The Houses
5th house: Good Times
6th house: Work and Health
7th house: Relationships
8th house: Depth
The Fifth House: The House of Happiness
The fifth house, associated with Leo and the sun, is often simply called the house of creative self-expression. That's a bit misleading, though, as the house covers a lot of different territory. For example, it is also associated with children, love affairs, speculation, hobbies, amusements and show business.
What ties all these things together (in my mind, at least) is that they are all good things and they are all fun, enjoyable, and pleasurable. Now that's a bit of an overstatement. Love affairs can go bad and turn out heartbreaking. Children can be difficult and even disappointing. The creative act of painting or writing a book can be a monumental struggle. Gambling and speculation can lead to life-changing financial losses, but....
But, at root, all of these things represent the coveted state of flow, or immersion in something so absorbing that nothing else matters for awhile. This state of flow has been found by recent scientific studies to correlate most nicely with the internal state of happiness. Think of how, for example, when you first became a parent, you learned that there really isn't anything more entertaining, enjoyable, joyful, interesting or absorbing than just watching your baby. Think of the way in which your attention is so riveted during the first stages of romance that both time and the world seem to stop or fade away.
Think of the joy and refreshment you experience when you are deeply engaged in your favorite hobby or a creative act like singing or painting or acting in your local community theatre. Think of the way a good movie or show rivets your imagination and takes you away from the here and now to some place thrilling yet safe. Even gambling and speculation, somewhat of an odd fit here, enwrap the player in cocooned world of total absorption in the roll of the dice or the turn of the cards.
In your birth chart, the sign on the fifth house can provide some indication of what you think is fun. The planets there can indicate how much fun you do have, under what circumstances, and what challenges you might face. They can also indicate (and quite often do), what kind of romances you'll have, what your attitude toward love is, and the nature of your relationship with your children. Sometimes it also indicates whether or not you have a real creative talent and whether you should pursue it. Many entertainment industry figures have prominent fifth house placements, for example.
Fifth house transits are generally to be welcomed, because they are either generally easy and happy transits in and of themselves or because they can remove blocks to the experience of flow and happiness in daily life. They can also shake up your love life and bring children into your life! As I mentioned above, it would be wrong to imagine that everything that happens in the 5th house is always good, but it is the house that's the gateway way to the experience of pleasure. And without pleasure, life is rough going indeed.
The Sixth House: Job and Health
The sixth house, associated with Virgo, can have a number of meanings, but in its most basic, straightforward form, it refers to one's job and one's health. Natal planets in the 6th house often show certain characteristics of a person's employment history. For example, I see many people with Saturn (planet of stability and endurance) who retain a single job for many years. People with Pluto in the 6th can be obsessive about their jobs. People with Venus in the 6th are often well-liked at work.
The sign on the cusp of a person's natal 6th house often shows what kind of characteristics or skills are needed for the performance of the job. For example, people with signs like Gemini or Aquarius often use technical, analytical or verbal skills in their jobs. People with Virgo on the 6th can be organized and detail-oriented. People with Leo on the 6th often have jobs that require more outgoing characteristics, while Sagittarius on the 6th often seems to be correlated with more adventurous jobs.
Looking at the 6th house alone does not usually give a complete picture of one's job, career or income, though. The 6th house is intimately correlated with the 2nd house of income and the 10th house of career (in a trine by angle). Most people will express characteristics of all three in their work in some way. I have also met a number of people with an empty sixth house who forego traditional employment and become entrepreneurs or doctors who work in a group practice or find some other means of avoiding becoming strictly an employee.
Transits to the 6th house often strongly affect one's work and one's working environment. Eclipses in the 6th, for example, can correlate with things like layoffs and restructurings in the company where one works.
As far as health goes, I am not a big fan of using the 6th house (or any other astrological indicator) to diagnose health problems. I prefer a doctor for that. However, transits to the 6th do seem to affect steps a person takes to deal with health issues. Saturn in the 6th can be good for weight loss, for example, and a transit of the sun to the 6th (which happens annually) can correlate with a conscious awareness of the need to schedule and attend doctor's appointments, deal with nagging issues, and so on. A brisk transit to the 6th can be just the ticket for getting an exercise routine started.
In a way, the 6th house does not really indicate job and health so much as it does one's approach to these vital matters of day-to-day living. It indicates all the things that tend to surround these matters, working environment, attitude, co-workers, employees, exercise routines, diets, and so on. Some people with strong placements in the 6th or in Virgo take a very active interest in these matters. Other people, with more nebulous planets in the 6th, take a more holistic or spiritual approach to both work and health maintenance.
