Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I’m your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I’m an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I’m going to give you your weekly horoscope and no bullshit, mystical advice for living your very best life.

My darlings, welcome back to the podcast. And this week, I think we should finally—I mean, finally talk about the tenth house and the Midheaven in astrology, in your birth chart. 

I should start by just acknowledging that if your birth time is not exact, then three points in your chart are inevitably going to be inaccurate: the Ascendant or Rising Sign, the Midheaven, and the Moon. So in order to know what those things are, you need to know your exact time of birth. If you’re guesstimating, or if you’re wrong, then you can’t trust the Ascendent, the Midheaven, or the Moon sign. And that’s an annoying thing for somebody who doesn’t have easy access to their time of birth, but, unfortunately, that’s how it works. 

Similarly, and this is kind of an aside from the Midheaven topic, but, similarly, if you don’t know your exact time of birth, and you’re not using whole sign or equal sign houses, you can't know the shape and size of the houses and what zodiac signs are in the houses of your birth chart. So just a fun fact: you need to know what time you were born, and you shouldn’t be rounding up or down or whatever. 

Okay, let’s get into the Midheaven. Who is she? What is she all about? So the Midheaven, also referred to as the MC—it’s also referred to as the middle sky—it is the highest point in your birth chart. So if you visualize the natal wheel, you know, it’s a circle, but there’s the lowest point, that’s the IC, the fourth house cusp, and then the Midheaven or the MC, which is the tenth house cusp. 

If you visualize the birth chart kind of like a tree, and the roots of the tree go beneath the chart, past the wheel of the chart, and they come out through that fourth house cusp, through the IC. And the top of the tree, the parts of the leaves of the tree that get touched directly by the sun, that’s the MC—that’s your Midheaven. It’s what you are known for. It’s your reputation. It’s how other people see you, and, in particular, it can involve people you haven’t met face to face. 

So, basically, the Midheaven is what you show to the world. And this is quite different than the ASC, the Ascendant or the Rising Sign—so they’re all synonyms to say the same thing, and that’s the first house cusp, which we can talk about in a different episode—but the Midheaven is what you show to the world. It’s your career. It’s your public persona. It’s what you aspire to do and what you aspire to do in this life—that kind of big goal-oriented way that we kind of like organize our lives and our hopes and our dreams. 

When other people see us, whether it’s at work or through reputation, whether it’s online or on a podcast, whatever it is, when they hear about you, when they learn about you, but they haven’t actually engaged with you on a personal level, they are seeing your Midheaven. They’re seeing that part of you. This is why the Midheaven is associated with reputation as well as with career. The Midheaven really signifies a lot about what we’re known for. It also signifies how we want to be known, like what we need to be known as. There are so many components that go into each of the things that I’ve named. 

Whenever we are looking at the birth chart, and me or any other astrologer is explaining these things to you, it’s really tempting to be like, “Okay, cool. So my career, I’ll just look at my Midheaven, and I’ll know what I should do for a career.” It’s kind of not that simple because it has to go through the whole of your personality. So while I’m going to talk about this point, the Midheaven and the tenth house, I’m going to talk about it really kind of like as an object, as a many layered data point. 

The truth is when we’re looking at something as complex as your career or your reputation or the ways in which you have organized your life, there are so many things that go into it, and there are so many parts of our nature that are required of us to live in a way that is really healthy and self-appropriate and successful, whatever the hell successful means to you. So, you know, you want to know that you can look at the Midheaven, look at the sign in your tenth house or on your tenth house cusp, you want to look at the planets in your tenth house, if you have any, but that’s not the only way to get data about this theme. 

So the Midheaven is your tenth house cusp, but the tenth house itself, it points to your life’s mission; it points to your sense of direction. The tenth house is the place where we get information about the kind of pressures that were placed upon us in our early developmental years, so our parents, our grandparents, our guardians kind of were like this is how you should be in the world; this is how adults should be in the world; this is the kind of expectations we have of how you’re going to show up in the world and what you’re allowed to do. 

