#93 | The Third House | Siblings, Language, Early Environment

And today we are making our way out of that second house where we learned that we had a body and got into the sensual realm , felt our way into things , grasped a few things , grasped some ideas into things , grasped a few things , grasped some ideas and maybe we lost our hands and grew them back , as per the fairy tale of the handless maiden that we just

explored . And we're going to say goodbye to that house and move on down the road . We're going to happen upon the third house of astrology . We're going to have to have a good look around here because there's so many things in this house to explore together .

This is the house of early environments and early learning our siblings , the ones that are around us , our voice , the words that we use , the accent that we have , those things that we mimic , some of those experiences that we had in early childhood as far as school and people in the neighborhood , how we got around that neighborhood , what we learned from the

people around us , how we grew up in that environment . Take a moment just to see what does this house actually look like for you personally . It's going to be different for all of us . Is it a grand mansion or is it a small hut ? Is it a house in the suburbs or is it out in the woods ? But get a sense of that place . That is your early experiences .

As you get a bit closer , have a look on the door , and whatever's written on the door , as for all of our houses , is the sign on the cusp of that house . If you know your astrology chart , you will know what that sign is and the ruler that it has . How has this house informed who you are ? I want to start with language itself and mimicry .

One of the things about the third house is your accent . When did you actually figure out that you had an accent ? It may be when someone with a different accent came in to your early experience , into your childhood . Or it may even be when you traveled for the first time and heard other people's accents and then assumed that you must also have one too .

It's a funny refrain to say I don't have an accent .

Of course we all do , and that accent is shaped in our childhood by mimicry , and we must remember that the third house is the first of the three relational houses , is the first of the three relational houses , so the third house tends to be in relationship to siblings and these early friends and school and what have you .

And then the seventh house is one-to-one relationships , including marriages and long-term relationships and even one-to-one business partnerships , and it's actually that 11th house that is , groups and teams and when people come together for a higher cause of some kind . So where is friendship in that ?

Well , it could be in this third house or it could be in that 11th house , typically declared to be in the 11th , but you can also get a sense of it down in this third house . So these early imprints from the third will speak to the 7th and the 11th . It will

speak to the kind of relationships we have . It won't be an exact mirror . It's not like you go out into the world and you find your sibling , although that can happen but it's the sort of thing where there's an imprint here that connects in to that seventh house , the myth or the fairy tale episode .

For the third house I'm going to be exploring the story of Echo , and Echo is what we do with language . Echo is how we learn language . We echo back what others have said to us . That's our form of socialization , or we might say parroting . We parrot back what others have said . So the question there is your own voice .

It must have something to do with this mimicking of the voices around you and then connect to something deeper inside of yourself . So , in a way , the third house is our connection of that something deeper down in through all of the words that we use , which are obviously not our own . They were taught to us .

So what is the language underneath that language and how do we go about discovering that ? And part of that , the hint to some of that , is to explore this third house of . Well , you know , what did we first discover when we started to use our voice ? Were we asked to speak up , or were we asked to shut up and sit in the corner ?

Or were children seen but not heard in your early environment ? Or were children celebrated and made to be the center of attention ? Maybe you had several experiences that were contradicting in a way , but maybe you've made your story through that .

Through that third house and those third house experiences , you've somehow taken all of those fragments of your childhood and created into a coherent story . It can be that we're not allowed to talk . It can be that we're supposed to talk some more . It could be many things in here .

As we explored when we were in the first house , we discovered or knew that Mercury is in its joy in the first house , and then the second house doesn't really have anything in its joy there , but in the third house it's

the moon that is in its joy . In this house . We can think then of that emotional atmosphere , of your early learning environment and the way that memory and emotion really go together . I heard it said once that memories cluster around emotional states , and that's a very third house concept , so take that in .

If you're feeling depressed and then you think about your life , the memories about depression that have happened in your life will cluster around and vie for your attention and they'll all put themselves together .

