Succedent House

The fuller picture

Succedent means following, and that's the whole of it: each of these four houses comes immediately after an angle. The second follows the first, the fifth follows the fourth, the eighth follows the seventh, the eleventh follows the tenth. They're the middle band of house strength, worth three points against five for an angular house and one for a cadent one, and a planet in one of them can get things done without the force an angle would give it.

The following relationship isn't just an ordering — it's a clue to what each of them means, and it's the most useful thing on this page. A succedent house tends to hold what the angle before it produces. The second holds the resources of the person the first house describes. The eighth holds the other party's money, which is exactly the second house counted from the seventh. And the eleventh is the second house from the tenth, which is why the money a business yields is read from the eleventh in a career question while the querent's own money stays in the second — a count stated as a rule and then used on a worked chart to find a salary. Two of the four, sourced. The pattern generalises neatly to the second and, with more of a stretch, to the fifth as what comes of the fourth, and that generalisation is ours to notice rather than a rule anybody states. Even so, once you see it the eighth stops looking like a random collection of death and other people's money and starts looking like a position.

Timing works the same way it does for the other two grades: the house quadrant supplies the unit and the degrees between the two planets supply the count. Succedent sits one step slower than angular throughout. A cardinal sign in a succedent house gives weeks, a mutable sign months, a fixed sign years. There's a specific honesty note here worth having: of the nine cells in that grid, succedent plus mutable is the one our own audit of the source never found exercised on any worked chart. Every other cell has been seen in practice at least once, several of them repeatedly. So "months" for a mutable sign in a succedent house is read off the shape of the grid rather than off a worked example, and it should be held a little more loosely than the eight cells around it.

Two further readings. There's an escalation rule attached to the whole grid, and succedent houses are where it has been seen working most plainly: where the literal unit is unreasonable against the question's own horizon, move one step and say why. One worked chart demotes a succedent fixed measure from years to months and gives the reasoning; another demotes a succedent cardinal one from weeks to days because weeks was implausible, and the recorded outcome supported the demotion. And in a question about where something is or whether somebody is reachable, succedent is the middle answer: the person is out, but close enough that you can still get hold of them, and a missing thing has left the immediate area without going far, so it can still be got back.