The houses
Signs tell you how you work. Houses tell you where. They are twelve sectors the birth chart circle is divided into, and each one covers a concrete area of life: your body, your money, your siblings, the place you live, children, work, your partner, shared resources, long journeys, career, friends, retreat.
What sets them apart from signs is the raw material. Signs depend on where the Sun and the planets sit along the zodiac, so they shift slowly over the year. Houses depend on the exact time and place you were born, because they come from the Earth turning on its axis: the wheel of houses moves one degree every four minutes. Two people born on the same day share almost all their signs, but if they were born six hours apart their houses are completely different. That is why the birth time matters so much.
The starting point is the Ascendant, the degree of the zodiac that was rising in the east at the moment you were born. The first house opens there, and the other eleven follow in order. Working out where each house boundary falls takes a house system, and we use Placidus, the most widely used one, which divides the time the degrees of the zodiac take to climb over the horizon.
The twelve chapters that follow take one house at a time: what it puts in play, what it looks like when you live it well, where it jams, and what changes when you have planets sitting in it. Read it with your own chart in front of you, because the houses that hold planets are the ones you will hear about most.