And if you're feeling joyful and you think back into your life , then you'll think about all these joyful memories and so the mood or the moon and memory they kind of go together in this house . Yeah , it's something to really remember , especially if you're having a long period of depression or a lot of flatness in your life .

When you use that emotion and you go in to remember the things that have happened in your life , no doubt you'll be remembering every sad thing , every bad thing that's happened to you . So just remember that . It's like a distortion field .

But yeah , the moon here is something that I'll discuss more with Cameron Allen in the interview we have through the third house . But if you think about it as well nursery rhymes and lullabies and the rhythms of the classroom all of those are very lunar and circular . You know , this is the first can . You can feel that circular nature of reality .

You know , we get up in the morning , we eat our breakfast , we go off to school and we do everything by the bell at the school and then we come back . You know , depending on , of course , what kind of classroom you were in , but typically that's the rhythm right , we go , we start to get into a , a rhythmic field .

That is our learning , and learning through that repetition . And so that's why the moon is in its joy here . This is what the moon likes to do . It likes the circular reality , the lunar consciousness isn't this big solar hero , right ? It's not trying to go off and vanquish the demons and go on some big solar quest . The lunar reality is an everyday reality .

It's this realm , it's these rhythms that we are in in the daily world . Now , something that made me think about the third house in the modern world is this idea of that parrot . It's like we see the thing and then we say the thing how much has changed ? In the new world of social media the third house isn't .

When we go deep into thought and really try to wrestle with things and contemplate things on a deeper level , a lot of that is left for the opposite house , the ninth house , where we're really asking the big questions of reality , like is there a God and what does it all mean , and we put our minds to the deep , the deep thinking and the big questions of

reality . But that's not the third house . The third house is the little questions and so in a way , the the third house it's like it can be that mimic or that parrot . I feel like there's almost like a distortion into the third house in the modern world

with social media , because ideas are getting spread around and everybody's just kind of parroting that back , that idea and as soon as the idea gains enough traction it becomes a consensus reality sort of an idea . It's like that's what's real .

You know , we've never known in human history a machine like social media that can replicate itself , or ideas can just replicate and replicate and replicate out and then force their way into reality . In some ways , social media is like the third house on steroids and it's difficult , isn't it ?

It's difficult to find places on the internet or on social media that you can really go deeper and contemplate . I've been enjoying recently getting into Substack where there's writers that are writing in a much more contemplative way , that you can really sink into their writing . It can be a very shallow pool of thought here .

This can be one of the shadows of a third , like a shallow pool that's just like echoing around and that's only amplified by these algorithms that grab those echoes and push them into different chambers and just , it's madness't it ? It really is .

I mean , maybe that's part of the lunar frequency , the lunatic frequency of the third , how these things , these , these ideas , can just circulate so quickly that they almost do become a form of madness .

As I was preparing for this house , I was thinking about those early childhood experiences and um , for five and a half years I lived in Taiwan and for five of those years I taught kindergarten kids .

First of all it was like so repetitive , you know , like every day we would have the same thing , we would sing many of the same songs in that first period because these were kids who didn't speak English and my job was to help them to learn English , so they were really parroting me and then they were parroting each other .

You know , in this environment the kids just loved so many of these songs they would never really tire of them . You know , one glass I taught for three years and we could still sing you Are my Sunshine , my Only Sunshine . That song we could still sing that and they'd be so happy . I could sing it every day and they'd be happy .

And this kind of rhythm that we got into by that repetition , by that rote , that they would learn their language and of course they became quite fluent doing that every day , day in , day out . And every time new vocabulary would come up it would always be put into song . And I still think today that .

You know we don't want to sit around in a classroom singing songs , but I do think it's . Perhaps one of the easiest ways to learn a language is to sing those old nursery rhymes and to hear the rhythm and the flow of languages put together . So , yeah , this is also obviously the house of siblings and sibling dynamics .

So if you have no siblings or foster siblings , or you have many siblings or just one or whatever it is , the story will be held and told by your third house . My mentor , brian Clark , wrote a book called the Sibling Constellation .

