What you own, earn, and value.
The second house is succedent — it follows the angle and holds what the angle opened. Where the first is the person arriving, the second is what they arrive with.
It sits below the horizon, in the part of the sky that was underfoot at birth. In classical sources it is the Gate of Hades, which is less ominous than it sounds: the second is the house the ecliptic descends into after rising, and the name records the direction of travel.
The traditional domains — property, income, movable goods — are all things kept rather than done. That is the succedent character throughout the chart.
Succedent, which is the houses' fixed
Houses 2, 5, 8 and 11 — each following an angular house. They hold and consolidate what the angle opened, and they are concerned with what is kept.
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 fifth, eighth and eleventh.
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 second house stretches:
| Latitude | Narrowest | Widest | Mean |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0° | 27.6° | 32.6° | 30.0° |
| 20° | 24.7° | 35.7° | 30.0° |
| 40° | 20.6° | 41.2° | 30.0° |
| 55° | 15.1° | 50.9° | 30.0° |
| 65° | 6.1° | 72.5° | 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 eighth house has an identical span in every chart, since its cusps are exactly 180° from this one.
Traditionally attributed
Livelihood, possessions, and the sense of what is worth having.
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.