If you have intercepted signs in your birth chart you may have wondered what’s going on. It’s a phenomenon that occurs with the Placidus house system and indicates that the houses involved contain more than 30 degrees and engulf an entire sign. The qualities of the intercepted signs are latent and only express under intense environmental pressures.
Here’s why signs can be intercepted.
As the zodiac signs and birth chart houses are each thirty degrees in extent, you’re likely to assume that the equivalent of one sign, or thirty degrees of the zodiac, always occupies exactly one mundane house.
This would be the case if the circle of mundane houses coincided with the zodiac. However, except at the equator, the mundane houses are to the north or to the south of the mean position of the zodiac.
In its extreme influence this accounts for the midnight Sun in the summer months in places north of the Artic Circle or south of the Antarctic Circle when the Sun remains visible at the local midnight.
In each instance the degree of the zodiac occupied by the Sun does not pass into any of the six houses below the horizon during the twenty-four-hour day.
This midnight Sun, as well as the phenomenon of six months daylight followed by six months darkness near the poles, is the result not merely of the observer occupying a high north or south latitude, but also to the incident that the zodiac is inclined at an angle of over 23 degrees to the equator.
Even at the equator, the zodiacal signs rise diagonally and the further to the north or to the south of the equator the observer moves the more diagonally do they rise.
Thus, in north temperate latitudes in the summer the Sun appears on the horizon, when it rises, well north of east of the observer, and as it moves toward noon it swings up and to the south. The farther north the observer goes, the farther to the north the Sun appears to rise in summer, until finally, in extreme north latitudes, it fails to set, merely circling around the north horizon from the west to the east at night without disappearing.
If you draw two parallel lines an inch apart, and then measure the distance between them diagonally instead of straight across, you will find that the diagonal line is much more than an inch. In fact, the more the diagonal inclines to the parallel lines the longer it must be.
Without entering into a technical explanation of the matter, it will be seen that if the zodiac rises diagonally that it is necessary for some of the mundane houses of thirty degrees extent to contain more than thirty degrees of the zodiac.
Furthermore, being true circles, if the zodiac is diagonal to the mundane houses at some points, relative to the zodiac the mundane houses are diagonal to it at other points.
This explains, in a very general way, why more than one zodiacal sign may occupy one house of your birth chart.
As the Tables of Houses used in the calculation of your birth chart are based on each house containing precisely thirty degrees it will be clear that so long as such tables are employed each mundane house must be exactly thirty degrees in extent, irrespective of the number of degrees of the zodiac it holds.
Astrology for Aquarius – sharing our knowledge
