Succedent

The succedent houses are the second, fifth, eighth and eleventh, each following an angle in the order in which the signs rise. The Greek name is epanaphorai, the risings after, and it is descriptive rather than evaluative: these are the places that come up behind the pivots.

The character the tradition assigns them is consolidation. Where an angular house is where something happens, a succedent house is where the result of it is kept. The second holds the money and moveable goods that follow from a life. The fifth holds the issue, children and pleasure, that follows from a household. The eighth holds what passes when the other party is gone, the legacies, the dowry and the goods of the dead. The eleventh holds the friends, the hopes and the support that follow from a standing in the world.

In strength the group sits in the middle. A planet in a succedent house is neither as forceful as one on an angle nor as weak as one in a cadent place, and the tradition treats it as effective but slower to show. That middle position is the practical reason the group is worth knowing: a chart with no angular planets at all is not a chart with nothing to say, and its succedent placements are where a reading goes next.

Two of the four carry planetary joys, Venus in the fifth and Jupiter in the eleventh, which are also the two places that see the ascendant by a favourable aspect.

Before the medieval catalogue gave each house a list of subjects, the Hellenistic tradition gave the twelve places names, and all four of the succedent places carry one.

The fifth is Agathe Tyche, Good Fortune. The eleventh is Agathos Daimon, the Good Spirit, and it is the place of Jupiter's joy. The eighth is the Idle Place, which is a name of a different kind, and the second is the Gate of Hades.

Those names do not line up neatly with the later subject lists, and the mismatch is informative. The older scheme sorts the places by their relation to the ascendant rather than by what happens in them. The fifth and the eleventh see the ascendant by trine and by sextile, the two aspects the tradition counts as friendly, and both get favourable names. The second and the eighth are among the four places that cannot see the ascendant by any classical aspect at all, and both get names of inactivity or of the underworld. The medieval catalogue sorts by subject instead. Each scheme is consistent inside itself and they answer different questions.

The revival of Hellenistic astrology since the 1990s has put the older layer back into working use, so a modern reader may meet the eleventh described as the house of friends, as the Good Spirit, or as both, and should know that the two descriptions come from different centuries and different logics rather than from a single tradition contradicting itself.