Second House
The second house follows the first and precedes the third. It is succedent, one of the four houses that follow directly after an angle, in the classification set out at House Division. In the whole-sign aspect scheme it is in aspect to the fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth houses, and in aversion, sharing no aspect, with the first, third, seventh and ninth: its own neighbours and the houses a fifth around from each.
A name Ptolemy records without using
The conventional Hellenistic name for this place is the Gate of Hades, Hāidou pylē, one of a set of twelve names that circulated among practitioners of the period and that the translator of Ptolemy’s text records in a note rather than finding in Ptolemy’s own running prose 1 bk. III ch. 10. Ptolemy’s engagement with the numbered scheme of places is uneven across the whole of it, heaviest for the horoscope itself and light or absent for most of the rest, and the second is one of the places his surviving text does not name directly 1 bk. III ch. 10.
What the earliest and latest named sources hold
The general Hellenistic association of this place with livelihood and possessions is the standard description in the modern scholarly literature on the period 2; the two named sources below agree with that description while differing in what else they attach to it.
Tradition
Held byDorotheus of Sidon, Carmen Astrologicum: The ʿUmar al-Tabarī Translation bk. I, c. 75 CE
Dorotheus ranks the twelve places by strength and puts the second among those “not recognized as good,” alongside the third and the eighth, though still above the sixth and twelfth, which he calls the worst of all 3 bk. I.
Tradition
Held byWilliam Lilly, Christian Astrology bk. I, London, London, 1647
Lilly assigns the second house judgment of the querent’s estate or fortune, wealth or poverty, all movable goods, money lent out, profit or gain, loss or damage; in a lawsuit it signifies a person’s friends or assistants, in a private duel the querent’s second, and in the figure cast for an eclipse or a great conjunction it signifies the wealth or poverty of the common people. He calls it a feminine house 4 bk. I.
Wealth and livelihood are what these two witnesses agree on, across more than a millennium and a half and between an Arabic-transmitted first-century Greek text and an English print manual, even as the rest of what each assigns here differs. That is a statement about the agreement of two named sources.
Gap in the evidence
Neither Dorotheus’s ranking passage nor Ptolemy’s own text gives a stated reason why livelihood in particular belongs to the second place rather than to some other position relative to the ascendant. Both report the assignment as settled doctrine in their own time, and no source in this site’s pool supplies the reasoning behind it.
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. 10. 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.