The Sun
in the Fourth House
The meaning of the Fourth House, like that of all the angular houses, can be summed up in one word: home. The Hellenistic and medieval astrological texts list a variety of things ruled by this house, such as parentage, ancestry, national pride, inherited property, childhood, and the end of life. In reality, however, it all boils down to home: the foundation from which we begin our lives, and the domestic refuge we make for ourselves in adulthood.
This sounds simple, and in the ancient world, where most people were tied to the land on which they were born, it was. These days, however, home is not at all a simple concept. People are more mobile and much less likely to carry with them the stamp of one place, one ethnicity, or even one set of parents. They are also more exposed to outside influences from a variety of medias. For some people, the concept of home has nothing to do with their real beginnings. It could be just a manufactured ideal taken from popular culture, like The Brady Bunch.
In many cases, what home means to a modern person is more a psychological concept than a place over the river and through the woods. So when we say that a person with the Sun in the Fourth House is bound to have strong associations with home and that he or she tends to be something of a homebody, we have to face the facts that the home we are referring to might not be a brick-and-mortar structure and that his or her identification with that home might be much more complex than we imagine.
House versus Home
There are, of course, some people with the Sun in the Fourth House whose attachment to their childhood home is obvious. They may continue to live in their parents’ home into adulthood and make that home and their family the center of their lives. However, when we look at a list of people with this placement of the Sun, examples of this kind of homebody are rare. Instead, what we find is tension—often pronounced tension—between the home in which the person grew up and the new home he or she seeks to establish in adulthood.
Sometimes this tension takes the form of disagreements about such things as politics, religion, or lifestyle choices. These tensions may force the Sun in the Fourth person to move out and find a new home. It could also be a matter of professional opportunity that forces the Sun in the Fourth person to break with his or her home. For example, the American painter Mary Cassatt left her home in Pennsylvania, where her prospects as an artist were severely limited, to pursue her career in Paris.
In other cases, the reasons for moving out are not so clear-cut. It’s just something you know you have to do. Young Albert Schweitzer, a humanitarian polymath, was happy to stay in his native Alsace-Lorraine, where he shared with his father a world immersed in theology and music. However, at some point, Schweitzer began to feel that his Christian faith required more from him. So, he went back to school, got a medical degree, and moved to Africa to start a hospital.
There are many reasons—positive and negative, easy and traumatic—why a person with the Sun in the Fourth may have to physically leave his or her childhood home. Leaving it on an emotional and psychological level, on the other hand, is another matter.
Past versus Future
If you were born with the Sun in the Fourth House, the influence of your childhood home tends to stick with you, regardless of how or why you left it. Of course, we are all to some degree products of our upbringing, but, with the Sun in the Fourth, that influence is deeper and more persistent. It often has a hold on your psyche that eludes rational analysis, a hold that will crop up over and over in your life in profound and unpredictable ways.
Some people with this placement spend a lot of time and energy trying to understand this hold that the past seems to have on them. Others do just the opposite. They run away from it. They turn their eyes toward the future and try to ignore the long train of unresolved emotions that they are dragging along behind them. Unfortunately, no matter how fast and far these people run into the future, the past always has a way of bringing them down.
The place to which people with the Sun in the Fourth typically run is a new home that they feel satisfies their individual needs and expresses their ideas and principles. For many people with this placement, finding this new home is a cathartic event. They are able to reestablish a sense of home on their own terms with people who seem to share their opinions and desires. However, if they haven’t properly dealt with the issues that have followed them from their childhood home, then their new home will quickly fill with new versions of the same tensions and trials that characterized the home they left.
Father versus Mother
One question that often comes up in discussions of the Fourth House is which parent the house rules. Some texts say that it relates to the father, while others focus on the mother. There are arguments made for both sides. In the past, the father’s station in life—his work, his reputation, and his opinions—was the primary factor in determining where and under what circumstances a family lived. On the other hand, it is the nurturing parent who typically has the most influence on a person’s emotional development, and, in the past, that was always the mother.
Of course, in our era of single-parent homes, blended families, and more fluid concepts about gender roles, these boundaries are not so fixed. But even when they are, human perception is a tricky thing, particularly when it comes to our emotional connection to the past. The interaction between two parents and a child is complex, and what a person takes from that interaction is hard to predict. Years of good or bad behavior by one parent could be washed away by a single action by the other. The chief concern has to be the whole of the child’s homelife and, in most cases, both parents play a role in this.
Your Mission
If you were born with the Sun in the Fourth House, your mission has three equally important parts. The first is to leave the home of your childhood. For some of you, this will be the hardest part. You may associate your childhood home with an ideal of security and unconditional love that continually draws you back. For others, leaving will not be so difficult. It may seem like the natural outcome of growing up. (And for some of you, leaving home may seem like an escape from an environment you found oppressive or abusive.)
The second part of your mission is to address the psychological and emotional issues that have followed you from that home. Again, this will be easier for some of you than for others. Much depends on the sign of and aspects to the Sun, along with other factors in the horoscope. Those of you who are able to step back and deal with your feelings in an honest and productive way will have a much easier time than those who try to run away from them. But even those who run away will, in most cases, be brought to a place in which a naked confrontation with the past is unavoidable.
The third part of this mission is the most essential. You have to go home again, only now on your own terms. This could mean creating a new home in a foreign land. It could also mean buying a bungalow down the street from Mom. How this return relates to your parents and your family is less important than how it relates to you—you as a person, you as an adult, and you as someone who has dealt with (or is trying to deal with) all the issues stemming from your childhood.
Completing all three of these parts is by no means easy. Some people with the Sun in the Fourth never get past part one. Others balk at doing the work required for part two, and still others struggle to complete part three. However, the people with this placement who do complete all three parts have something special to offer the world. Because of what they have gone through in their search for a new home, these people often project a steadiness, a serenity, and a wisdom that give reassurance and comfort to less confident souls. They are people who have found their base, who are sure of their foundation, and this often makes them leaders and figures of inspiration in a world that all too often seems unsure of its footing.