The eleventh house is the house of genius. Firmicus calls it the Bonus Daemon or Bonus Genius, which is sometimes translated simply as the good spirit.
I don’t know about you but I get a kind of Christian religious memory from hearing the words good spirit. It reminds me of fellowship, which is something else that the eleventh house is responsible for, and gathering in the house of God or some shit like that. Manilius calls the eleventh house a temple of Jupiter and says that it is blessed.
In their book Joyful Militancy, carla bergman and Nick Montgomery write that “Friendship is the root of freedom.” They say that “‘Freedom’ and ‘friend’ share the same early Indo-European root: *fri-, or *pri-, meaning ‘love.’” They write that:
“Freedom and friendship used to mean the same thing: intimate, interdependent relationships and the commitment to face the world together. At its root, relational freedom isn’t about being unrestricted: it might mean the capacity for interconnectedness and attachment. Or mutual support and care. Or shared gratitude and openness to an uncertain world. Or a new capacity to fight alongside others.”
And, so, the eleventh house is the house of good luck, free people, friends and friendship, hope, love, and happiness.
The eleventh house opposes the fifth house, which is the house of the erotic. It’s both these houses, this axis of the fifth and eleventh, I think, that refers to love. You often find the meaning of one house in its opposite.
Friendship is a utopia. It’s a commitment. It’s a confirmed desire. Making friendships is about world building. It’s about looking another person in the eye and saying “I am your person too.” Friendship can be just as jealous and passionate as romantic sexual love. If friendship and freedom mean the same thing, then I don’t think that we are able to imagine any kind of future without first imagining friendship.
The Eleventh House Changes
The eleventh house changes because friendship changes. When we’re young, a lot of us are trapped in mandatory school. This is a place where we have to go everyday to be around a bunch of people who we would otherwise not meet who happen to be our age. We’re alienated from people who are not our age.
Sometimes, friendship becomes larger when we grow out of mandatory education. We get to make friends with people of all ages! But we have to figure out how to make adult friends first, which means friends in places where we are not forced together. We have to learn freedom.
Freedom is a cultivated skill. It takes a lot of awkwardness because you start to reveal your oddities when faced with freedom. You start to spend all of your time researching celestial bodies in the sky or talking to squirrels. And that’s how you make friends—by being fucking weird. Trust me. There’s no other way, that is, unless you’re looking to network.
Traditionally, the eleventh house rules hope in the first phase of life. It rules friends in the second, and it rules grace and benefits in the third.
There are all things that support one another. You need hope to cultivate friendship. You need friendship to cultivate hope. You need both to cultivate generosity. Friends are those with whom you share things freely. You share time, you share recipes, you share food, and you share life. Friendship, and hope, is where mutual aid begins.
The Sun and Jupiter
The eleventh house is a bit of a mirror to the ninth. They both blank the highest angle of the chart and they’re both defined by the Sun and Jupiter. While the ninth house is the social class of men, the eleventh is about fellowship, equality, and fraternity.
Oop, did I say fraternity? The eleventh house, being the house of friendship between equals, has also sometimes been a place that excluded women. But not always. Medieval astrologers, specifically Al-Biruni, refer to the eleventh house as signifying the love that one receives specifically from women.
Women, especially peasant women, were very powerful in the middle ages. They ran the farms, the mutual aid, and they built the movements. It’s only post Enlightenment, after ideals around liberty were appropriated by the aristocrats and academics, that we start to see fraternities.
Jupiter here, I think, is about the generosity of the eleventh house. Venus, which rejoices and signifies the fifth house, dares us to not just accept and receive but to enjoy to the fullest extent. Jupiter is bigger than Venus. It’s the bigger benefic. Jupiter is about giving things away until they come back to you, without knowing whether or not they will come back to you.
When I talk to people with a rejoicing Jupiter, with a Jupiter in the eleventh house, I always hear these stories about friends who always seem to give them exactly what they need in the moment. Sometimes, it’s a small gift and, other times, it's a big one. Sometimes, it’s a gift that they don’t know what to do with.
Jupiter is the sugar daddy who puts a feast in front of you. He doesn’t care if you’re hungry. Jupiter in the eleventh house people do this with friends. Jupiter multiplies what is not yours or mine but what is ours here. Jupiter helps you out by helping everyone you know out.
Working with the Eleventh House
When you go through difficult eleventh house transits, it’s not that you lose friends. It’s that you realize who has been a friend to you and who hasn’t. It’s up to you to do what you want with that information. When we aren’t taught freedom, we also are not taught friendship. A lot of the time, people who have not acted as a friend towards you don’t know how to be friends. You can teach or you can let that person learn without you. You don’t have to stay in any relationship you don’t want to be in.
What’s interesting about people who have a lunar node in the fifth house is that they typically don’t necessarily experience the most frustration with friends but with issues around the fifth house—they have regrets or exclusions that they remember from childhood, they feel alienated from romance, or they feel stunted in pleasure.
The reason why I think this happens is because there are so many guidebooks around how to date and not enough around how to make, maintain, and enjoy friendships. We often complain that dating is so consumer based, that we shop around for a partner like we’re buying something, and we feel like we have to put ourselves in a marketplace when we want to just fall in love.
But what about friends? In my opinion, you should not date anyone who you’re not also friends with. This means, of course, that you must date your friends.
I don’t think that there’s a line between friends and lovers unless we do a lot of work to maintain that distinction, which we do. But then actually falling in love? You don’t fall in love with someone unless they’re also best friend material.
So, maybe it’s good that we tend to underestimate the bond and attachment of friendship. We’ve been left alone in trying to figure it out for ourselves, trying to defend it against nuclear style attachments, and friendships have not gone away despite the ways in which our lack of time under capitalism tries its best to rob friendship in every way possible. Friendship survives with you and you get to figure out how to do it without consequence.
There is no legal foundation that defines friendship but you still make friends. You barely have time to do so and you make friends. You don’t have a concrete goal, like marriage, when you make friends and there’s not even any apps for the purpose of helping you make friends. But you go out, talk to the squirrels, and you run into people who already speak their language.