In this book he really goes deep into how , you know , so much is talked about with the parental dynamics and all of these different components of our relationship to our parents and how that shapes us and all those early experiences of our relationship to our parents and how that shapes us and all those early experiences .

And yet , in psychology , so little actually is written about siblings . It's like they don't have quite the same level as those parental dynamics do when considered as shapers of the personality and shapers of our consciousness , you know , and our ways of thinking about ourselves .

And yet these are the first , equal others and , as Brian says , these are the ones that you know we are going to be with from the start and there's the potential we can be with all the way to the end . Of course that doesn't always come to pass , but these are the ones that were around .

These are the ones that we have to either contend with in those early days or play with or enjoy their company , or fight for resources of the second house or whatever it might be , or fight for the attention of the parents' love , which is in the fourth house .

The siblings kind of get wedged in between the resources of the second and the family and the familiar dynamics and the parental love of the fourth . We get a lot of amplifications of these themes in fairy tale and in myth . It made me think about Cinderella and those two wicked stepsisters and Psyche in Psyche , and Eros also has two sisters .

In Cinderella there's the story of like , you're not good enough , you're only good for um , doing all the the dishes and the laundry and the chores around the house . But you'll never be anything more than that . And so much so that they even name cinderella cinderella they even give her that as a name and um , and that becomes her identity .

Uh , because of what the siblings basically gave to her , they gave her that identity . And then psyche and Eros in the same way . Right , they were so jealous of Psyche's beauty and then eventually so jealous of all of this palatial life that she was living that they plotted against her .

So that's sort of the darker side of siblings , and of course that can happen from time to time , you know . And then of course we have the other side of siblings , like Artemis and Apollo . You know , that's the moon and the sun god , and they're just forever , so tight with each other , you know , so close to each other .

There is little fragments of jealousy that go on through that , particularly in the Orion story , depending on which version you go to , but generally there was such a deep love and connection between those two , two , the brother and sister of artemis and and apollo , um , you know , forever connected to each other .

And then of course we have the gemini twins of castor and pollux . Castor is mortal and pollux is immortal and , uh , when the two twins were fighting another set of twins , it ends up that Caster unfortunately is killed and Pollux is so devastated by this that he offers up his own immortality to Caster .

So this can be the level of love that we feel , you know , this deep bond and this deep connection that we feel for that other , for that first other . You know , in that story Pollux actually does give his immortality , or at least half of it , to Caster . But then there's the tragedy that they're never together anymore .

So when one's in the upper world , the other's in the underworld and they're always turning around and around . They're sort of like ships in a night , always crossing as they go over , and they're spending one day in the upper world , one day in the underworld .

Of course , course , those two twins had another set of twins , helen and clyton , nestra , uh , who are , who are big parts of the epics of um , of the greek tragedies . But we won't get too far into those because we get lost in that world of the mythic . And then then there's the brothers Hermes and Apollo . What a great set of siblings those are .

That kind of explores the whole gambit of sibling dynamics . In that story Apollo is the sun , god , right , so he's the very sun , he's like the first sun . And then along comes

this second sun , this second sibling , and disrupts the apple cart . Of course Apollo isn't going to like that in the best of times .

But even worse when your little brother is Hermes , the trickster god , and the first thing he wants to do when he's alive is to steal your cattle and cause you all sorts of trouble and then hide them away in a cave and just basically niggle at you and niggle at you , and that's Hermes' way .

But of course there's the beautiful scene in that myth where Apollo has dragged Hermes up to Zeus and you know Grant , the big father Zeus , and he's asked him to judge Hermes and tell him what's what and put him in his place .

And in that scene Hermes just lies bold-faced to Zeus and lies that he's never even heard of cows , he's never seen a cow and he's only really drawn them in his picture book with his mummy , doesn't know anything about stealing or anything like that , and he gives Zeus a wink because he's telling such a big baloney lie .

