Learn · The twelve houses
The fourth house
The fourth house is home, family and roots: the place you come back to, the family you came from and the private self few people see. It sits at the very bottom of your chart.
You could walk the front hall of the house you grew up in with your eyes shut: the sound of the door, the smell of the coats, which stair complained. The fourth house is that hall. It is where you were first kept safe, and where you go, even now, to feel settled.
The Imum Coeli, or IC, marks the cusp: the bottom of the sky. It is the degree of the zodiac directly under your feet at the moment you were born, on the opposite side of the wheel from the Midheaven. It is the deepest point in the chart, and the one no one else sees.
In your chart
Whatever sign holds the fourth-house cusp shows what home felt like and what you build to feel at home: Taurus builds solidly, Cancer makes a warm nest, Gemini keeps the door open and the radio on. Planets here belong to your private life, not your public one. The Moon, ruler of the natural sign, Cancer, is at ease in this house. The fourth is an angular house, on one of the chart’s two axes, so what stands in it matters even though few people ever see it.
From a real analysis
In her chart: Saturn in Capricorn, in the 4th house · 24°01′ Capricorn, retrograde
Capricorn is drawn as the sea-goat, half mountain climber and half swimmer, and your home works the same way: it needs firm ground before you let yourself float. A place becomes yours slowly. You choose one good chair over five cheap ones, keep furniture for years, and feel uneasy in a space that changes every month.
Themes
The fourth house is the family you came from, the house you live in, the land under it and the history behind both. It holds the habits that were handed down without being discussed: the way your family argues, what it eats on a bad day, what it never mentions. Where you feel you belong is decided here, and it does not always match where you live.
The past is the difficulty. What was never said still shapes a home years after the people who left it have gone.
The bottom of the sky
Midnight sits at the IC. A Sun in the fourth house arrived in the hours before it, when the light was as far from the sky above you as it gets and the world had gone quiet.
The foundation and the roof
The fourth house is the foundation and the tenth the roof. Whatever you do in public stands on what happened in private, and most charts show which of the two has been getting more of your time.
How the analysis treats it
The fourth house needs the birth time, as the first house does, and it is set aside where the time is not known. Where it is read, its cusp, its ruler and its planets speak for your private life and where you come from.
Every house needs an exact birth time: without one the chart leaves the houses out rather than guess. The houses are drawn in Placidus unless you choose Whole Sign, Koch or Equal, and the analysis says which.
Sources: every position and date here comes from NASA JPL’s DE440 ephemeris and is checked against NASA’s JPL Horizons. How it is checked.
Your fourth house
That is the fourth house in general. Your chart shows the sign it starts in and the planets that stand in it, and that is what makes it yours. Free, and it takes a minute.