Your first house
The Jungian psychologist James Hillman once said, “You have to give up the life you have to get to the life that’s waiting for you.”3 This was the secret message coded in the stars on the Eastern horizon at your birth. Newly born, you’d just proven the truth of it: you had to relinquish the womb in order to reach the new life awaiting you. This is a natural law of development. Understanding this is the key to mastery of your 1st house.
Writing about the 1st house, astrologer Dane Rudhyar stresses the need to separate yourself from its early influences, the personal, social and cultural conditioning that mothered you.4 The work of the 1st house is to keep birthing yourself, which means to keep separating, to keep honoring what’s different about you. Your “difference,” says Rudhyar, is not the same as a self-involved burden of alienation (“Nobody understands me”). Rather it’s about accepting the gift of being distinct. On a deeply spiritual level we may recognize we’re all one, interconnected and interdependent. Yet it’s also true that the whole does its most productive and creative work through individuals. When you embrace your individuality, you come closer to fulfilling your destiny. You gain access to more inner resources. You become more authentically formed.Notice this mask is made of pliable material. How might you alter its expression? Without tearing the whole thing apart and installing a different rising sign, how would you redesign this persona so it could get you more of what you want? Pick the best qualities from the sign, its ruler, and any planets in your 1st and decorate your mask anew. How different does it look from the mask you first put on the table? Does it more successfully express what’s distinct about you?