And Zeus has a big laugh at that moment and zeus kind of says what we all really want to hear as siblings , which is that this world needs the apollo types and it needs order and structure and and discipline and all those beautiful apollo apollo things .

But it also needs the , the hermes types , the creators and the disruptors and the ones that make people laugh . And so zeus just tells the two brothers to go work it out .

There can be an understanding of how each one , in their uniqueness and their individuality , is bringing something different to the table and they can ultimately help each other in the long run .

So we also had in the second house , the idea of one's hands and the loss and the gaining of one's hands and that's also the third house is when we use the hands for writing and as that great mercury tool for writing or drawing or scribbling or whatever it might be , doodling it might be , we start to use that hand and that's a great area of creativity

because , you know , in a way the hands are extension of the lungs and therefore , you know , in ancient Greece they used to see the mind not as in the brain , but in the lungs , and so the hands end up being this extension of the lungs . It's quite different , isn't it ? Writing versus speaking .

You know , I'm experiencing this right now as I'm talking to you guys into the microphone , and what it's like to be writing with my pen or on the or on the keyboard .

It's such a different experience , like different thoughts can come out , different frequencies can come out , and although it's the same voice , it's definitely different when you're using your hands versus when you're using , ultimately , your breath , which is what I'm doing , what we're doing when we're speaking it out .

So yeah , in a way , writing is that bridge between the internal thought that you have and the external symbol and these symbols that we've created over time , which is the alphabet in the Western world and you know the picture languages of China and Japan and those countries is a whole different way of expressing , and all these different languages that have different

ways of scribbling , basically different ways of getting their point across , different ways of symbolizing that language . And what does that do to our minds ? The different language that we're , different writing that we're brought up into , how does that shape our mind and how does our mind shape it ?

So , in a way , the hand is an extension of the voice , but it's got its own voice as well . There's things that the hand will say that the voice may not . So another thing in that third house is vehicles and movement .

Um , I heard it say once that the ninth house was where you want to go and the third house is how you get there , and so this , the third house , could be a house of bikes and buses and school walks and , um , you know , scooters and and uh , and those little razor scooter things .

I have all sorts of new things out there now , like the Segway and all those kinds of things that get us around and you know , as we're moving around our neighborhood we're really drawing mental maps in our mind of where things are , what is around us .

You know , this is why it's these technologies that we have , like Google Maps it kind of comes , is why it's these technologies that we have , like Google Maps , it kind of it comes in and it's so helpful .

I mean , I'm so glad and so grateful that I have Google Maps , but I can feel my ability to map the neighborhood decreases the more I use the Google Maps . You know , I remember when I was in my early childhood neighborhoods I kind of know where everything was , because I had to kind of get lost out there in different places .

And that's how I would just slowly but surely map , especially the bike , the bicycle . I remember having little gangs , a little gang , and we'd ride around on our bicycle and go through the cemetery and all those kinds of places and find little cubbies to hang out at and jump off things .

And you know , you start to track and you start to know that local mind , the motion around the locations , around the local areas , is how the local mind maps onto what's around you .

And I remember reading Tyson Yunkaporta's book Sand Talk and him talking about song lines and how you could sing a song in some Aboriginal tribes or an Aboriginal culture in Australia and the song would actually take you from point A to point B because it would point out all of the things along the way , like that was that rock where there was a snake once that

dad killed , or something like that . And you know like it would help you get along because as you're singing the song you see the actual thing .

And so song , even in the third house , and song and voice and song and memory as well , coming up there in the more indigenous mind , just how much we could remember when we didn't have all of these uh tools , every tool that we have , that that apparently helps us remember by writing things down also steals from our ability to to remember , to remember on bigger

levels . You know , I think about that sometimes when I'm thinking about these ancient epics , like currently reading the odyssey and how much of an epic it was and someone's obviously scribed that down . But there were people in the ancient world that could just sing the whole song , that could sing it from start to finish the bards , and what have you ?

The ones that had that musicality and would do the myth-making and storytelling in song and with instrument . And you know , still today there's many that tell their stories that way .

