Looking at church in the chart, pt. 1
the importance of the "falling away" houses
I talked about Jupiter in Gemini last week and here is a playlist for you. To be clear: this is based on vibe and nothing else. Enjoy.
I need to do more falling away.
I did so much being at mass growing up. If I’m going to throw out an estimate, it would have been something like 680 hours between the age of five and when I left for college. That’s about a month of my life spent in church, a month of full 24 hour days. Give or take.
For the most part, that month of church was spent at Notre Dame Catholic Church in Kerrville, Texas. This is the same church, though a different building, where my parents were married. It’s where my memaw’s funeral was and where I got confirmed despite missing the bulk of the required events due to my memaw’s decline in health and funeral. (And my waning comfort with Catholicism, though I didn’t acknowledge that at the time—I just got confirmed). It’s a pretty building, startlingly appropriate for the landscape. Limestone and honey colored wood and smooth concrete. Until recently there hung a Celtic cross over the altar and I can only really describe my memory of it as hopeful. At some point after I left it was decided that a cross without the figure of Jesus wasn’t appropriate, so they affixed a sacred sculpture to it depicting the dying son of God. Shockingly, this is a bit of a downer, aesthetically.
Depending on my age and my feelings about religion and my feelings about whatever I cared the most about at the time, those hours spent in church tended to work as some kind of liminal meditative time, drifting in and out of active thought. I remember spending a lot of time trying to read the Spanish half of the missal and spending a lot of time looking at all the different men and teen boys in my church, deciding who was hot and who was just hot for a church in a small town.
I also did a lot of deep reflection in those pews. My body could follow along with the liturgy without needing my brain to contribute anything. Kneeling, standing, holding hands, shaking hands, singing, humming, repeating, praying. There was plenty of time for me to listen without thinking, something that remains challenging for me. During one mass at a different chapel, a chapel at the Catholic retreat center and camp that my mother ran for over a decade, I was in that floating state. I remember this clearly because it is one of the only times that I think I might’ve felt a… contact or message or whisper from the divine. Call it what you want, but standing in that chapel, repeating the Hail Mary, and staring at the light streaming through the stained glass, I felt a well of clarity that I needed to come out, that nothing was going to change and it was in fact a good thing to share. It was probably still a handful of years before I would follow through with that, but the message was clear and it was intimately tied to the flow of mass, to the consistency of that ritual.
Astrologically, we see these kinds of experiences primarily in the Third and Ninth House axis. The Ninth House reflects the higher beliefs, religion, and the sanctified places of worship while the Third House offers the ritual and the action of belief. Across this axis there are questions about purpose and direction in life, though in a softer sense than perhaps we’d see in the Tenth House or the First. Why is that? Mostly because they’re “cadent” houses, falling away from the angles of the chart. In addition to the Third and Ninth, we also see the Twelfth and Sixth Houses classified this way. Each of these houses falls away from a “central” angular house.
Another way to think about this “falling away” that the cadent houses do is to consider the rotation of the chart as time passes. It can be hard to explain and often takes a little while of studying astrology to understand how primary and secondary motion occur in the chart, but I think it’s worth trying to simplify. The implications are interesting whether you learn to read a chart completely or not.
In the chart above you see that the horizon line is marked on the left by “AS” -- this is the point that was on the horizon when I saved this chart. That means that Leo was the sign on the horizon. This is our First House, the next sign is our Second House, and so on. We can imagine this is for a newborn and that the chart was set when they breathed their first breath. The First, Fourth, Seventh, and Tenth houses are the “angular houses” -- reflecting the self, the family, partners, and career.
Now, imagine going back in time about two hours. The child represented here was in the process of being born. The birthing parent was in labor or otherwise moving this child from inside themselves out to the world. In these moments, the signs that are marked above with Twelve, Three, Six, and Nine were all situated in the places that end up being the angular houses. I think in some ways of these houses being “almost” houses. They reflect the aftermath, the “what if” in the chart. By the time of birth, those signs have moved away (fallen away) from those angular places of power. This is what makes them cadent.
The cadent houses each carry their own specific and long list of significations, but they share a tendency toward the vulnerable and the complex.
Third: you have the local, the immediate, the message, the written word, the mentor, the siblings, the cousins, the perspective makers/reflectors.
Sixth: you have the work, the labor of living, the required activity, the mundane facts of life.
Ninth: you have the whole world, the places you have to travel far and wide to arrive at, the philosophies that might not live out in your day to day experience but that remain central nonetheless.
Twelfth: you have the melancholy, the lost and the losing, the fears and suffering of life, the ghosts and the killers. The retreat and the hermitage.
I spend time breaking this down because I see my writing here and my interests veering more and more into the cadent houses. Obviously I’ve spent a lot of space writing about religion specifically lately and I expect that will continue. But I also see some interesting and challenging connections between the activities of the other cadent houses and topics that I want to write about. I see questions of labor, of domesticity, and of craft working their way into this space. As you’ll see in our first go at a monthly horoscope, I hope to tend toward analyzing and asking questions with these cadent topics in mind. With so much necessary and urgent action in the world, I feel like these cadent parts of life need more attention and engagement than ever. I want to understand what “church” means to other people and understand how your cadent needs are being met.
Of course, this is motivated to no small extent by personal loss. At some point after I left Kerrville, the church community veered farther and farther into the political right. I am sure there are still plenty of lovely well-intentioned people there, but from what I heard at some point there was an American flag flown on the altar? Can’t confirm, but I can see how that would happen as the place I grew up in has evolved into something whiter, Trumpier, and mean. A microcosm of the shifts that have taken place in Texas since 2008(-ish?) and a big part of why I don’t return often. I think, otherwise, I might. Because as much as Catholicism and Texas could probably never be my home again that doesn’t mean there is nothing worth revisiting.
To that point, another offering I see in the cadent houses and what they are meant (I think) to give is space for the gray. Extremism doesn’t fit nicely in these houses and neither do tidy answers. This is a good thing for us, I think. As we approach another election between two awful candidates (gag) and continue to see war crime after war crime perpetrated against the Palestinian people by Israel and America it’s tempting to give myself permission to make my thinking harsh and concise. Ultimately I think this is a symptom of the problem rather than a viable solution.
I say this as a goal rather than a self-assessment: my hope is to be focused in my actions and broad in my understanding. Call it a season of intentional falling away.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
P.S. Send me your Enneagram and astrology and random questions why not?