Home, ancestry, the private base of a life.
The fourth house begins at the Imum Coeli — the lowest point of the chart, directly opposite the Midheaven. It is the part of the sky beneath your feet at birth, and it is an angle in the strict sense: a real intersection, not a division.
Angular, and the least visible of the four. The tenth is what a life is known for; the fourth is where it comes from, and the two are the same meridian read at opposite ends.
Traditionally it holds home, land, ancestry and, in older sources, the end of the matter — how something finally settles. That last sense survives in horary practice more than in natal.
Angular, which is the houses' cardinal
Houses 1, 4, 7 and 10 — the four that begin at an angle of the chart. They are where a chart meets the world, and they carry the most weight in every tradition that weighs houses at all.
The parallel with the signs is exact rather than a metaphor. Cardinal signs sit three apart in the zodiac; angular houses sit three apart in the wheel. Both divisions are the circle cut into three, and both put the opening term at the point where something begins — an equinox or solstice for the signs, an angle of the chart for the houses. This house shares its class with the first, seventh and tenth.
How wide it really is
Placidus and the other quadrant systems divide time, not arc, so a house's width in the zodiac depends on which degree happens to be rising — and that changes through the day and with the latitude of the birthplace. Sampled every ten minutes across a full rotation, here is how far the fourth house stretches:
| Latitude | Narrowest | Widest | Mean |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0° | 27.6° | 32.6° | 30.0° |
| 20° | 24.9° | 33.8° | 30.0° |
| 40° | 21.1° | 36.6° | 30.0° |
| 55° | 15.9° | 41.4° | 30.0° |
| 65° | 6.6° | 50.8° | 30.0° |
The mean is 30° at every latitude, and that is not a coincidence or an artefact of the sampling: over a full rotation each house passes across the entire zodiac, so twelve houses sharing 360° must average exactly thirty. All of the inequality is in the spread, which is why an averaged figure tells you nothing and the range tells you everything. The tenth house has an identical span in every chart, since its cusps are exactly 180° from this one.
Traditionally attributed
Family, ancestry, land, and the end of the matter.
Listed because it is what the tradition says, not because this site can check it. Everything above this line is geometry; everything in it is convention.