The ninth house, sometimes called the house of institutions, whether those are religious or academic, or mobility or loudness, is the house of power. It’s the house of publishing, of getting to see your voice out there and visible. It’s the house of travel, of being able to orient the world to your body. It’s the house of recognition. The ninth house is the house of power.

The name for the ninth house is God. Firmicus writes that the ninth house is where “we find the social class of men.”

This is a specific type of man that Firmicus refers to. It’s a type of man who we find in public, who doesn’t flinch away from public spaces. It’s a type of man who doesn’t doubt or question his safety—it’s, in the words of Vito Corleone, “Senator Corleone. Governor Corleone, or something…”

The idea that the ninth house signifies higher education is relatively recent. Astrologers before William Lilly’s time described the ninth house as being about prophecies, about visions, about soothsaying, about religion, and about your relationship with the king. None of them mentioned higher education because higher education had not existed yet.

In her work, Sylvia Wynter writes that the human is a praxis. She writes that the first version of Man was religious before it was secular and economic. Humanity, she says, is a power relation that began with the clergy’s relation to the masses.

The ninth house is the Sun’s temple and it is a temple. It has sometimes looked like a senator’s hall, other times like a monastery, and sometimes like a gatekept institution. The ninth house is taking your SATs and feeling precarious about your future. It’s about taking out loans or scholarships and wondering whether you can afford a future. If the ninth house is God, then the ninth house is also your way towards the future. In a world where futures are sold, not all of us are able to access a future.

But the ninth house is also the house of imagination—of finding enough political will to create futures that are not yet available. The ninth house is an experimental house because it comes after the eighth and has not, yet, stabilized into the tenth. The ninth house isn’t just about school. The ninth house is your political will and your capacity for change. The ninth house is the house of freedom.

The Ninth House Changes

Sometimes, the ninth house holds the journeys that you have not yet taken. Other times, you wander there, in its expanse, feeling lost and certain. Still other times, you remember where you’ve been through the ninth house. The ninth house is the knowledge that you’ve earned through remaining alive and curious.

In the first phase of life, the ninth house is meant to signify travel. Then, after your first Saturn return, the ninth house means the things that you believe and the religious (or secular) institutions that recognize you. Only in the last phase of life does the ninth house become prophecies, visions, dreams, and knowledge.

Can the young be prophetic? I think that the old are better at it. The old are better at uncertainty, at living without needing to know what comes tomorrow. I think that the future can feel too calculated for us when we are young. But I do think that young people can be prophets, also, in the same way that young people can write poetry.

The ninth house is the house of imagination which, believe it or not, your education is supposed to support. That’s right. Education wasn’t originally meant to give you access to the right kind of resume. In the past, higher education was a gentleman’s sport. It was unrelated to work because education was for aristocrats who didn’t have to work. Education was about spiritual and intellectual development.

The first school, in how we think of it today, a friend taught me recently, was invented by a woman.

I think that the ninth house, in the first phase of life is like that book everyone gives people at your high school graduation. The Places You’ll Go. It’s not the waiting room, where everyone is always waiting for something to happen. It’s a road so abstract you might not even recognize it when you’re on it. You start your second decade of life, year twenty, in a ninth house year.

The first time you get a ninth house year either after or during your first Saturn return is when you are thirty two. There are some things that feel finished at that age. You’re able to see the road, finally. This ninth house year happens to coincide with an important Venus return. Thirty two is a year of growth.

In the elders I’ve talked to, the ninth house seems alleviated—lighter. You’re no longer weighed down by the tremendousness of the future. The elders I worked with were always the people who were the least afraid of collapse. That’s knowledge, I think, along with a kind of prophetic vision that you can only get through surviving for a long time.

Jupiter and the Sun

As for the ninth house, Jupiter forms its backbone. This is not from natural rulership but from the planetary co-signification of houses.

When I talk to people who have Jupiter in the ninth house, there’s a self assurance around knowledge. They know what they know. They don’t have to flourish. They hold their beliefs like stones. This isn’t the case with Sun in the ninth house people.

You see, the Sun rejoices in the ninth house. This is it’s house of joy—in God, in the elevated, and in the profound.

Sun in the ninth house people are hungry for knowledge. They’re never satisfied. It’s like they eat their lessons. These are the people who, if they go to college, change their majors two or three times not because they’re bored in one but because they’re ready for something else.

Sometimes, Sun in the ninth house people treat achievements like they’re lessons. They’re hungry for success because they eat that too. They move fast, always looking for the next big thing that will provoke them into growth. They’re not satisfied hanging out in one place. They always need an escape route.

You’ll notice something else. The ninth house is about the social class of men but Mars, that nocturnal symbol of some kind of masculinity, has no presence here. Mars is angry here, I think, in Jupiter’s house. It causes a lot of trouble. Mars disturbs the higher ups. In the ninth house, it leads to drives and causes.

The type of masculinity that Mars signifies is a soldier’s masculinity. It’s through Mars that men are sometimes treated as more disposable than women and children. Men work in more dangerous occupations and are the last to leave a sinking ship. Men are not rescued. But the ninth house isn’t about contrarian, rebellious, or tamed masculinity. The ninth house is about the social class of men.

The category of the human, which is sometimes gendered or racialized or economic, is not distributed equality but it hides in opportunity. The ninth house is where we sometimes prove our humanities, whether that is through education or religion or economic power. It’s the house of development. Being human, it’s a house of conquest over our non-human kin.

Working with the Ninth House

There’s a lot of good things in the ninth house—dreams of the future, self belief, and recognition. When you work with the ninth house, the best way to start is to ask yourself about your relationship to these things.

What happened when you had a dream about the future? Was your potential seen and uplifted? Did you feel like a daredevil when you dreamed? Were you punished?

What happened when you believed in your own existence? Were you believed? Were you mocked? Were you told that you were arrogant to inhabit any self certainty at all?

What happened when you sought to make yourself known to other people? Were you celebrated and included? Were you excluded?

How was your experience of school? Was your growth acknowledged or did you hide it like a good secret? Did you teach yourself how to learn outside of the structure of an institution or did you find your motivation depleted by years of being told to be good?

The ninth house is the house of imagination and of wonder. There is a paucity of imagination when we teach the majority of people only marketable skills that make them ready to join the labor market. The ninth house may not have to do with school for you, if education wasn’t where you found your awe of the universe. The ninth house might be a YA novel, might be a neighbor’s house, or it might be that forum on philosophy that your twenty year old self was obsessed with.

Before empire, before we were stuck with one type of power structure, groups of people experimented with power structures seasonally. They would be monarchs one moment and then anarchists the other. The possibility of change was always available.

The ninth house is the house of God. Healthy omnipotence is storytelling omnipotence in which you play with either a group of people or yourself in imagining the world as you’d like to see it. It’s playing pretend with kings and princes until you’re able to dream of a way that you’d like to live.