Michael mead , a great hero , friend of the podcast , he gets the drum out and gets the rhythm going , you know , and that helps him to remember the stories and and take him all the way through .

Um , but in the ancient world , before we were really writing things down quite so much , and definitely before we were storing them in hard drives and on computers and whatever all of our thoughts , just how much memory we could actually hold when it came to myths and epics and tragedies and poems , how much more capacity there was in the mind .

It's like a muscle that stopped getting used . And then there's breath , because essentially talking is just a form of breath , isn't it ? It's just a particular way that we use our breath and so , in a sense , the voice , it begins with the breath and Mercury certainly is that breath . God , you know , mercury can , can , slip through the keyhole , can't he ?

So he's obviously Mercury or Quicksilver . He can move and he moves with the breath . And he's got the wings , he's got the winged helmet and the winged shoes . He's always going to have his relationship to the third house , given that Gemini is the third sign and there's that link between Gemini and the third house .

So , yeah , breath that short breath , that rhythmic breath , that speaking breath . You know , in the third house it's opposing the night . So it's those small truths versus the big truths , it's that speech versus the doctrine that may come up in the night .

This is where we can just use our voice and use our words , perhaps leading into the next point that I have here , which is around how do we get the news ? How did we used to get the news before the news came along ? And , of course , news is a form of gossip , and gossip is how all of that information goes around .

And you can definitely see that amplified in the world . As soon as there's some big , scandalous thing , everybody wants to talk about it and know about it , and that's in the bigger world . Now our gossip isn't just around our neighborhood , it's in everything going on in the world .

But gossip was an interesting thing , a way that information traveled from here to there through gossip . I just found out , last week actually , because I was on a course with Brian Clark and he talked about the root of gossip being God-sib , as in a God-sibling . Isn't that interesting . So you know , in old English the God-sib was like a God-parent , a god-relative .

Then it was extended from that to mean a familiar acquaintance , a friend or a neighbor , and then it became anyone engaging in familiar or idle talk , and it was especially related to women .

Friends invited to attend a birth and at the birth they were engaging in familiar or idle talk , later became known as trifling talk or groundless rumor , an interesting sort of mercurial hermetic slip .

There was that when I first heard brian say that , I thought he said god's sip , which made me think about the characters in greek mythology like hebe and ganymede , who were the cupbearers for the gods . And this is one of the symbols for aquarius which we get to later .

You know , 11th house , it's much later in the zodiac , but another air sign , another , another air house and um , seeing about that of like . Well , you know , the information that they get by being the cupbearers of the gods is that they're around for that idle chatter .

So they get to know the mind of the gods by being around , which isn't the same as that ninth house , getting to know the mind of God by going into philosophy and theosophy and you know all of this higher thinking , it's just being around the gods and hearing how they talk and what they talk about , so , essentially , being around for the gods to gossip .

So these words that occur in , uh in the third house , you know , obviously we uh with words , we spell words . And uh , why is it that we spell words ? Why is why is words a form of spelling ? Um , because words are magic , you know , they're sort of like incantations in a way . They're ways of bringing things into being or or bringing things out of being . You

know , we think about that . The witch has the big book , right , the book of spells , or the wizard and uh and reads particular rhythms from that book of spells in order to conjure things up , and stories are like that as well .

I always uh , go back to this , but in , in for the grim brothers collection , you know , the word that they had for fairy tales was not fairy tales , it was this .

This word , zorbra marchen and I apologize to anyone german that is cringing at me using my German there but essentially I was told that the word could ultimately mean conjuring tales or magic tales , as though , by going in to these stories , it's like we conjure the story all around us , like we're living inside of it .

Sometimes If a story is told , well , we're not just listening in the background , but it's brought into the foreground , it's like brought up into our world . So it's interesting that language is spelt and the spell can come upon us when we use language which makes us think .

Well , we should be careful what we say , because we should be careful what we wish for . But of course , that depends what your third house looks like . You might have Saturn in there telling you it's very important to say the exact right words at the exact right time .