The 6th house is not the glamour house in most people's charts; but work and health are necessary elements of life. In fact, one way to gauge how important the 6th house is, is to look how most of us feel when we don't have either work or our health. For this reason alone, the 6th house deserves our full respect.
The Seventh House: Relationships
The 7th house is typically considered the house of marriage and committed relationships and is said to indicate the type of people you attract in love relationships. It is also the house of all other kinds of partnerships, including business partnerships.
The 7th house also relates to a number of things outside traditional marriage or committed relationships, including the public, open enemies, contracts, lawsuits and war. It is interesting that the ancients identified the house of marriage as the house of open enemies! But perhaps this reflects some sort of psychological truth about the nature of intimate relationships, e.g., that is those we are closest to with whom we experience the most conflict.
Since the 7th house also relates to dealings with the public, natal or progressed placements like the Moon in the 7th house can indicate popularity with the public, particularly if other items in the chart reinforce that theme. It can also indicate a spouse who is popular with the public.
Planets in the 7th house can indicate the nature of one's marriage, the effect of it, or attributes of the marriage partner. For example, Uranus in the 7th house can indicate a marriage that causes disruption in one's life. Mercury in the 7th can indicate a marriage in which a high value is placed on communication.
Transits to the 7th house (e.g., when Mars is in your opposite sign) tend to highlight the effect of other people in your life, and bring your dealings with others more into the spotlight. Mars in the 7th house, for example, can be used to bring issues of contention to the surface so they can be addressed.
The 7th house precedes the 8th house, which deals with things like power, money, and sex. In chart terms, marriage or commitment come before the ability to gain power (since, I suppose, solid relationships give people a base from which to become more personally powerful) and the ability to deal with joint finances and sexual issues. People with an empty 7th house do not necessarily remain single, by the way, as there are a number of factors that influence whether a person chooses to marry.
Outer planet transits tend to create significant long term changes in how a person views relationships, partnerships, the public or even enemies, but they usually do so in a gradual manner.
The Eighth House: The House of Depth
I know of no good, concise way to describe what the 8th house is all about, because activity in this house affects people in so many different ways. Here's a partial list of areas that correlate with the 8th house: sex, invesments, other people's money, anything below of the surface, inheritances, psychological traumas, the past, therapy, merging, research, emotional intensity, power, secrets, the occult, death, psychiatry, joint finances, divorce, intimacy, the marital partner's finances and fortunes, debt, credit and taxes, self-control, psychic powers, insurance settlements, healing, surgery, and non-ordinary income. That's quite a list.
Many of the things are the list are heavy or deep or fraught with unconscious or subconscious baggage. Money and sex, two of the things on the list, tend to attract various subconscious glitches in the psyche of the ordinary human, so I usually think of this as the house of going deep for understanding. But even this is misleading. I know some people with active 8th houses and the manifestations are no deeper than a predilection toward earning outside consulting income or a career as an investment banker.
I once knew a woman whose 8th house was activated by transit, and within the space of about 8 months her aunt died, she inherited some money and a car, got in an accident and collected an insurance settlement, started physical therapy (as a result of the accident), filed for divorce and began research related to getting an advanced degree in nursing. When a person's 8th house gets excited, it can get really excited, but it does not necessarily appear that there is rhyme or reason to the various events. It is possible that this woman's series of 8th house manifestations was part of a larger process of psychological transformation, but it wasn't apparent that this was the case at the time.
Similarly, in spite of the 8th house's ability to deal with deep issues, sometimes 8th house issues need to be dealt with in a much more mundane way. Saturn in the 8th house can indicate dealing with credit card debt or unpaid taxes, and in most cases, these types of issues simply need to be handled in a straightforward way. Saturn transiting the 8th house also sometimes indicates something of a sex life drought in a marriage (at least from the point of view of one of the partner's), but this is usually temporary and not necessarily the result of deep underlying psychological issues in the marriage.
On the other hand, if it is psychological transformation you need and want, there is no better allay ever than the 8th house. The 8th house, more than any other, is willing to examine and understand the past--and it is in the past that most psychological issues arise. Planets in the 8th house in the natal chart often indicate, in fact, psychological elements from one's past that will need to be confronted later. For example, Moon in the 8th house sometimes indicates that as an adult, a person will need to confront the psychological legacy of their mother. An example is a man whose mother was unfaithful to his father and then left to marry another man. Later in his life, his wife files for divorce (another 8th house manifestation), and it becomes time for the man to confront the effect his mother's behavior had on him--particularly since the pattern seems to be repeating in his own life.
Thus, an outer planet transit through the 8th house or activation of a natal planet in the 8th house can indicate that the time is right to seek out therapy. Therapy conducted with the aid of 8th house transits can often be quite effective, at the very least in bringing to light the deep and hidden things the 8th house loves.