How do you figure out your houses without a computer?

[The Suckling]

I"ve been using a very handy refference book that can determine someone's Rising sign and the position of all their planets but it doesn't seem to help with their houses.

Actually, I don't fully understand the "houses" thing. I thought whatever sign was in your ascendant would automatically determine the other houses, but then I heard something about having planets in your houses and not constellations.

I'm very confused. Could someone help me?

[Doctor Oakroot]

For a given latitude on the earth and time of year, the ascendant completely determines the other house cusps... but the relationship has to do with drawing a circle through a sphere and then cutting it with another circle - the results are not intuitively obvious...

So without a computer, you use a table of houses. Any bookstore that sells an ephemeris should be able to order a table of houses for you (the table is book-sized so it's actually a book).... but my experience when I was trying to find one was that the store personel where pretty clueless and it was really hard to find.

A few basic things if you want to estimate the houses...

1. The 7th house cusp is always in exact opposition to the ascendant.

2. The nadir (4th house cusp) is always in exact opposition to the midheaven.

3. The ascendant and midheaven are not square to each other (except at the equinoxes) so you need to figure those out independently.

4. Once you've got those two, you can draw two lines - ascendant to 6th house and midheaven to nadir - to divide the circle into quarters. Evenly dividing those quarters into thirds will give houses that are close enough for most work.

--

Planets in houses vs. planets in signs...

The house is a position in the sky as seen at the moment of the event. The sign (constellation) is a position in the sky with reference to the background stars (more-or-less... I'm ignoring a big "but" here for the moment).

Because of this, the signs rotate around the earth (of course actually the earth rotates - but as we see it...) every day.

So you have planets in signs in houses.

Each planet represents a part of your personality - think of it as a function in your existence.

The sign tells you what kind of energy manifests in that function (mode and element).

The house tells where in your life that planet/sign combination tends to crop up...

Whoops, my wife just paged me, lol, I'll add more later :D

[5targazer]

Hello there, first of all if you are intrested in learning astrology I noticed you are located here in San Diego anyhow....
I took a great 12 week course to learn how to interpret natal charts guarantee you will get it.
without a proper computer program you will not be able to distinguish the different houses because some times they are intercepted by other planets meaning sometimes the 1st house will have 2 planets ruling it, each house is divided into 30 degrees yet sometimes thats different depending where you were born and what not.
If you are intrested in the school visit thecadentcross.com run by Keith hurry because the classes start March 4th

If not interested you can post the persons birthday, time and place of birth and I have the computer program and would be happy to interpret or e-mail you a proper chart with the house already divided.

But if you are serious you might like the class.