Foundations
What are the houses for?
Signs describe how an energy behaves. Houses describe where it happens. The twelve houses divide your local sky into arenas — money, family, work, partnership — so a placement lands somewhere specific instead of floating.
The zodiac is a band the planets travel through. The houses are a grid laid over your own horizon at your birth moment. They rotate through the whole zodiac once a day, which is exactly why they need a birth time.
Four houses begin at the chart's corners: the 1st at the Ascendant, the 4th at the IC, the 7th at the Descendant, the 10th at the Midheaven. Planets near these points are traditionally read as the loudest in the chart.
1st self and body · 2nd resources and worth · 3rd mind, siblings, near travel · 4th home and roots · 5th play, romance, creation · 6th work and health · 7th partnership · 8th intimacy and shared resources · 9th belief and far horizons · 10th vocation · 11th community · 12th solitude and the unconscious.
Placidus, whole sign, Koch — the same chart can put the same planet in the 9th or the 10th depending on the method. Cosmic Color Co uses Placidus by default, and you can switch to Whole Sign under your chart wheel or in Settings. Disagreement between systems is normal, not an error.