Our emotional foundation and subconscious self-image based on early childhood experiences are established in the fourth house. The way we feel about ourselves is conditioned by our experience of our parents’ (or significant others’) acceptance or rejection of us as we were growing up. From these experiences we developed our sense of belonging and our capacity to receive - and/or a sense of alienation and a difficulty or frozenness in receiving.

The fourth house rules the home, our family as a child and as an adult, the nurturing parent and our early experience of being nurtured, our most personal and intimate life, real estate and property, and our heritage and ancestry. Here is where we send down roots and establish a base of operations, find our limits, and generally secure ourselves. It is the end of any searching we might have done in the Third house, and thus rules the latter part of life. A planet here indicates the need for a stable emotional base in order to fill the needs of the house it rules. The more planets in this house, the more one tends to be subjective, personal, private or introverted.

Astronomically speaking, the fourth house is that one-twelfth sector of the local sky counter-clockwise from the nadir (see above picture) occupied by planets in the two hours before they reach the lowest point in the local sky.

In this incarnation you have chosen to learn to build inner security, rather than to derive it from external sources such as job, lover, family, etc. This occurs not by your becoming a rock or totally alienated from others, but rather by becoming more conscious of your unconscious patterns. As a child you may not have been recognized as the individual you are, nor had your emotional needs met by your parents. That forced you back on yourself, and reinforced the lesson not to depend externally on security. It is often the case that you have had prior life experiences of not having had your emotional or individuality needs met or recognized. You may thus come into this life with a great deal of need ready to be triggered, especially if you have karma with one or both of your parents around these issues. This heightened sensitivity and vulnerability on your part, coupled with this incarnationally repeating family pattern, produces a difficult cycle that needs to be made conscious and understood. It may be, however, that in order to learn the lesson of building security in yourself you have drawn a dominating or even abusive or cruel parent. You also tend to unconsciously pick partners who reflect the psychological makeup of one or both of your parents.

This Pluto in the Fourth House page and much of this 550-page website are excerpted from You and the Universe, a handmade, individualized fine art book on astrology, mythology and astronomy through which the recipient's complete astrological reading is woven.