This can look any number of ways, but, often times, you will read about how the tenth house is related to the father or the male parent. I don’t buy into that kind of thinking for a number of reasons. First is astrologically it’s simply not accurate in my experience as a practitioner. It is the paternal parent, which it may or may not be a male human. I don’t think it’s about the gender; I think it’s more about who is more paternal, who is more maternal, who is more nurturing, who is more structure giving. And it doesn’t always work in such a kind of like either/or way, and many of us were not raised with two parents, so we will often see energies from the parent or the parent side of the family that is more paternal. 

When we look at the pressures that are placed upon us around how we should be in the world and how we should be known in the world, sometimes that pressure is welcome. Sometimes that pressure is a sense of expectation based on I believe in you; you can do this; go forth be happy; go forth, be successful. And to the person who that’s being said to, it’s a beautiful thing. And for many other people, it’s a shit show. It doesn’t feel good. It’s pressure. It’s like this is how you’re supposed to be. 

Regardless of early developmental or inherited conditions, the tenth house, you know, the natural place of Saturn and the sign of Capricorn, they are associated with the choices you make and the consequences they bear in public, on purpose. So if you find that you have a bunch of planets in the tenth house, that doesn’t automatically mean that you are like big on career—you know what you want to do for a living. If you don’t have any planets in the tenth house, it does not mean you won't have a career or there’s in any way some sort of negative implication around your career. If you don’t have any aspects to your Midheaven—ditto. 

The key here is to understand the nature of your Midheaven and your tenth house as a way to understand how you want to be known, what you’re willing to give to your career, good ways for you to engage with the career that you feel most called to, or inspiration about what kind of career to align yourself with, how you want to be known, and the most effective way of taking steps towards being known for that. And so, can this be associated with fame? Yes. Can this be associated with capitalism and climbing a ladder? Yes. Is it inherently those things? No. 

I frequently say, and I’ll say it again, for many people, their primary ambition and the thing they want to be known for is being a parent, and that doesn’t really fit into capitalism very neatly, and it is not about fame at all. I mean, I don’t know, there’s mommy bloggers, so maybe it is about fame these days, but that’s an aside. Parenting is not inherently about public standing; it’s about what’s most important to you and what you feel drawn to. 

So I want to come back to this visual I’ve given you about the tree. The reason why I work with that visual is because the sun, the beautiful, bright sun that brings forth so much growth, the way it touches the top of the very outside leaves, it’s a very external thing. Now, the truth of the matter is the sun is feeding the roots of the tree as well. It’s impacting the growth on all levels, even levels that are more private. But this is the public stuff. This is the thing that can be seen because it’s being touched by the light of the world, so others can see it in public—that’s the Midheaven. That’s the tenth house. 

So while the tenth house points to your life’s mission, it’s really hard to properly understand the Midheaven unless you understand the other side of its axis. Astrology is so much about interconnectedness, right. And so, when we look at the angles, okay, the angles in any birth chart—so that’s the Ascendant or the first house cusp, the IC or the fourth house cusp, the DEC or the Descendant, the seventh house cusp, and then finally the Midheaven, which is what we’re focusing on here today—when we look at these things, what we get to understand is these central points, these pivotal points to how our identity and who we choose to be, how we choose to be it interacts with others, with the world in a meaningful way. 

And so, there’s a way that the fourth house is the most private point, but it is absolutely relational because it does relate to our family of origin and our early childhood experiences. This is differently than the twelfth house, but you see there are similarities—I’ve talked about the twelfth house recently—to the fourth house, and the similarities are in part because we’re talking about water houses. 

When we look at the IC, the fourth house cusp, the opposite point to the Midheaven, we see our foundations—our foundations in ourselves. Some of those foundations come from our early childhood experiences. And whether your experiences were shitty or beautiful, regardless, they’re your foundations, and they don’t change. You can reorient yourself to them, you can build them up, you can tear them down, but they are what they are, what they are, right. 

