Thoughts on Home, Family and the Fourth House
At the holidays there is a focus on family which often necessitates an examination of what family means to us as individuals. Many of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s remember the paintings which turned Norman Rockwell into an adjective as well as a painter “the Norman Rockwell family, the Norman Rockwell holiday.” For those of us in a family experience which was less than idyllic, which I would guess is most of us, these images evoked a fantasy of comfort and security and safety in the bosom of a group of people who loved us unconditionally.
This is the ideal that lives in the fourth house in the astrological chart. In the fourth house we look for a sense of home and family that nourishes and nurtures us and which offers a sanctum from the outer world. In the fourth house we discover the essence of who we are by becoming deeply integrated with our inner selves and the core essence of who we are.
In the fourth house we also discover the ancestral roots that have fed our genetic history, and our psychological history from those roots also play a large part in forming the inner selves that are deeply protected within us. From the core Self within we build a home and network of family relationships, and these are also found in the fourth house. Sometimes we are rejected by our family of origin, or we detach from them and create our own family; however, it is the actual family lineage that lives in the fourth house rather than an adoptive family.
The sign on the cusp of the fourth house (which we also call the “nadir”) and planets in the fourth house describe our relationship to this family lineage, our […]
