generation to generation. They are based on a complex and socially stabilized type of understanding. In the third house "understanding" is still very rudimentary; it is characteristically empirical; it pieces together personal observations, classifies them, and fits them into a practical set of rules. These are however, simply rules and not universal laws. The third house type of mind generalizes as little as possible.

It is behaviorist, pragmatic, technique-oriented. It simply wants to know the "how to" of doing things for practical reasons. It can be most inquisitive and inventive, but also subtle and cunning in developing experiments — witness the incredibly complex experiments devised by laboratory scientists, whether physicists or psychologists. Yet it is not philosophical and even less metaphysical or religious. It is the mind of the specialist, not of the generalist.

*Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950), Polish-born founder of the Institute of General Semantics.

Still, in order to control or transform his environment, a man has to formulate his findings, at least in a primitive and pragmatic-technical manner. He learns to communicate with other men, yet this communication refers essentially to practical goals, to how to survive, and eventually to how to feel happy and personally fulfilled in one's environment.

We should look at the third house as an inevitable follower of the first and second. In the first house the basic issue to be — that is, to discover what we are and who we are, and to assert our individuality. In the second house we discover and experience the kind of material substance — first, biopsychic, the social-cultural and financial substance — which we own and therefore is ours to use. In the third house we come to know how best to use it in the environment in which it has to be used; and this knowledge can only come to us, at this stage at least, by trying to act out what we are and using our possessions — meaning first of all, our bodies — up to the point where we are blocked by the resistance of surrounding objects and people.

Every child from the moment of birth instinctively tries to find out how far he can go in any direction, physical as well as psychological, before his gesture or action is stopped by something or someone. He learns that he is not born in a void. He is surrounded by obstacles and opposing forces and wills; he has to define his own "living space" and to know what is available to satisfy his needs and what is permissible within the boundaries of his activity.

The need for such a knowledge repeats itself at a higher level and the adult also must learn how far he can safely go in social and intellectual fields. Often the individual refuses to admit personal limitations or dangers in the use of what he has come to possess; and neurosis, psychosis, or social tragedy may be the result. Mankind today is facing such a kind of potential tragedy because western man refuses to accept the limitations of what he can do in and to his planetary environment. We have to learn the real extent of our power as physical and mental human beings, and the real value of what we possess — our technology and our affluence — and the only way to learn may be, alas, to find out objectively what the end results of the use we make of these possessions will be. A megalomanic self-image seeking to project itself by means of enormous powers wrenched from nature inevitably will most likely elicit a very forceful reaction from our planetary or cosmic environment.

We should learn fast if we want to avoid a catastrophe. Knowledge at the level of the ninth house tends to be theoretical and very general, but third house experiences have a character of immediacy. Survival may be at stake. The search for knowledge in the third house field of experience is, or should be, conditioned by the need to know in practical terms how everything works so that the individual may more effectively demonstrate what he essentially is. When, however, the person is driven in this search for knowledge by socially determined goals and pressures, the knowledge he acquires ceases to have real significance for himself as an individual. His intellect may become bloated, filled with meaningless data which he cannot assimilate. If he does not retrace his steps or "drop out" from the environment which substitutes a false ideal for his true individual selfhood, then some kind of tragedy may be unavoidable.

The third house is called, quite significantly, a cadent house because it implies the possibility of a fall away from what is indicated in the angular house that has come before. A cadent house can mean integration and synthesis, or it may end in disintegration and collapse, or perversion. A process of transformation can operate, and the experiences related to all four cadent houses may be — and should be — preludes to reorganization in a new realm of existence. But the process can backfire when the experiences related to the angular houses — first, fourth, seventh, tenth — have not been sound and wholesome, and/or the powers used in the succeedent houses — second, fifth, eighth, eleventh — have been abused or misused. This is particularly obvious where the sixth and twelfth houses are concerned, but it is no less so in terms of the mental processes related to the third and ninth houses. Our present society glamorizes knowledge, especially technology and all "how to" types of information. With computers it has acquired the capacity to store, correlate, and make available enormous amounts of information.

This capacity is a third house matter. It can be a blessing or a curse, depending on the strength and validity of the image man has of himself and the universe. Alas, the image that western man has made at the official level of his thinking is essentially crude and megalomanic. Unless it is fundamentally altered, a fall seems inevitable. It may not be too late to alter it, but the time is short, extremely short.

The Astrological Houses