- Natural sign
- Taurus
- Ruler
- Venus
- House type
- Succedent house
- Axis
- 2 / 8
What the house governs
The second house is everything a person can call their own: what they earn with their own hands, possessions, objects, and also the sense of their own worth. It is not about wealth as a fact but about the way of acquiring and holding: easily or through strain, in small flows or in rare large ones.
How to read it in a chart
Look at the ruler of the second house and the house it sits in: that is where the source of income lies. Planets in the second describe the character of earning; Saturn here is not about poverty but about the slow and reliable. Aspects to the ruler show what helps and what eats the resource.
The axis of the house
The 2-8 axis is mine and shared. The second house is what a person earned themselves, the eighth is other people's and joint money: loans, a partner's budget, inheritance. A tilt towards the eighth often looks like living on other people's resources, a tilt towards the second like distrust of anything shared.
Common reading mistakes
The most common mistake is reading the second house as a forecast of an amount. It describes the mechanics, not the figure. The second mistake is looking for all the money of the chart here, forgetting the sixth house (work as a process) and the tenth (status and what commands a higher price).
Houses depend on the exact time of birth: an error of a quarter of an hour shifts the cusps by a few degrees, an error of two hours moves a planet into the neighbouring house. Without a birth time it is correct to read only the planets by sign.