“There’s nothing in my 7th house. Does that mean I will never get married?” I’d love to have a dollar for every time I’ve heard that question. As your own practice unfolds, I guarantee that you’ll hear it a lot too. If you sit with clients, empty houses are one of those issues that come up over and over again. That’s inevitable – for starters, unless we start flooding our charts with countless asteroids, everybody in the world has at least two of them. There are ten planets and twelve houses. You can do the math. 

So what do they mean? Are empty houses truly “dead zones” in a person’s life? That’s sort of true sometimes, but often not. The question is actually fairly complicated. Let’s explore it, starting with one stand-out fact:

AIN’T NO SUCH THING AS AN EMPTY HOUSE 

Planets definitely activate a house in a big way, but they are not the only astrological factor that can accomplish that feat. Signs represent energy too. Every house has a sign on its cusp. That sign sets the tone for our experience in that department of life even if there are no planets there. Lacking a planet, the house fades somewhat in importance, but it is still part of life. Everyone has all twelve houses and we can’t be fully human without some experience connected with each one of them. 

• Margot Robbie of Barbie fame has an empty 10th house, but her Midheaven is in Taurus, which is ruled by Venus in Gemini and the 11th house. Venus of course is the “goddess of the arts,” and so when it comes to career, a Venus path naturally opened up before her. She’s talented and beautiful, skilled with language (Gemini) and good at working in teams and joint projects – there’s the 11th house.

• Stormy Daniels was not famous for her chastity. One might expect her to have a highly activated 5th house, and yet it’s empty. Taurus to the rescue again – that’s the sign on her 5th house cusp, so once again we see the Venus rulership. Her Venus meanwhile is in Aquarius and squared by Uranus in Scorpio: lots of edgy, rule-breaking symbolism there, all related in clear ways to her 5th house experience. 

• Another person not famous for chastity but also born with an empty 5th house is Donald Trump. He’s got Sagittarius on the cusp and it’s ruled by his 2nd house Jupiter and squared by his 11th house Venus and Saturn, both in Cancer. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous line: “I can resist anything except temptation.”

Obviously in each of these three cases, I’m not diving into a deep astrological analysis. The point is simply that I could – and you could too. The symbolism is all there to be read and from what we actually know of these people’s lives, it fits. These “empty houses” are activated in ways we can understand astrologically. In each case, we could even go deeper and offer them counsel about how to optimize their responses to each of these houses based solely on sign information.

Let me add two more points. Even if a house is empty in the natal chart, sooner or later its underlying pattern of sign energy will be triggered into activation by transits, progressions, or solar arcs. Then there’s love or any of its variations: if a partner’s planets fall in one of your “empty” houses, as long as you are together the experiences of that house will figure in your life. A classic example is what happens when a childless person falls in love with someone who has kids. Suddenly that childless person has kids too – and probably a partner who drops a planet into his or her 5th house. 

Once again, the takeaway is that there is really no such thing as a truly empty house. All twelve are energized at least to some extent in every one of us.

THREE WAYS TO SAY EVERYTHING

Astrology is really three interlocking symbol systems: planets, signs, and houses. For every plain-English concept that we use in our work, there is a planet, a sign, and a house to represent it. They are not exactly interchangeable, but they’re close. For example, how do we understand partnerships from an astrological perspective – do we use Venus, or Libra, or the 7th house? In practice, in any particular partnership situation, any one of those three symbols could be in the spotlight. 

This leads us to perhaps our most fundamental insight into “empty” houses – they might very well mislead us. What if you have nothing in your 7th house, but Venus is conjunct your Ascendant in Libra? Are relationships likely to be a low-energy issue in your life? All astrologers know better.

• When faced with an empty house, before diminishing the importance of that area of life,  remember to check for the condition of the corresponding sign and the ruling planet. For every issue in life, there are three astrological ways in which it can be activated. Houses are only one of them.

Let’s look at the chart of the late, great spiritual teacher, Ram Dass. December 22 marks the sixth anniversary of his passing, but he lives on in the hearts of many of us. My band Silkworm was scheduled to open for him in North Carolina back in the late 1970s. We were there in the auditorium doing our afternoon sound check when he walked in. I’ll always remember how utterly human and unpretentious he was – like any true spiritual teacher, he wasn’t busy impressing us with his wisdom, yet his presence itself was a blessing.

