The 7th House

The 7th house is the other: partnership, marriage, close one-to-one bonds, and even open enemies. It's the mirror that shows you yourself through someone else.

The 7th house at a glance

• ThemePartnership & Others
• Natural signLibra
• Natural rulerVenus
• ElementAir
• Governshow you partner up, in love and your closest bonds
• Keywordspartnership, marriage, one-to-one, commitment

What the 7th house is about

The 7th house is whoever is standing opposite you. Partners, but also the business partner, the agent, the person you are negotiating with, and the one the old books called the open enemy: anyone whose position is fixed in relation to yours.

It is directly across the chart from the 1st, which is the whole point of it. The 1st is how you arrive; the 7th is what you meet, and the two are described by opposite signs, so the thing you look for is very often the thing you do not do yourself.

It is the house of the deliberate bond rather than the accidental one. Not who you love, exactly. Who you agree with, in the formal sense of coming to terms.

An empty 7th house is not an empty life

An empty 7th is not a forecast of solitude, and it is the absence that worries people most.

It has no bearing on whether you partner. Read the sign on the cusp, then find its ruler: a 7th ruled by a Venus in the 9th tends to meet people somewhere other than home, and would do with or without a planet standing in the house.

The sign on the cusp does the colouring

The sign on your 7th cusp is the Descendant, and it describes what you look for and what keeps arriving. It is exactly opposite your rising sign, always.

Which is why the description can feel unflattering to read: it is naming the half of the axis you left to somebody else. That is not a fault in you, it is how an axis works.

Where the 7th house actually is in the sky

The 7th house begins at the western horizon: the exact place the sky was going down as you were born. A planet on that cusp was setting at that moment.

So the Ascendant and the Descendant are one line through you, east to west, and the chart's left and right edges are the two ends of your own horizon. It is the least metaphorical thing in astrology.

The house systems disagree, and here is how much

Every quadrant system agrees here too, because the Descendant is an angle: it is simply the Ascendant plus 180 degrees, so no method can put it anywhere else.

Whole sign is again the exception, and it can move a partner-planet by a whole house. Under whole sign your 7th is the seventh sign from your rising sign, entire, whatever the horizon was doing.

A question to sit with

What do your closest relationships keep reflecting back to you about yourself?