Third House · Little Almanac

The third house follows the second and precedes the fourth. It is cadent, one of the four houses that fall away from an angle rather than building on or following directly from one, in the classification set out at House Division. In the whole-sign aspect scheme it is in aspect to the first, fifth, sixth, seventh, ninth, eleventh and twelfth houses, and in aversion, sharing no aspect, with the second, fourth, eighth and tenth.

The Moon’s own place

The Hellenistic Greek name for this place is Goddess, Theā, meaning the Moon ^{1 bk. III ch. 5}; unlike most of the twelve conventional names, this one names the planet outright rather than describing the place’s effect.

Tradition

Held byDorotheus of Sidon, Carmen Astrologicum: The ʿUmar al-Tabarī Translation bk. I, c. 75 CE

Dorotheus states directly that the third is “the place of the joy of the Moon,” ranking it, along with the second and eighth, among the places “not recognized as good,” even though it still outranks the sixth and twelfth ^{2 bk. I}.

Tradition

Held byJulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis bk. II, Roman North Africa, c. 334-337 CE

Firmicus gives the same assignment, the Moon’s joy in the third house, as part of a complete sevenfold scheme covering all seven planets, one joy apiece ^{3 bk. II}. Dorotheus’s statement, from a text surviving through an Arabic intermediary of a first-century Greek original, is the earlier of the two attestations by roughly three centuries.

The Moon’s own place in the day and night division set out at Sect is fixed to the nocturnal team, the same side as Venus and Mars, whose own joys fall in the fifth and sixth houses respectively; the three planets whose joy-houses sit below the horizon are exactly the three nocturnal planets, a pattern the sources describing the scheme do not spell out but that follows directly from the two lists once both are in hand.

Correction

Commonly saidPtolemy locates siblings in the third house, as later astrology does.

Ptolemy’s own chapter on brothers and sisters does not use a numbered third house at all. His method takes “the culminating sign, the place of the mother, that is, that which contains by day Venus and by night the moon,” and looks to “that which succeeds it,” meaning the sign following the midheaven, as “the place of the children of the mother, which should be the same as the place of the brethren” ^{1 bk. III ch. 5}. The reckoning runs from the midheaven and lands on whichever sign that reckoning produces. The third-house doctrine for siblings is attested in this site’s sources through Dorotheus and the general Hellenistic tradition ⁴, and the Tetrabiblos plays no part in it. The two methods differ at the root: one is anchored to the ascendant, the other to the midheaven.

The Moon’s own place

References