Best places for home and family

The IC: the angle underfoot

The IC (Imum Coeli) is the point directly beneath you, the bottom of the chart. A planet's IC line runs through the places where that planet lay underfoot at your birth, on the far side of the Earth. Astrologers read the IC as home, family, roots and private life: the part of you that most people never see.

IC lines are straight north to south meridians, drawn dashed, and each one lies on the opposite side of the globe from the same planet's MC line. That gives the home theme a quiet twist: the city that a planet marks for your public life and the city it marks for your private life are half a world apart. Your Jupiter career line and your Jupiter home line never meet.

The four home lines

• Moon IC. Read as one of the most domestic lines on the map: nesting, family, memory and the wish to put down roots. The past can pull hard here, and feelings run close to the surface at home.
• Venus IC. A comfortable, pleasant home: family harmony, a garden, rooms you enjoy decorating. Tradition's gentle caution is that comfort can crowd out effort.
• Jupiter IC. A generous home base: a roomy house, a welcoming family, faith or philosophy practiced in private, roots that spread wider. The risk is spreading yourself too wide.
• Sun IC. A private sense of self: building a base, reflecting on family stories and feeling quietly central rather than on stage. It is not a line for being in the spotlight.

Home is about daily life

A home city is lived in every day, so practical things weigh more than they would on a holiday: the commute, schools, the cost of living, the climate, and how far you are from family and friends. The list cannot weigh any of that. Use it on places that already pass those tests.

Tradition also says the IC is where old family patterns come up. A Moon or Venus IC line is read as a soft place to land, and also as a place where you may find yourself thinking about where you come from. That is part of the reading, not a warning.

Start with the place you live now. Click it, read the IC lines in its list of five, and open the relocated chart: the planets within 5 degrees of the relocated IC are the ones tradition would read in your home life there, line or no line. Then do the same for any city on this list, so you are comparing like with like.

Under Handle with care you will find Saturn IC, Pluto IC, Mars IC and Uranus IC. These are read as busy home lines: duties and restructuring, renovation, rearranging, frequent moves. Tradition does not treat them as places to avoid. Click your own city to see which IC lines run near it.