Child

Lilly's fifth house holds children, and around them pleasure, banquets, taverns, plays, and messengers and ambassadors. The grouping is not random. The fifth is the house of what issues from the native and gives delight, and in a scheme where the first house is the body and the second what the body owns, the fifth is the increase that comes out of a life rather than into it.

Jupiter is the general significator, as the greater benefic and the planet of growth and abundance. Venus has a place in the reading too, because the fifth is where Venus has her joy, one of the seven houses in which a planet is held to be at home in its own affairs whatever sign occupies it.

The particular significator is the lord of the fifth, and the questions traditionally asked of it are hard and practical ones: whether it is fertile or barren by sign, whether it is free of Saturn, whether it aspects the ascendant or its lord. Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces are counted fertile signs, Gemini, Leo and Virgo barren, and the rest indifferent. That scheme runs through horary and electional practice and rests on the tradition's own reasoning about the water triplicity rather than on anything outside it.

Which is worth stating plainly rather than leaving implied. These are the tradition's rules, recorded as the tradition holds them. The atlas describes what astrologers have said about children and charts. It does not present a chart as a way of forecasting a birth.

Ptolemy's chapter on children, in the fourth book, starts from the midheaven and the places that follow it rather than from a fifth house. He takes that region of the chart as the one concerned with offspring and examines the planets in it and their aspects, to establish whether there will be children, how many, and whether they will be reared.

The last of those is a category modern readers pass over too quickly. Ancient natal astrology treats the survival of a child through infancy as a question distinct from its birth, because in the world the technique was built for it was a distinct question. There is a separate chapter in the third book on children who are not reared. Reading these passages as though they were about family planning misses what they were for.

Valens and the wider Hellenistic corpus add a further layer through the lots, calculated points derived from the distance between two planets and projected from the ascendant. A lot of children belongs to that family of points, and where the house catalogue gives one fixed compartment, the lot method gives a movable marker that can fall anywhere in the chart.

The fifth house of children is therefore a medieval simplification of something the earlier tradition handled with a region of the chart, a lot, and a survival question kept separate from the birth. The simplification is what almost every modern textbook teaches, and it is worth knowing that it is one.

Sources TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy with Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and FortuneChris Brennan