And whenever something happens with our career—somebody says, “You suck. You think you’re good; you suck.” Or somebody says, “You’re amazing. You’re this big, shiny ball of light, and I fucking love you.” Whether somebody is shitting on you, or somebody is giving you your flowers, either way, when we take in that data through our Midheaven, what we have to do is we have to sort it through that IC—our really deeply held feelings about ourselves—our foundations, our roots. 

And so, whenever something hits our Midheaven point, it does have to be considered how we are managing and integrating through our IC. Because when we talk about career, whether we’re talking about astrology or not, when we talk about career, we talk about it as kind of like this thing we have. When we look at this thing that I have, it’s like how I manage it; what do I do with it? That kind of thing. But the truth is how we are known by others in public is a huge part of our self-esteem. It pulls on our self-esteem. It requires our self-esteem to bloom like a flower or shrink like a flower. 

So it’s important for us to understand that our career is a path that we take. Our reputation is in many ways a result of what we do and don’t do. It’s also a reflection of who we’re around and our luck, but is it also very much a reflection of what we do and don’t do. 

When we think of the career as the central focus of our achievements, our accomplishments, our value, and we don’t understand it in balance with our inner most needs and our personal lives and our home lives, what I can tell you as an astrologer who’s counseled people of all ages is that it doesn’t age well for anyone. It just doesn’t. 

And so, there’s a way that we can consider what we’re doing for a career, you know, “I’m a painter, and I want to paint. This is for sure what I know I want to do, and that is my career,” and we prioritize that thing that we are doing, whether it’s for money or it’s for just the pursuit of the thing. When we prioritize those things, separate from or isolated from what we need in our personal lives in order to be happy, to be safe, to be fed, then what ends up happening is we can't sustain the efforts, and it costs us something we don’t want to pay. 

When we instead think of it as this is the path I’m taking; this is the journey I am choosing to be on; this is what I’m dedicating my time and energy to because I believe in it, because I feel passionate about it, because it is the best choice for me, because I need the money, or I want the power or whatever it is—whatever your choice is—understand that the Midheaven, this thing that you’re known for, your career, is a journey. And when you understand that it becomes a little bit easier to make choices. 

Because in any person’s birth chart, the Midheaven represents a place where you’re always striving. It’s a place where, even if you aren’t changing, the way people see you is changing—your circumstances are changing. 

So if we come back to my little metaphor about the tree and the light, the tree doesn’t go anywhere—look at that damn tree standing still, just rooted to the ground, literally. But the sun, the sun is constantly moving; it’s constantly shifting. The way it casts its light upon the top or bottom or middle of the damn tree is different. It’s ever shifting, right. 

It’s important to remember that the Midheaven is a place of journeying, and it is a place where we cast our own shadow upon the world or ourselves. In other words, we make an impact on the world, and it cannot be all good because we’re people—because all light casts a shadow. And so, this is a place where we have a need for humility. It’s also a place in the birth chart where we can see the capacity for mastery and the style and nature of that mastery. 

What I think is really important to remember in the context of astrology, when we see the capacity for mastery, we always see the necessity for humility. It’s just a really beautiful life lesson to never fucking forget. You don’t ever get to a place where you’re so achieved in whatever it is that you don’t have to be humble still. Because no matter how expert you get, there’s always going to be somebody who has a different perspective, a unique perspective, or there’s never going to be a time where you don’t have something to learn. And this is a tricky thing with the Midheaven. 

Now, let’s flip it on its ass for a second and say as well, you have something of value. I’ve never seen a birth chart in my life where there wasn’t value—never. Never. Every single one of us have value—every single one of us. And so, if your Midheaven is just kind of like boopadeboop [sp], I don’t know, I don’t really want to focus on anything other than how I feel. I don’t want to focus on anything other than my personal needs, like, my real goals in life are going to be personal and not public. That is a beautiful fucking thing. And that might be a little trickly in capitalism, depending on a number of factors, but it is a beautiful thing. There’s not a good or a bad, so get that shit out of your head. It’s easy/not easy—that exists much more than good and bad in the context of our Midheaven or our tenth house.

