The Moon
in the Fourth House
You feel a deep, emotional connection to your home; however it may not always be a positive connection. It could be the reason you never wanted to leave home. It could be the reason you couldn’t stay. It could be the source of your happiest thoughts and most precious memories. It could also be the thing that sends you into therapy. Regardless, the emotional connection is there, and it is something, for better or worse, that you will carry with you for the rest of your life.
The source of both your positive and not so positive associations with your home is often your relationship with one of your parents, usually your mother. She may have been a dominant figure in the household, but what really matters is the nurturing you received from her (or him, if the father was the nurturing parent) and the attitude with which that nurturing was offered. Subtleties become very important with this placement. What was done is not so much the issue as how it was done and what you felt about what was done. Your relationship with your parents can become extraordinarily complex, with positive and negative emotions intermingling and overlapping.
Despite all the emotional messiness, this is often a strong position for the Moon. Because you have been working on lunar issues like emotional security since childhood, you have already figured a lot of stuff out by the time you become an adult. You understand your vulnerabilities and know better than most of us how to deal with them. Also, there is often something about people with the Moon in the Fourth House that brings out the protective, nurturing instincts of other people. You may not be aware of this or consciously use it to your advantage, but it is rarely going to be a disadvantage.
The Moon in the Fourth House with the Sun in the First
This may be the only combination with the Moon in the Fourth in which the influence of the family is not readily apparent. People see you as a completely independent person. Those who never knew you as a child might think that you stepped into the world fully grown and beholden to none. However, if these people were able to look into your heart or, better yet, into your soul, they would see the emotional hold that your upbringing has on you.
Even as a small child, you liked to do things your own way, and this probably caused you to clash with your parents and other authority figures. You may have also felt that you didn’t really need the nurturing and protection your parents offered. This makes it easy for you, as an adult, to minimize the direction and nurturing you received as a child. However, on a deeper psychological level, you are well aware of both and of the debts you owe.
At some point in your life, you are going to have to reclaim your childhood and recognize the influence your home and parents have exerted in your life. Doing this may not help you get back the love you missed (or think you missed) during those early years, but it can help you learn to love yourself. It can also help you create a new home in which you are able to love and nurture others.
The Moon in the Fourth House with the Sun in the Second
Your greatest resource may be the emotional relationship with your parents and your early homelife. That doesn’t necessarily mean it was a good relationship. The dread of disappointing a disapproving parent can be just as much a motivator as the joy of meeting the expectations of an encouraging one. Either way, the experiences of your childhood probably served as the foundation for the successes you’ve gained as an adult.
As much as your childhood experiences can motivate you, they can also limit you. Your upbringing has given you certain standards. In some cases, adhering to these standards will make you stronger, but in others, it will only serve to reinforce prejudices and misguided ideas. You have to allow for the possibility that lessons learned from your parents might have become outmoded and no longer apply to the life you live as an adult.
Of course, the opposite is also possible. You might have rejected the standards put forth by your elders and developed a different, purposely contrary set of standards. This act of rebellion might have made perfect sense in your youth, but holding on to that contrarian attitude in your adulthood can become awkward. You might find that those lessons you tossed aside make much more sense when viewed with mature eyes.
The Moon in the Fourth House with the Sun in the Third
Of all these combinations with the Fourth House Moon, yours may be the one most influenced by childhood experiences. This is because, even as a child, you were unusually sensitive to changes in your environment. You saw more, heard more, and absorbed what you perceived deep into your subconscious. Some might say that the information you absorbed lacks substance and intellectual depth, that it’s just an accumulation of family stories and pop culture references, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have a major impact on your life.
Because your childhood is so deeply imprinted on your psyche, it is often difficult for you to sort out the positive from the negative. Your grandmother’s chicken soup recipe and her low opinion of redheads might have an equal influence on your thinking. On a conscious level, you may laugh at grandma’s mean-spirited prejudices, but, regardless of your good intentions, that negativity could still have a hold on your subconscious.
You might think you can manage these subconscious foibles and inappropriate sentiments by means of your intellect, but in matters concerning your early years, your intellect often fails you. In order to defeat these demons, you will have to venture into the realm of emotion. Your Sun and Moon signs will indicate how well equipped you are for such a confrontation, but it is a battle that you cannot avoid.
The Moon in the Fourth House with the Sun in the Fourth
You may not consider yourself a homebody, but your emotional associations with both your childhood home and the home you create as an adult run deep and, to a large extent, overlap. If you were happy in your childhood home—if you identified it as your refuge and the place where your weaknesses and vulnerabilities would be accepted and never used to do you harm—then creating a new home as an adult will be easy for you.
