On the Third House

siblings and the sacred in the profane

I’ve been fretting a lot over siblings in recent weeks as our move to Virginia has brought my husband and me in closer physical, if not emotional, proximity to two out of our three younger sisters.

In Hellenistic astrology, siblings are signaled by the third house, a place of daily habit, the people you encounter each week as you go about your neighborhood errands, your normal work. The third house was also known by astrologers in the fourth and fifth centuries as the House of the Goddess. Opposite the institutionally backed House of God in the ninth, the third signified a more mundane encounter with divinity. This was seeking and worshipping the divine through contact with the stuff of everyday life: home altars, local routes, the rituals of morning cleaning, preparing food, feeding hungry guests and family members—rituals that were so day-in, day-out they could be easily mistaken as nothing more than routine chores, natural rhythms. Women’s labor. Naturally, in the patriarchal system of the Hellenistic world, this kind of god-contact was considered weak; those very-olden-day diviners regarded the third house the “least good of the good” astrological houses, according to Demetra George’s translative work, or “the best of the bad” houses. It’s a view on the work and spaces (and deities) traditionally coded as feminine that seems a far cry from the sentiment boldly proclaimed on the outside of the women’s lodge at the base of a mountain in the small town where I now live. “Labor Conquers All Things,” the club, founded for and by the white women of the village in 1920, asserts.