Astrology For Days is my forthcoming astrology app. There are no interpretations; I’m not here to tell you what to think. This is a resource for students and pros alike, regardless of what system you use. Astrology For Days helps you track the transits and keep comprehensive notes on what you learn or predict. Coming soon to an internet near you.

Now let’s talk about transits for a moment. When we go through transits to the Midheaven what happens is we have major events occur to our career. So that major event, depending on where you’re at in your development, may be insight into your career, becoming self-employed, getting a promotion, getting your ass handed to you and losing social standing or a public standing. It might be a time where you have to bear consequences for actions you’ve taken in the past that were out of integrity. Because, again, integrity and humility and mastery, they are all Midheaven/tenth house themes. 

So when we look at, let’s say, some of the cyclical transits that occur to the Midheaven, like Jupiter transits or Saturn transits, we can see these cycles of action and consequence, investment and growth. And so, what’s kind of exciting about that, from where I’m sitting, is that you don’t have to compare yourself to anyone else—you don’t have to compare yourself to anyone except for yourself, really. We can all, like, pull a deep Jody Foster and just do our personal best, you know. 

When we go through transits to our Midheaven, something gets activated in our conscious objective goals and the way we’ve organized our careers, and that’s really cool. Now, once a planet crosses that Midheaven and is no longer forming a transit to it, that’s when we have that planet moving through the tenth house. And whenever a planet moves through the tenth house it’s activating whatever issues we have. Depending on the transiting planet itself, it’s engaging us by stimulating growth, provoking experiences, that kind of thing. 

Now, you want to keep in mind that because the tenth house and the Midheaven is associated with your aspirations—it’s like your goals and what you want to be known for—when transits occur to or from the tenth house, it’s going to provoke experiences and opportunities for you to embody your aspirations. 

And this is where that Capricorn/Saturnian heaviness that is inherent to these points, the tenth house and the Midheaven, come in. Because this house and point—and I should clarify, since I didn’t already, the Midheaven is not a planet; it is a point. It's an angle—because of all this Capricorn/Saturnian energy that is inherent to the Midheaven and the tenth house, what we tend to be is perfectionistic. 

So Capricorn, Scorpio, Virgo—I mean, I could kind of name a few others, but especially those three tend to all be kind of perfectionistic in their own special ways. And Capricorn’s perfectionism is rooted in a fear of being wrong and of failing. Everybody has a tenth house. Everybody has a Midheaven, and this is a place where, if we fail, we fail in public. If we are known for being shitty in some way, it is known by many and not just by your best friends or your parents or something. 

And so, there is a way that we can be really hard on ourselves or others can be hard on us in regards to our Midheaven. And so, you want to pay attention to the ways in which the zodiac sign that’s on your tenth house cusp, aka the energies of your Midheaven, the way they seek to self-protect. All of the zodiac signs have their own personalized way of seeking to stay safe, and the zodiac sign on your Midheaven describes the ways in which you’re most likely to try to stay safe. Whether or not it works, that’s a different story and has more to do with aspects to your Midheaven than anything else. 

And when I mention aspects to your Midheaven, I want to say it is not a thing to consider aspects between angles. We are looking for aspects from planets to angles, but not from angles to each other. So your Ascendant and your Midheaven are not square to each other—they often technically are, but we don’t count that as a square natally. 

Now, before we finish up, I just want to say one more thing about this Midheaven of ours. On the Google machine—you may have heard of it; some people call it the internet—what happens is you will Google Midheaven and get promises of your dream job, of your—what you should do for a living. And I’ve had too many people over the years come into my office being like, “I read this thing,” or, “Some astrologer told me that I should do x for a living, but I really don’t want to.” 

So here’s the real deal, you see. If you have a Midheaven, let’s say, in Scorpio, there are a lot of implications about that. You might want to get to the bottom of things. You might want to be known as deep and intense. You might be kind of publicly secretive and not really want people to know your shit. Okay, cool, cool, cool. However, let’s say you have a bright and shiny stellium in the first house in Leo, well, that’s going to change things, right. So maybe you have less patience for deep investigation and getting to the bottom of things than your Scorpio Midheaven might suggest. And all that privacy business maybe kind of goes a little out the window because all that Leo in your first house inspires you to want to be seen and want to be known. 