But what happens if this was not the case? What if your early homelife was disruptive and your weaknesses were exploited in ways that did you harm? Much depends on the degree of harm and what else is going on in your horoscope. For some people with this combination, the sense that they were deprived of love and nurturing as a child can result in a slow-burning anger that can trouble them for the rest of their lives.
The people with this combination who often face the biggest challenge are those who come out of a childhood that appears normal. They seem to have received all the nurturing a child requires, but, for some reason, it wasn’t enough. This can lead to feelings of anger and deprivation that cannot be easily explained and might never be directly confronted. For a person with the Moon in the Fourth, “normal” doesn’t always cut it. Your emotional needs were, and are, too great.
The Moon in the Fourth House with the Sun in the Fifth
You must follow your passion wherever it takes you. This might mean that you end up thousands of miles away from your childhood home in a different country, in a different culture, maybe even speaking a different language. You might also rebel against the influence of your home and try to become someone quite different from the person you were raised to be. That’s all okay. However, if your passion separates you from your sense of home on an emotional and psychological level, you are likely to suffer.
You suffer because you are yanking at roots that are simply too deep to ever be completely removed. You may think that you’ve somehow escaped the past, that you’ve created a new home that reflects a new you, but the foundation of this new home will eventually begin to crumble, and, if you look closely, you will see weedy elements of the home you thought you’d left behind growing through the cracks.
People with this combination have an extra reason to hold on to their emotional association with their home. One way or another, your creativity, your originality, and your sense of play are tied to the feelings you carry with you from your past. Your inner child (always an important part of the personality of anyone with the Sun in the Fifth House) can never be fully separated from the pleasures and traumas of your real childhood. This is something you cannot escape and you never want to outgrow.
The Moon in the Fourth House with the Sun in the Sixth
If you were lucky, you were raised in a home in which you were taught that it is better to serve than to be served. After all, with the Sun in the Sixth, service is a big part of your mission in life, so whatever encouragement toward this goal you were able to take from your early years is a benefit. It will help you balance your inner and outer life and find, in the act of helping others, the emotional boost that can only come from making your parents proud.
If you were taught anything approximating the opposite of this sentiment, you are not so lucky. You’re not so lucky because following the direction of your Sixth House Sun is likely to draw you away from the attitudes and opinions of your youth. You are going to have to make adjustments. You are going to have to create a new concept of home and family in which success is measured, not by your salary or your title, but by the gratitude of the people you’ve helped.
It might seem that creating this new home would be a simple task, but it requires that you first work through all the psychological issues stemming from your past home. That calls for self-awareness and an understanding of human emotion, faculties that may not come naturally to you (depending on what else is happening in your chart). You may find it necessary to develop these capacities or seek help from people more adept in these matters.
The Moon in the Fourth House with the Sun in the Seventh
The person you marry will not only have to be compatible with you, he or she will also have to be compatible with your parents, your home, and the environment in which you were raised. The same applies to any singular relationship. A relationship with someone who represents a break from this past, someone who takes you far away from your childhood home (either physically or emotionally), will be a challenge.
This intermingling of home and partnership can often be positive. It can draw you closer to that person and, in some cases, create a connection that has a mystical, psychic dimension. On the other hand, you have to be careful not to let your adult relationships become a repetition of family dramas from your childhood, with you and/or your partner playing the parts of your parents or of competing siblings.
Your ability to avoid this pitfall will depend on the signs occupied by your Sun and Moon and by other factors in your chart. Nonetheless, your goal should always be a relationship that honors your past but represents a fresh start with a new person. Creating this balance will not be easy. It will require you to make peace with the issues left over from your upbringing and create a new home in which the pleasures you find and the mistakes you make are all your own.
The Moon in the Fourth House with the Sun in the Eighth
At some level, you feel that you have been betrayed by your early childhood. Maybe your parents didn’t give you the care you needed. Maybe they were poor or sick. Maybe they made lifestyle choices or suffered because of social stigmas that placed you at a disadvantage. The reasons are less important than the way they make you feel, and the way they make you feel is exposed and vulnerable.
This is not to say that you hate your parents. You may love them very much. Consciously, you may see no connection between them and whatever misfortunes you have suffered. However, on a subconscious level, that sense of being betrayed persists. In some cases, this feeling can sour your relationship with your family. In others, it can undercut your self-confidence, becoming a reason to either work harder and overachieve or give up and blame it all on your childhood.
