Mundane Houses

Definition

Mundane houses are what you get when the usual twelve-house framework is applied to a national or mundane chart, and each house is re-read for a collective topic rather than the matching part of one person’s life. The mundane meanings follow the birth-chart meanings step for step: the birth chart’s first house of the body becomes the mundane first house of the people; its tenth house of vocation becomes the mundane tenth of the government. This re-reading is anchored in the medieval Arabic-Latin tradition of Masha’allah, Abu Ma’shar, and Bonatti, and consolidated in modern Western practice.

In Tradition

Across the medieval Arabic-Latin mundane tradition and its modern Western reception, the mundane houses work as a translation table, mapping the birth-chart house meanings onto collective topics. The translation keeps the structure of the birth-chart scheme intact: the angular houses (first, fourth, seventh, tenth) carry the main collective meanings — the people, the land, foreign relations, the government — while the cadent houses (third, sixth, ninth, twelfth) carry the supporting ones — media, public health, foreign affairs, hidden activity.

In Practice

A mundane astrologer reads from the mundane-house table for any mundane chart — a national chart, an ingress chart, an eclipse chart, a conjunction chart: the first house is the nation, its people, its general condition; the second is the economy, resources, treasury, and revenue; the third is communications, transport, media, and neighbouring countries; the fourth is land, agriculture, the opposition, and the weather; the fifth is entertainment, sport, speculation, and children; the sixth is workers, public health, the armed services, and civil servants; the seventh is foreign relations, treaties, wars, and declared enemies; the eighth is national debt, taxation, mortality, and insurance; the ninth is religion, the judiciary, higher education, and foreign lands; the tenth is the government, the head of state, and the nation’s reputation; the eleventh is the legislature, allies, and national hopes; and the twelfth is prisons, hospitals, secret enemies, and behind-the-scenes activity. Planets in these houses, and aspects to the planets that rule them, are read for the group rather than for a person.

Historical Origin

Mundane house interpretation is drawn together in Holden’s History of Horoscopic Astrology (Lean P04+P06), which documents both the medieval Arabic-Latin systematisation — Masha’allah, Abu Ma’shar, Bonatti — and the modern Western reception of Sepharial and of Baigent, Campion, and Harvey. Holden’s Lean P06-mun-001 gives a worked mundane chart showing the collective topic assigned to each house. The framework carried through the Renaissance and was consolidated in the late-twentieth-century mundane-astrology revival.

Etymology

Origin: Latin. Meaning: From mundus (world) + domus (house) — houses applied to worldly affairs.

Further Reading

• Guido Bonatti, Liber Astronomiae
• James H. Holden, A History of Horoscopic Astrology