This is just a made up example and does not speak on behalf of all the people of all the world, but I’m trying to give you a kind of sense of how you want to take that Midheaven as a data point in a constellation of data points, and then synthesize all that data to come up with something that matches the person, whether you’re looking at your own birth chart, or you’re starting to consult with clients, or whatever it is. And so, that Midheaven is not as conclusive as sometimes, you know, blogs or whatever would inspire us to believe they are. 

So if you, after listening to this Hot Take, go to your birth chart and say, “Oh, shit. I have a Sagittarius Midheaven and that means—and I read that I should be in publishing, but I don’t like publishing,” then don’t be in publishing, okay. You Google these things, and it says be a travel agent. I don’t know, do travel agents exists anymore? This is the thing—jobs are responsive to time. There’s different jobs in the 1970s than there were in the 1850s, than there are now—obvi, right? 

So what you want to do is look at the energies of it, and then choose a path. Don’t get so fixated on the job—unless that’s really helpful to you—instead, choose the path. When people come to me and they say, “I’ve been considering a career path in x. Should I take it? Should I not? Should I do it? Should I not?” one of the first questions I always ask is what do you want your life to feel like? Because the reality is it is the day to day that makes up a life. And that day to day is in your sixth house. 

So we want to be climbing a ladder—the tenth house, slash, Midheaven—we want to be climbing that Midheaven ladder, and we want that ladder to be the right ladder for us. But the act of climbing it requires the sixth house. But if you’re on the wrong ladder, it doesn’t matter how well you perform your sixth house because that Midheaven is going to bring you to the top of the wrong tree. You need to be barking up the right tree, see. 

And so, thinking about what you want your life to feel like, the balance between home, aka your IC, slash, fourth house and your public life or your at the office life, that’s a really important consideration because that’s what you’re going to age into. And so, being willing to do some kind of holistic investigation into what you want to do is really wise. 

And then the final thing I’ll say about this is there is no shame—there is nothing wrong with not wanting a career or having your life’s ambitions and greatest aspirations not be something that make you money or as a job. If that’s the case, then again, we look to the sixth house to see what kind of work you can do to sustain you in capitalism, to make you some money so that you can pay for food and shelter and all the things. One is not superior or inferior; it’s just different people have different kinds of lives, and that’s just that. 

Self-acceptance is superior. Making healthy choices that are sustainable, I would say, is superior, but not having a career versus a job, at all. So have a lot of latitude with yourself as you pursue these investigations, especially if you’ve been like, “What should I do for a career change?” or “What career should I pursue?”, and you’re looking to astrology to find the answers. 

Even if you are on a path that you’re quite certain of, and you’re like, “Oh, I know what I’m meant to do, and I’m doing it, and it’s going really well,” every single one of us will question our choices. Every single one of us will have rough months or years. Every single one of us will have to pivot over the course of life. That’s just how it goes. 

And that could be a shitty thing—it could feel shitty at times, but it’s a good thing. All growth worth having requires maintenance. It requires some measure of sacrifice. And there’s a learning curve. There’s a learning curve to all things because you might be amazing in your career, and you’re like a wonder kid, and everyone’s impressed by you when you’re 31, but you might be in the same career at 51, and people might not be so impressed anymore because now you’re 51, and the world loves to be impressed by 30-year-olds, right. 

So this is a really important thing to remember is that our career is something we age into. It’s not at its apex in your thirties. It doesn’t have to be in its apex at any time, but there’s a lot of time for us to grow into our birth charts and, certainly, to grow into the highest point in the birth chart, aka your damn Midheaven and tenth house. 

My loves, I hope this was helpful—just a sweet little Hot Take on the tenth house and Midheaven. As always, I invite you to send me questions about astrology—anything you want to learn—or about your birth chart for the weekend episode. And join me over on Patreon, where we are going ridiculously in-depth into the twelfth house—I mean, ridiculously in-depth into the twelfth house. Talk to you in a couple of days. Bye-bye.