Other than the famous words “Be Here Now” from the title of Ram Dass’s best-known book, perhaps his second-most quoted line is “love, serve, remember.” And he walked his talk – Ram Dass seemed to live to serve people. Yet his 6th house – the house of service – is empty. This absence is particularly striking because another dimension of the 6th house is mentoring and initiation. He was utterly devoted to Neem Karoli Baba, his guru – and of course he himself initiated and mentored many people in the course of his life, including me. 

So why no planets in his 6th house? What it symbolizes was clearly a huge area of his life. He was, after all, part of a lineage. 

Jupiter rules Ram Dass’s 6th house from the mystical 12th house. It’s in the nurturing sign, Cancer. All of that tells us something that’s relevant. But what is the sixth sign of the zodiac? Virgo is of course the answer, and there we find his Neptune in his 3rd house. He served (Virgo) by teaching (3rd house) spiritual matters (Neptune.) 

In practical astrology the word “work” can relate to either the 6th house or, more commonly, to the 10th. The two houses aren’t exactly interchangeable, but they do overlap a lot in practice. In simple terms, the 10th house is “the hat we wear in the world,” while the 6th house feels more like “Monday morning.” It’s where we actually develop and practice our craft. Ram Dass has a packed 10th house, so there’s no way we could do a meaningful interpretation of his chart without being pedal-to-the-metal about his mission in the world. And what sign lies on the cusp of his 10th house? Pisces – which, via rulership, brings us right back to that 3rd house Neptune in “6th sign” Virgo.

The point is that even though Ram Dass’s 6th house contains no planets, by the time we translate the related symbolism into English, we’ve pretty well covered the “6th house” base. That’s all because of the underlying principle that there is more than one way to say the same thing astrologically. Always, when you’re faced with an empty house, remember to look at the condition of the related sign and planet – and pay some attention to the sign on that house cusp and to the planet that rules it.

Again, empty houses are not as empty as they look.

WHAT IF ALL THREE SYMBOLS ARE QUIET?

Sometimes it happens that a house is devoid of planets, the corresponding sign is empty, and the related planets are hiding out in a corner. What do we do then? Start by remembering that there is always a sign on the cusp of that empty house. Based on it, you can always find something meaningful to say. 

• Keep perspective though – the message of the chart, at least from the evolutionary point of view, is that in this lifetime this particular area of life is of diminished importance for the person in question. That’s really the bottom line.

Imagine a person with an empty 7th house, nothing in Libra, and Venus not playing a very central role in the chart. It would still very likely be a major blunder to announce to that person that “relationships don’t mean anything to you.” Start with a little common sense – relationships are significant to basically everybody. Add the technical realities of astrology – as we have seen, people everywhere have Venus in their charts – and even if it’s a quiet one, it is still Venus. Everyone has some Libran energy even if there are no planets there. Everyone has a 7th house and it’s flavored with sign energy. 

No one’s chart contains zero relationship symbolism. That is simply not possible.

We also need to recognize that astrological symbolism speaks of relationships in a variety of ways. 4th house symbolism can indicate family. The 5th house can point to children or romances. The 6th can indicate mentoring relationships that are of enormous importance. The 8th house can point to the mysteries of coupling and sexual bonding. If those houses are activated, that’s the language we would use in talking about relationships – and, guaranteed, it would be meaningful to the client.

If all of those “arc of intimacy” houses are empty and the rest of the symbolism is quiet, in practice a working astrologer would focus on other areas of life. If the client were to ask about relationships, we could respond based on the techniques I’ve been describing – but we would also assure the client that from the deepest evolutionary perspective, in this incarnation they were not truly “majoring” in those intimate areas. Other developments were simply more pressing.

Whenever a part of life is relatively inactive in that sense, in my experience with clients, they often register a certain relief as they hear it. At some deep level, it rings true for them.

So these are my thoughts about empty houses: 

• First, there really aren’t any! 

• Second, the basic human ideas connected with houses that lack planets are often activated in other ways via related signs and rulerships. 

• Third, sometimes an entire area of life is de-emphasized in a person’s chart. If so, as astrologers, we should de-emphasize it too.