The Third House

Key Concepts: Learning, education, siblings, extended family, exchange of information, neighborhoods, and social networks. What am I learning and how am I learning it?

Guardian Sign & Element: Gemini & Air

House Type: Cadent 

Lunar Phrase: I feel care(d) for…

Lunar Focus: The Moon focuses on or reveals the ways we learn best in order to express ourselves emotionally. Additionally, the Moon focuses on or reveals how we want to be cared for by our social networks or community as well as siblings if we have any. As the House of the Moon, the Third House is also a place for connecting with learning as a pathway of expanding our consciousness.

Healing Opportunities: Discovering and embracing the unique ways you learn and process sensory information. Creating rituals and activities focused on connection with your nearest and dearest. Exploring the magick in your neighborhood and cultivating it. Working with dreams as part of your healing work. Healing rituals for your inner child. Releasing feelings of intellectual inadequacy put upon you by others and letting yourself get curious about your curiosity. Practices to help you speak from a place of authenticity rather than expectation. Reassessing social contracts you have with family and close friends who you struggle to be in a healing relationship with. Consciousness-expanding practices including meditation, breathwork, and flow states. All forms of lunar and divination rituals. 

Inner Landscape: A space of deep resonant connection, where your ideas are illuminated, your words flow free, and you find yourself in a state of understanding/being understood with ease.

☽〇☾

Note: I use the word "social" and "social groups" not in reference to social media, but in the far older experience of the terms reaching back into our ancient social ties of kinship. Part of the magickal lunar energy of the Third House is re-membering and future-dreaming ourselves out of the confines of profit-driven, culture-flattening spaces like social media and back into actual social spaces with one another. Which is all just a fancy way of saying, meet up again in public parks, coffee houses, and living rooms as an act of collective liberation (and fun!). 

The Third House is the first of three relationship-focused Houses (along with the Seventh and Eleventh), representing some of our earliest familial relationships. It is also the space in our birth chart that represents our capacity for learning and the ways that we exchange and process information. These early familial relationships, especially ones with our siblings or close-in-age cousins (if we have any) who are our earliest social peers, are where we test out our ability to absorb information, adapt to our environments, and test out what we've learned (i.e. if I copy my sister that'll get a funny reaction). Neighbors and neighborhoods are also drawn into the Third House, both from childhood and present day, reflecting the ancient roots of astrology when the fate of neighbors and neighborhoods were more intertwined like our modern family relationships. In the Third House we explore some of our earliest perceptions of our social and familial world and how this has continued to shape our life beyond childhood. More broadly, the Third House represents our perceptiveness and how we learn (and struggle to learn) based on what we are able to perceive and how we are able and invited to expand our perceptiveness. 

Within lunar astrology, the Third House plays a special role. Ancient Greek astrologers viewed the Third House as the House of the Moon's Joy and it was also known as the House of Goddess (the Ninth House is the House of God). The Moon's connection and at-homeness in the Third House of learning helps us understand the Moon's role as the filter of our consciousness - in order to be conscious beings we explore paths of learning that help us recognize our own conscious states. As we gain knowledge, transmuting it into wisdom through conscious effort and expanding our perceptiveness, that knowledge continues to flow through us and, ideally, circulates freely through our social groups. There is also an energy of connecting with tried and true generational wisdom (shared with the Twelfth House), where we learn from those who have gone before as one way to expand our consciousness. The Third House is also a traditional House of divination and with its strong lunar pull, a lot of Third House energy can show up in our dreams, where our conscious and subconscious states mingle.

The Moon in the Third House also helps us understand where we are most comfortable in our social connections, whether that's the family we were born into, the family and friends we chose, and/or our intimate partnerships (there is overlap here with the energies of the Seventh House when it comes to non-family relationships).¹ It is the place in our social relationships where we feel most in tune with the social flow - where our inner world feels a deep resonance with our social surroundings. Working with the Moon in our Third House can help us to find our flow state with our close companions and kin. Exploring our Third House with the Moon as our guide helps us to not only identify what it is we are learning about and how we learn it, but to find interesting patterns on this path of learning and resonance for why we might find ourselves drawn to certain experiences while being uninterested in others. Through the Third House we learn to recognize what we care about (i.e. what it is we want to learn more about) and how we feel cared for (i.e. the relationships that support our growth).

Challenges within the Third House often arise from our learning and communication styles and needs not being accepted and nurtured when we were younger. Whether from condemning our growing sense of self-awareness (Don't think about that! Don't learn about those things!), a lack of curiosity for our learning needs by the adults around us or finding ourselves lacking access to a diversity of knowledge, these early messages about our intellectual capacity, the "right" or "wrongness" of our curiosity, and lack of adequate educational support, can lead to feelings of low self-esteem, a false sense of intellectual inferiority, and hopelessness. The energy of the Full Moon in the Third House can highlight our intellectual strengths and the relationships in our life that support our curiosity. Working with the New or Dark Moon in the Third House helps us to explore the ways we've been expected to learn something rather than being able to express ourselves through the learning process. As we understand better how it is we process and perceive the world, our trust for what we know and how we can learn more grows. We can feel just how expansive and interconnected our consciousness is (i.e. our lunar body) and how to connect with the people and experiences that call us into a place of mutual flourishing.

Lunar Affirmations of the Third House

🌕 The Full Moon: I energize my ability to connect with and recognize relationships of mutual flourishing.

🌒 The New Moon: I clear out shame around what it is I think I should know and allow myself to celebrate what I do know and how hard I worked to know it.

🌑 The Dark Moon: I let go of other people's opinions of my capacity to learn and embrace my wild and enduring curiosity.

Sacred Inquiry for the Third House

• I learn best when in the following environments ___________. 
• I feel best cared for by my close kin when ___________.
• My favorite way to exchange information, especially emotional exchange, is ___________.

Lunar Rituals of the Third House

There is a lot of magick happening in the Third House, not only because of its deep lunar energy, but because so much of magick is tied up with expanding consciousness and using our knowledge to cultivate wisdom. It is easy with the strong Air energy of the Third House to get swept up in the possibility of it all, which is a great current to tap into when you want to create more opportunity for connection and learning in your life. Think about rituals and practices that seem to pull the magick from your bones and draw you into closer kinship with your magickal allies, whether plant, people, place, holy one and/or creature - that's the energy to draw upon for your Third House magickal workings. 

• Dream rituals of all kinds
• Rituals and practices rooted in Goddess Spirituality
• All variety of divination
• Throwing a party for your inner child
• Rituals of reconnection and reconciliation
• Meditation and breathwork
• Charms for confident communication
• House-seeking rituals to help you find a great home in your desired neighborhood
• Releasing outmoded ideas about what you are intellectually capable of (including inner child work that heals early wounds of being misunderstood, bullied, and unsupported for your learning needs)

Third House Remedies

• Gemini Remedies of all kinds including for the lungs and nervous system
• Elemental air remedies of all kinds
• Dream blends
• Lunar-inspired blends
• Blends to support your divination practices
• Perception-expanding blends
• Plant allies that support your brain health and connection with your close loved ones

Additional Concepts

• Robert Cole's House Cycle: The House of Exploratory Growth. The student. You feel curious, you have a great desire to communicate and learn about the world.
• Stephen Arroyo's House Trinity Correspondence: The Trinity of Relationships
• Marcia Starck's House Clock: 12 - 2 AM

📚

Footnotes

1. "Intimate partnerships" don't have to be sexual, but represent our closest relationships where we are our most vulnerable with the other people involved, which creates intimate and open connections.

-

image source