Home, parents, land, ancestry and the conditions from which a matter grows or finally settles.
A house does not have a fixed zodiac sign or planetary ruler in this reference. Those popular correspondences collapse two different twelvefold systems and are not needed to read an actual cusp.
3 sourced claims:3traditional
Reading this house
Lilly's topics below tell you what kinds of question this place was used to answer in seventeenth-century astrology. Its position in the wheel is a different piece of information. For an actual chart, read the sign on the cusp, its ruler, any planets here and their aspects together; do not substitute the 4th zodiac sign for the 4th house. The historical medical or social judgements in Lilly are evidence of his practice, not present-day advice.
Lilly places fathers, dwellings, tenements, inheritances, gardens, fields, crops and the quality of purchased land here. He also gives it the determination or end of a matter. The house can therefore describe both the ground on which something stands and where its story comes to rest. His father attribution belongs to Lilly's method; later schools divide parental significators differently, so the page should not turn it into a universal rule.
Paraphrased from Lilly's 1647 list; the period's social and medical vocabulary is documented, not treated as exhaustive or clinically reliable.
Sources (1)
Christian Astrology — Book I, chapter VII, ‘Of the Twelve Houses of Heaven’ (4th house)
Its cusp is the lower meridian, the Imum Coeli, one of four angles. In Lilly's vocabulary this is the Angle of the Earth. A planet here is not just 'private' in a modern psychological sense: in the source it may point to property, ancestry, a parent or the outcome of the question being asked. The sign on the cusp and the condition of its ruler narrow the subject; there is no fixed Cancer cusp.
Spatial structure and interpretive distinctions derived from Lilly's angular, succedent and cadent account; these sentences are not his verbatim wording.
Opinions, not this study's and not findings. These were published around 1900 by astrologers writing for a Theosophical readership, and most English astrology since has been reading them. They are quoted rather than restated so the distance stays visible, and each one names its astrologer and its page.
Sun in the fourth house
Sun in the fourth house shows success at the end of life, realised ambitions, hopes and desires when the life is nearing the close. It denotes a good heredity with which pride of ancestry is connected. It promises gain by inheritance or some benefits coming through, ar by means of, the parentage.
Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity,
p. 166 — Modern Astrology Office, London, this printing 1928
· The 1928 printing, scanned
Moon in the fourth house
Moon in the fourth house denotes much fluctuation of circumstances and many changes of residence at the close of life. It is only a favourable position when the Moon is well aspected at birth, when it denotes probable gain by inheritance and some reputation or popularity through one or both of the parents. It is a frequent indication of adoption, or early separation from the home sphere.
Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity,
p. 166 — Modern Astrology Office, London, this printing 1928
· The 1928 printing, scanned
Venus in the fourth house
Venus in the fourth house in good aspect with the luminaries is very fortunate and makes the whole life a success, fortune favouring the termination of all transactions, tending to bring all undertakings to a successful issue.
Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity,
p. 166 — Modern Astrology Office, London, this printing 1928
· The 1928 printing, scanned
Uranus in the fourth house
Uranus in the fourth house denotes sudden and tragic or exceptional experiences at the end of life. It is not a good position for Uranus, and nothing definite can be predicted with regard to the close of life, for reversals and sudden changes are shown. To those who seek to lead the occult life denotes isolation or expansion of consciousness upon higher planes, but only where the horoscope shows occultism or mysticism can this be judged.
Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity,
p. 166 — Modern Astrology Office, London, this printing 1928
· The 1928 printing, scanned
Neptune in the fourth house
NEPTUNE in the fourth house denotes an unfavourable close to the life, living under some peculiar restraint or in some especial retirement in the latter portion, or placed in unpleasant positions at the end. It denotes very unusual and unique domestic conditions.
Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity,
p. 166 — Modern Astrology Office, London, this printing 1928
· The 1928 printing, scanned
A planet missing from this list is one Leo does not delineate in this house, or one whose passage did not survive its own scan.
Who is quoted here, and who is not
Two astrologers, both writing around 1900:
Alan Leo, whose How to Judge a Nativity is the only
one of these books arranged as a lookup table — a paragraph per planet per
house — which is why everybody copied it; and Sepharial, who
arranged the same material by the question a reader brings rather than by
placement, so only a few of his judgements stand alone well enough to quote.
William Lilly is not here, and not because he was not asked.
Christian Astrology (1647) is the most important book in English on
the subject and this study holds it as a text already — but every scan of it is
long-s blackletter, and the OCR renders the title of its own first book as
“An Introduci ion to Aftrologje”. There is
nothing in it a reader could trust a quotation from. Ripley's
Compound of Alchymy and Anderson's Constitutions get
the same answer elsewhere in this study, for the same reason.