The Descendant: The Western Angle

The Descendant is the point opposite the Ascendant, the degree of the ecliptic setting on the western horizon, and it is the cusp of the seventh house. Its significations are the other party: marriage and the spouse, business partners, the open adversary, and in horary work the person on the other side of the question. The classical texts often treat the seventh house rather than the Descendant as a point in its own right, and the emphasis on the four angles as sensitive degrees is more characteristic of modern practice than of the older sources, though the angles themselves are fundamental to both. Being derived from the Ascendant by simple opposition, the Descendant carries the same dependence on an exact birth time and place, and the same rapid daily motion through the zodiac.

In synastry, the comparative reading of two charts against each other, the Descendant is one of the points most commonly checked for a partner's planets falling close to it, on the reasoning that the seventh-house cusp is the natural signifier of what one is drawn to seek in another person; this specific synastric use of the Descendant is a twentieth-century development built on the classical seventh-house doctrine rather than a technique documented in the Hellenistic or medieval sources themselves, which discuss the seventh house's relationship significations without this particular comparative method.