The term “supportive” houses isn’t really a term that comes from any school in astrology but is just how I think of houses three, five, nine, and eleven. These four houses are the signs that sextile either the ascendent or the descendent.

Both houses three and eleven will be about community. Both houses three and eleven are about how other people support you. House eleven is about the ways in which the idea of community impacts the ways you show up for others and yourself. House three is about the ways in which you might impact community.

Community is not a static thing. Community has to reach the third house from the eleventh by going through the agent of change that is you (your ascendent). Both houses eleven and three can be social houses since they show the ways in which your ascendent changes based on how other people treat you.

House three is also a cadent house while house eleven is a succedent house. This means that, while both houses are about social support, house eleven is about changing the world with people and house three is about letting your actions in community change yourself. Sometimes, house three might be around relationships that we think of as more personal while house eleven is more about collective action and political relationships. Again, personal and political commitments are really the same thing. All our personal relationships are also political and all our political relationships are also personal. The differences between them are really just a shift in perspective.

Houses five and nine show us where our own actions impact other people. These houses sextile the descendent. They show us how we support other people. House five is about pleasure. House nine is about power. Pleasure becomes power when they move through the agent of change that is a relationship.

Both houses five and nine are love houses. We love each other with pleasure and with power. House five is the succedent house that ends the fourth house, which means that our pleasure fixes us to the specificity of our histories. House nine is a cadent house and prepares us for the tenth house. Power is what happens when we love other people while we struggle against the world together. The ninth house is where we turn critical connection into systemic change.

While the angular houses are about the actual events of change themselves, the supportive houses or houses that sextile the horizon are about the places where we see change become more than what was promised. The angular houses may be the initial decision to change and the supportive houses are the unexpected consequences are those decisions.

Transits to the supportive houses will affect the angular houses that they are adjacent to. Transits to houses three are about preparing for transits to the fourth house—changes to the ways you impact community prepare you to account for your personal histories. Transits to the fifth house are about supporting decisions you made during the transit in your fourth house—you support the reckoning with your histories by defining types of love that dream of futures.

Transits to houses nine and eleven will be about the tenth house. When a planet transits your ninth house, you’re preparing for an angular transit to your tenth house. You’re changing your idea of power so that you can know the world in a different way. Transits to the eleventh house will support those changes that you made when you experienced an angular tenth house transit. After changing your structural environment in some way, you’re relearning relationships and the social structures that you live inside of.

The supportive houses are impacted by houses four and ten and affect houses one and seven. These are the social houses. They show you, simply, how your actions affect your relationships. Houses five and eleven are really about the same question—the question of how your environment supports you. Houses three and nine are also about the same thing, which is the question of how you impact your environment.

When working with these houses, don’t worry so much about securing definitions of each house. Instead, look back on what happened when planets transited angular ones and ask yourself what the real structures of support looked like in your life. For some people, support looks like learning space and, for others, it can be about learning validation for a survival strategy that you used to feel shame about. There’s no readymade way to talk about relationships that fits your life perfectly. When talking about the supportive houses, get creative with your own vocabulary instead.