Labour in the chart: The 2nd House
February 08, ‘24
Capitalism defines labour as the production of goods and services. Yet this doesn’t account for the other kinds of labour that exist such as housework. Capitalism posits monetized labour as the only valid form of labour as it ensures our survival. Yet life requires all kinds of labour to sustain our being. We can use the houses in the chart to recognise this by mapping out different kinds of labour through each house topic. It’s useful to reflect on what kind of labour we naturally gravitate towards and where we encounter difficulty. So, we can bring awareness to how we navigate our own lives and build agency through this by conscious choice. With this blueprint of labour by each house, we can begin to examine our relation to the work we do that is seen or unseen. This blueprint can work as a base for you to overlay your planetary positions. These positions can ask questions about whether that work is something expected, admired, required, unacknowledged, overburdening or neglected?
The 2nd House:
The second house is known as a dark house. If you stood in the first house and looked out across the chart you would not see the second. So this house often reflects labour that goes unaccounted for.
In astrology the second house gets equated to finances, reflecting the conditions of our capitalist world. Finances are necessary so we can eat and have a roof over our heads at the minimum. This house is a labour of survival.
If this is all we see in astrology all we can see is a world that must be survived.
Finances aren't just about having possessions, it's about security and accessing a quality of life. This house is more than just material, it can be relational too.
The second house is about how we resource ourself. It's like the meta to the first house, our thoughts and feelings around our self that meets the world. The support that we offer to ourselves.
It's a succedent house, meaning it's gaining energy. This is a place for building and sustaining.
The second house asks us how we can sustain our being; how we can align with it; and how we can meet our own needs. As it makes a trine to the sixth house, this can sometimes look like the mundanity of self-admin tasks - keeping our things ordered and our space clean.
It can also be an ordering of the non-physical space around ourselves too.
This is a fundamental practice of community care. If you are unable to meet your own needs how can you meet that of others?
If the relationship with yourself is insecure, how can you sustain secure relationships with others?
Good second house practice enables you to better navigate conflict and repair, it enables you to show up. It calls you to overcome your own shame, your own insecurity. It's interesting that in a capitalistic astrology this house is often about what you own.
In traditional astrology this house contains an exit known as the gate of hades. It's about leaving the underworld and moving to the horizon. Moving away from a dark night of the soul. Second house labour is like when you clean up your pit of a room after a period of depression.
So it can also be about moving away from an unhealthy relationship with yourself and rising to meet yourself as you are. It's the values you need to embody in order to accept yourself.
The first house makes us known to ourselves and the second asks if we can meet them.
Is astrology the liberating alternative belief system that we think it is? ⟶