Dealing with this sense of betrayal is going to require some major psychological and/or spiritual excavation. Fortunately, with this combination, you are well prepared for such a journey. Regardless of what people might see on the surface, there is a great deal of strength hidden inside you. You have the courage to face your darkest demons and the emotional resilience to wrestle them to the ground. This process might take some time and create a great deal of disruption in your life, but your victory will be worth the struggle.
The Moon in the Fourth House with the Sun in the Ninth
You may have put a lot of distance between where you are now and your childhood home. This could be in terms of miles, or it could be in terms of attitude, opinions, beliefs, and/or lifestyle. People might think that you’ve left it all behind—that you are a new person, unfettered by family connections and Freudian horrors. But that’s where they are wrong. No matter how far you’ve traveled, literally or figuratively, from your childhood home, part of it is always with you.
Sometimes the influence of your childhood home is evident in your reluctance to settle down as an adult. Maybe your childhood was scarred by bad experiences, like an unloving parent or a broken home, that have left you convinced that any home you create will have the same faults. Or maybe your childhood home was so special and supportive that you know you could never duplicate it. Whatever the story, there is a restlessness in your nature that can be traced back to your childhood and your relationship with your parents.
However, the real difficulties with this combination often come out of a sense that a particular belief system or philosophy was imposed on you by your parents or by the environment in which you were raised. In many instances, you resist this system and insist on finding your own way. In others you accept it, but you follow it in a way that reflects your intellectual needs and the times in which you live. In either case, your attitude toward what your parents believed can become a point of contention.
The Moon in the Fourth House with the Sun in the Tenth
There is a gap between your inner and outer life. It would be going too far to say that they are at war, but they are certainly not at peace, and this keeps you on edge. You are ambitious. You want to be seen, acknowledged, and respected. At the same time, however, you long for the security and stability you felt in your childhood home. A part of you wishes you had never left the warmth and acceptance of that environment.
To the ambitious part of you, the idea of returning home, either on a physical or emotional level, seems like an act of surrender. It’s a threat to everything you have accomplished and a denial of what you see as your life’s work. There’s some truth in this. Turning toward the Moon in the Fourth House represents a turn toward safety and security, toward peace and emotional fulfillment, and turning away from the competitive striving of the Sun in the Tenth. However, if you think this striving is going to make you happy, you are wrong.
You have to find a way to integrate your inner life with your outer life. There are a variety of ways you can do this. You might try starting a family business in which home and career can exist side by side. Or you might start thinking of the people you work with as part of your family. However this integration is achieved, if you can find the right balance between your need to succeed and your need to feel safe within a family, you will have both the success and happiness you deserve.
The Moon in the Fourth House with the Sun in the Eleventh
You were given a precious gift by your parents. Either by their support or by their opposition, they set you on a road that led you to something greater than yourself. It might be a social or political cause. It might be a spiritual aspiration or a professional calling. It might be a community of like-minded people. Wherever that special gift took you, it is the place where your life can have meaning and you can find fulfillment—and it all started with your relationship to your childhood home.
There are times, unfortunately, when this precious gift can backfire, when your commitment to a cause has less to do with idealism and more to do with a battle you’re fighting with your past. This can skew your judgment and introduce unresolved psychological issues into your opinions and beliefs. It can turn your intentional community, the place that is supposed to represent the best of you, into a mirror of your inner conflicts.
For this reason, it is important that you maintain control over your emotional baggage. You don’t have to thoroughly resolve all the issues that haunt you from your childhood, but you have to be familiar enough with them to know when they are messing with your head and with the way you relate to your friends. Your ability to be part of something larger than yourself in the present often depends on how well you are dealing with these imbedded familial issues from your past.
The Moon in the Fourth House with the Sun in the Twelfth
It is likely that your life has been impacted by a psychological or subconscious burden that has its origin in your upbringing and childhood. It may have something to do with your relationship with your parents, or it might involve other factors related to the environment in which you grew up. In some cases, this burden might be obvious to the outside world. It might take the form of a physical or psychological impediment that everyone can see. But most of the time, the only person aware of this burden is you.
Dealing with this burden is going to take up a lot of your time and energy. It’s going to require you to take a long journey inward through memory and time. It is also going to require you to look closely at aspects of your life and character that most of us prefer to leave unexamined. This is because the goal of this journey is not to remove the burden, but to understand, on a deep emotional and spiritual level, what this burden has to say about you.
In the meantime, much depends on how you carry this burden. If you carry it like a shield or make it your excuse for all your failures and shortcomings, it will grow heavier and heavier until the task of bearing it consumes your life. However, if it increases your empathy for those who bear different kinds of burdens, if it sharpens your intuition and deepens your understanding of the vagaries of human emotion, then every day this burden will become a little lighter until it’s not a burden at all, but instead a badge of honor.