Or you might have the moon or Mercury in there saying just let it go , let it flow , or someone else in there for that matter . So , finally , I want to think about the third house .

You can hear that the third house is a lot about chatter and the mind and everything , but it could also be the house of mindfulness , and mindfulness being that noticing the breath and the repetition and the loops of the mind .

So maybe that moon , in its joy here , is asking us to come into the body and to hear our thoughts and to hear what's going on up there , what's going round and round , what are these loops ? And you know how to relate to the thought , not to eliminate it but to observe it and respond to awareness .

And that's definitely a big area of in the world these days . There's a lot of talk about mindfulness and how to sort of be with our minds . You know we're given minds somehow in this third house but we're not really given an instruction manual of how to have a mind and what you're supposed to do with it .

So you know , the moon's joy really reinforces that of mindfulness and finding the right rhythm for your internal dialogue and helping it settle and finding safety so that your mind doesn't go off and play all sorts of tricks on you .

Just as a last note here , as I was preparing for this episode , I walked over to my bookshelf and a book really jumped out at me that I bought at a secondhand bookshop a few years ago , called Untrain your Parrot . It's a book by Elizabeth Hamilton . The full title is Untrain your Parrot and Other No-Nonsense Instructions on the Path of Zen .

And interesting to find this because in the third house of course we all start as parrots . But eventually something in us maybe that's the self , maybe that's the soul , maybe that's the spirit Something in us deeper down wants to connect to the parrot right , wants to connect to the self .

Maybe that's the soul , maybe that's the spirit , something in us deeper down wants to connect to the parrot right , wants to connect to the voice . Although we learnt through the parroting , it's important , isn't it , to untrain that parrot and to stop repeating what was safe , expected or inherited and to start speaking from somewhere deeper .

And that feels like a nice spot to find our closure , as , as we've had a good wander around in this third house and uh , yeah , we'll be leaving this house , but not before we've had a few , uh , other bits and pieces , like this conversation with cameron

allen . It was part two of our chat . It's a very , very good conversation about the third . He's really passionate about the third . He's got some good placements there and we'll get some good insights chatting with him about that .

And then , as I said , we'll be exploring Echo and how she loses her voice and then gets all entangled with narcissists but eventually finds her way to Pan and to her own true nature . So that will be coming up in the next couple of weeks too . I hope you enjoy that .

Those episodes well , the one about Echo will actually be recorded in Greece as I'm about to head off there . Recorded in Greece , as I'm about to head off there and , yeah , I'm about to join Colette Davis for a retreat in Greece from June 10th to the 17th . In fact , there's one spot left for that .

So if you're in the neighborhood or want to be in the neighborhood , I'd strongly advise joining us . It's going to be a real special time . We'll probably do this many more times , colette and I , but it's pretty special being at the first one .

There'll be a lot of dream work and sacred sites , a lot of myths and storytelling and a lot of movement , and personally , I can't think of anything better .

I'm super excited to be a part of that , and especially with someone as epic as colette davis , one of my dear friends and somebody who is really along on the journey , and I love what she does in the world and I'm honored to be a part of what she's up to . So , yes , I'll see you in those next couple of episodes .

And then we'll be ending this first quadrant of the houses one , two , three and we'll be crossing a certain threshold called the IC , the Imum Kueli , which is the line that goes down all the way down into our ancestry , right down into our very roots . We'll be crossing that line and entering the fourth house , and I'm really looking forward to that .

I've had a great conversation with Melanie Reinhart . She will be coming back onto the podcast . We'll be talking fourth house dynamics , fourth house things , as well as , of course , some fairy tales and some stories and a nice wandering around in the house of ancestry . So I look forward to seeing you there .

In the meantime , take care of yourself and , yeah , go well . Thank you for listening to On the Soul's Terms podcast . To support the show , please consider leaving a five-star review , sharing with friends or becoming a patron at patreoncom . Slash onthesoulsterms Until next time and met a share in the roof of a knee .