The ninth house is belief, higher study, foreign places, and the long view. Mercury there wants the whole structure rather than the useful part of it. Such natives learn languages properly, pursue a subject to its foundations, and are dissatisfied by a summary. They are drawn to law, theology, philosophy, history, and any discipline with a canon to master. Give them a question and they will return with the history of the question.
Travel and study are interchangeable methods here. A year abroad and a degree perform the same office: both remove the native from the assumptions of the parish, which is the necessary condition for their thinking to work. Teaching is the natural profession, and the native teaches well — enthusiastically, digressively, at slightly too great a length. Publication attracts. So does argument about first principles, conducted with genuine pleasure and no malice.
The cost is a certain grandeur of scale that neglects the immediate. The native can expound the constitutional position and forget to return the neighbour's ladder. Opinions are generalised from insufficient evidence and then defended with the full apparatus of learning, which makes them harder rather than easier to dislodge. There is also a taste for being right in public, and a habit of lecturing people who asked a short question and wanted a short answer.
What It Gives
- ◆Grasp of large systems
- ◆Genuine scholarly appetite
- ◆Facility with foreign languages
- ◆Explains complex ideas well
What It Costs
- ◆Overlooks immediate practicalities
- ◆Generalises from thin evidence
- ◆Lectures when asked briefly
This is one line of a whole chart. The rest of it — every placement, house and aspect at once — is a birth date away.
Cast Your Birth Chart