So far you can say what a planet is and how it behaves in its sign. That gives you a person with no address. Houses add the address: the part of life where that planet does most of its work.
Picture the chart as a clock face cut into twelve slices. Each slice is a house, and each house stands for an area of ordinary life. A planet in a house tells you where its energy tends to go.
Here are the twelve, in the plainest words we can find:
You don't need to memorize this list today. You'll look things up for a while, and then one day you won't need to.
Planets move slowly across the sky, so being born at 7 am or 7 pm barely changes where they are. The Moon is the exception, and even it only moves about half a sign in a day. The houses are different. They come from the horizon, and the horizon turns with the Earth.
As the Earth spins, a new sign climbs over the eastern horizon roughly every two hours. That sign is your rising sign, and it sets where house 1 begins. Get the time wrong by an hour or two and every planet can land in a different house, even though the planets themselves haven't moved.
This is why the course asked for a birth time back in lesson 0. If you don't know yours, the planets and signs from lessons 1 to 3 still hold. The houses are the part you'd hold loosely.
There are several ways to divide the chart into houses, and astrologers argue about them happily. This course uses whole-sign houses, the oldest method and the easiest to read by eye.
It works like this: whatever sign is rising becomes the whole of house 1. The next sign in order is house 2, the one after that is house 3, and so on around the circle. One sign, one house, no splitting.
Maya was born at 7:40 am in Chicago with Taurus rising, so Taurus is her house 1. From there it counts itself:
Her rising point is only 3.8 degrees into Taurus. A little earlier that morning, Aries would have been rising, and every house would have shifted by one. That's how touchy this part of the chart is.
Now drop her planets into those houses. Because each house is one whole sign, you just ask which sign each planet is in.
Four planets in house 11 and three in house 9. That's a lopsided chart, and lopsided is interesting. Her attention leans toward friends and groups (11) and toward belief, study and distance (9). We'll weigh those crowds properly in lesson 7.
In lesson 3 you built one sentence from a planet and a sign. The house slots onto the end as the place where it happens.
Maya's Moon is in Capricorn. From lesson 3: she feels safe when things are handled and earned. Add house 9 and you get something more specific. She feels safe when she has a framework to believe in, something like a field she's studied properly or a view of the world she's worked out for herself.
Her Sun is in Pisces in house 11. The Pisces part says she runs on empathy and imagination. The house says where that shows most: among friends, in groups, in causes bigger than her. She's likely the one in the group chat who notices who has gone quiet.
Planet, then sign, then house. What, how, where. That's the full sentence, and you'll use it for the rest of the course.
Ten planets, twelve houses. Every chart has at least two empty rooms. Maya has seven empty houses: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 12. That's more than most, because her planets bunch together.
An empty house doesn't mean that area of life is missing. Her empty 7th doesn't mean no partner, and her empty 4th doesn't mean no family. It means no planet is pointing a spotlight there from birth. Those parts of life can run fine on their own.
Every empty house still has a sign on it, though, and every sign has a ruling planet. Maya's 7th house is Scorpio. Following its ruler to find out how partnership works for her is a trick we'll pick up in lesson 5, where the same idea gives us her chart ruler.