Subverting Capitalism Through The Houses
tl;dr: I’m hosting a workshop on February 4th and I’d love to see you there.
Usually, when I begin a session with an astrology client to talk about money, I preface our time together by saying, “Money touches every part of our lives, therefore the relationship to money can be found in every part of the chart.” The purpose of saying is to open up my client’s way of thinking about their chart, and also to give us both permission to flow freely in any direction during the reading.
Money does not just appear in the 2nd house, or the 8th house.
Since money touches every part of our lives, we also know (and probably to a more intimate degree) that capitalism does this, too. It seeps in, like an insidious vapor or liquid, and fills in the spaces it can reach with its toxicity. However, money and capitalism are not the same thing. One is a tool used by the other. Astrology is also a tool, but much like money, I don’t think it is often wielded in the most positively impactful ways.
Capitalism, lacking any inherent tools or self-reliance, siphons from other forms of power to consolidate for its own self-preservation. Everything eventually becomes the master’s tools. Don’t believe me? The master’s tools for the last couple decades or so have been our personal information and public social data, and the effects of that weaponization are playing out in real time.
When we use the master’s tools to defeat or subdue or disarm the master, it’s called subversion: flipping scripts of power and oppression on their heads, using their own tools against them to liberate the oppressed. One example of subversion is the art of drag: taking societal expectations of gender expression (the master’s tools) and turning them upside down to mock the institutions who put those expectations in place and uphold them.
We need folks to create new tools which are born from non-oppressive natures, but for me personally, I work in the realm of subversion.
To me, there’s something creative and delightful and daring in flipping the script—like responding to Sinophobic attempts at censorship in the United States by downloading a Chinese social media app en masse. Oftentimes, however, subversion is not just fun, but necessary.
When so many of us are comfortable touting the phrase “there’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism,” sometimes I begin to wonder if we have internalized that into “there’s no such thing as ethical existence under capitalism.” Consumption is only one piece of the machine, but if we take into consideration the root sentiment here, which is that using the master’s tools is unavoidable most of the time, then subversion becomes about survival.
Destroying the master’s tools would destroy a lot more than just the master’s livelihood. There are other forms of collateral damage to consider. There are tools that can even be fully reclaimed, but it begins with the art of subversion.
I’ve spoken before about how astrology is one tool that capitalism has co-opted in its endless drive to sell our personhood back to us. Throughout history, astrology has experienced this type of treatment through many different iterations, because the ability to decode time has always been extremely appealing to those in positions of power. That’s why it’s always worthwhile and important to examine where systems of power may be seeping into your understanding of astrology—whether you spend more time on the consumer side or the practitioner side.
Sometimes you need to subvert your own understanding of astrology.
Where the houses come into the conversation is through a pretty wide-open front door, if you ask me. In the last handful of decades, the rise of psychological astrology (which now takes form as most pop astrology you see in the mainstream) brought upon the idea of “ABC houses,” or the “12 letter alphabet,” which incorrectly fused together the concepts of the signs and houses.
This is the commonly held belief by many beginner practitioners of astrology (I cannot get into the specifics of all house division systems across the globe, so I’m speaking just to Western astro here) that Aries “rules” the 1st house or is “naturally” assigned to it, and Taurus rules the 2nd house, and so on. While there has been more vocal disengagement from this idea in recent years as more public-facing astrologers like Chris Brennan take the time to address its roots and inception, ABC houses is still a very common thing many astrologers go through the process of unlearning when they begin to get deeper into their astrological studies.
Are ABC houses a direct byproduct of capitalism? That’s a tricky question to answer, but at the very least I think I can confidently say the concept is part of the actual trickle-down effects of unchecked capitalism (as opposed to the ones Reagan hallucinated). The long-term effect of capitalism is to flatten everything into a homogenized mass, bleeding out all creativity and nuance, and that’s what ABC houses do to our understanding of astrology.
It’s not just this one misconception that’s responsible for capitalism’s grip on astrology; let me be clear about that. But I do think it is the clearest example we have of the flattening that occurs when capitalism enters the chat.
The 1st House: The Battlefield of the Body
The 1st house (and the Ascendant) isn’t just about who you are, it’s about how you move through the world. From the moment of birth, your body is the vessel that determines your interface with life. The traditional significations of the 1st house—constitution, vitality, and presence—tell us as much about the physical experience of being as they do about the spirit inhabiting it.
Under capitalism, the body becomes the first and primary battlefield. How the world treats you is often determined not by the fullness of your humanity but by the attributes of your body: its perceived abilities, its gender, its race, its size, its appearance. The 1st house speaks to this embodied reality, reflecting how ease or difficulty in movement through the world is shaped not only by the self but also by systemic power structures.
The key distortion in the 1st house is the body as a commodity, rather than something sacred. Health itself is treated, under capitalism, like something that can be purchased through solutions to problems (often caused or exacerbated by capitalism’s demands on the body), rather than cultivating health in a holistic sense that prevents problems from occurring in the first place. Subversion here begins by rejecting the idea that the body must conform to external standards of worth or utility. The 1st house reminds us that embodiment is sacred and unique, not a project to be fixed, and that individual health is public health.
Like I tell all of my clients: capitalism touches every part of our lives, and the houses describe every part of our lives. I’m going to be taking a walk through the distortions and subversions of capitalism available to us in all 12 houses of the chart in my upcoming workshop, Subverting Capitalism Through The Houses. I’d love to see you there.
