What House Rules Sex in Western Astrology?

Episode 157 is a solo show where I discuss the tricky question of which of the twelve houses rules sex in western astrology.

This is a problematic question because it turns out that over the past 2000 years western astrologers have assigned sex to three different houses during different eras.

In the Greco-Roman astrological tradition sex was evidently originally assigned to the 7th house, and then later it shifted to the 5th house at some point during the Medieval or Renaissance traditions, before eventually moving again to the 8th house in modern times.

The fact that sex hasn’t always been assigned to the 8th house is a relatively recent revelation due to the recovery and translation of older astrological texts over the past few decades, and it presents an interesting problem in terms of how to resolve the issue.

While astrologers sometimes assume that the shift in the assignment had to do with cultural changes, one of the things I point out in this discussion is that often the shift seems to have been motivated by conceptual changes in how significations were derived from all of the houses. As a result of that, this topic becomes a useful access point for understanding how astrologers developed meanings for all twelve houses in different eras.

Transcript

A full transcript of this episode is available: Episode 157 transcript

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