Fourth House
The fourth house follows the third and precedes the fifth. It is angular, one of the four houses built directly on an angle, in the classification set out at House Division: specifically, it is built on the Imum Coeli, the point opposite the midheaven and the lowest point of the ecliptic below the horizon at the moment observed. In the whole-sign aspect scheme it is in aspect to the first, second, sixth, seventh, eighth, tenth and twelfth houses, and in aversion, sharing no aspect, with the third, fifth, ninth and eleventh.
The lower midheaven
The Hellenistic Greek name recorded for this place is Hypogeion, “under the earth,” and the translator’s note glossing Ptolemy’s text gives it in English as the lower midheaven 1 bk. III ch. 4; the Latin equivalent still in technical use is Imum Coeli, “the bottom of the sky.”
Tradition
Held byDorotheus of Sidon, Carmen Astrologicum: The ʿUmar al-Tabarī Translation bk. I, c. 75 CE
Dorotheus calls the same place the cardine of the earth and ranks it sixth of the twelve by strength, below the ascendant, the midheaven, the eleventh, the fifth and the seventh, but above the ninth and the remaining five places 2 bk. I.
Tradition
Held byWilliam Lilly, Christian Astrology bk. I, London, London, 1647
Lilly assigns the fourth house parents, particularly the father, together with lands, tenements, houses, treasure hid in the ground, and, in a question about some pending affair, the end or outcome of the matter 3 bk. I.
The general association of this place with parents and with the conclusion of an undertaking is the description standard in the modern scholarly literature on Hellenistic practice as well 4.
Correction
Commonly saidPtolemy locates the parents in the fourth and tenth houses, as later astrology does.
Ptolemy’s own chapter on parents does not proceed by house at all. It opens by naming the planets that stand for each parent by nature, “the sun and Saturn are by nature associated with the person of the father and the moon and Venus with that of the mother,” and the rest of the chapter examines how those four planets are disposed toward one another and toward the angles 1 bk. III ch. 4. A house-based doctrine assigning the father to the fourth place and the mother to the tenth, or the reverse, is a later systematization, well attested in the broader Hellenistic and subsequent tradition 2 bk. I4, and absent from this particular chapter of Ptolemy.
Gap in the evidence
Whether Ptolemy held some unstated house-based doctrine of parents alongside the planetary-nature method his text gives, perhaps as background knowledge too basic to write down, or held only the one method described, is not something the surviving chapter settles either way.
References
- Claudius Ptolemy, trans. F. E. Robbins. Tetrabiblos. Loeb Classical Library 435. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940 (composed c. 150 CE). bk. III ch. 4. find a copy (catalogue search) recordprimary source
The standard English reference and the chapter-numbering scheme this site adopts and names. Non-Robbins reprints number the chapters differently, so every locus here is given as Robbins numbering.
- Dorotheus of Sidon, trans. Benjamin N. Dykes. Carmen Astrologicum: The ʿUmar al-Tabarī Translation: Cazimi Press, 2019 (composed c. 75 CE). bk. I. ISBN 9781934586501 recordprimary source
Second updated edition. A practitioner translation, cited alongside rather than instead of Pingree's 1976 Teubner critical edition. The Greek original is lost; the text survives through a Middle Persian intermediary into Arabic, which is itself part of why the Dorothean material needs careful reading.
- William Lilly. Christian Astrology. London, 1647 (composed 1647). bk. I. https://archive.org/details/b30338724 recordprimary source
Second edition 1659. Where a figure differs between the two printings this site says which printing it is quoting.
- Roger Beck. A Brief History of Ancient Astrology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. find a copy (catalogue search) recordscholarly
The best short technical introduction to the Hellenistic system.