Marriage, contracts, one-to-one alliances, rivals and adversaries who can be named.
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 7th zodiac sign for the 7th house. The historical medical or social judgements in Lilly are evidence of his practice, not present-day advice.
Lilly uses this house for marriage and love questions, but equally for a defendant in a lawsuit, an opposing party in war, a physician in a medical question and a suspected thief. The common feature is an identifiable other person across from the querent. It is not simply a house of harmonious relationships. The question decides whether the person opposite is a spouse, collaborator, rival or professional being consulted.
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’ (7th house)
The cusp is the Descendant, the western horizon and opposite the Ascendant by 180 degrees. This is an angle, so the other party has a defined place in the figure. Lilly calls it the Angle of the West. Read planets here as testimony about that other side, while keeping the actual sign and its ruler in view; Libra is Lilly's numbered cosignificator, not the inevitable sign on every Descendant.
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 seventh house
THE Sun in the seventh house in a male horoscope denotes a proud but honourable partner, and progress in life through marriage.
Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity,
p. 187 — Modern Astrology Office, London, this printing 1928
· The 1928 printing, scanned
Moon in the seventh house
Moon in the seventh house in a female horoscope denotes some romance in married life and a partner whose affections fluctuate. Unless the Moon is well aspected this is not a very favourable position. It should not be taken as the sole significator in a male horoscope, but it must be considered as an important factor in producing marriage.
Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity,
p. 188 — Modern Astrology Office, London, this printing 1928
· The 1928 printing, scanned
Mars in the seventh house
Mars in the seventh house when afflicted denotes quarrels and unpleasant conditions in the marriage state.
Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity,
p. 187 — Modern Astrology Office, London, this printing 1928
· The 1928 printing, scanned
Saturn in the seventh house
Saturn in the seventh house is bad for trade; and in evil aspect to the Moon it shows financial failure.
SATURN in the seventh house shows a faithful partner or marriage to a person older than the native. Saturn is exalted in Libra, and as this sign is equivalent to the seventh house Saturn in the seventh denotes faithfulness and sincerity on the part of the marriage partner. It does not give affection of the demonstrative and emotional order, but it makes love a duty and gives stability to the affections, which become permanent and enduring.
Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity,
p. 183 — Modern Astrology Office, London, this printing 1928
· The 1928 printing, scanned
Uranus in the seventh house
Uranus in the seventh house denotes romantic attachments, hasty and impulsive engagements. It also denotes the possibility of marriage to a genius, or to an original character. This influence may be very good or very evil according to the horoscope.
Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity,
p. 183 — Modern Astrology Office, London, this printing 1928
· The 1928 printing, scanned
Uranus in the seventh house
Uranus in the seventh house shows public rivals; Saturn shows deceitful opponents who will use fraudulent means to overcome the native; Mars denotes such as may use violence and do him bodily harm;
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.