Stelliums: when one sign holds three or more planets

A stellium is three or more planets in the same sign, or the same house. Definitions vary on whether the Sun and Moon count and whether three is enough; the effect is what matters.

What it does

It concentrates. A stellium in the tenth house makes career disproportionately central to a life, not because the person chose that but because a third of their chart lives there. Everything else can end up organised around it.

The cost

Concentration somewhere is absence elsewhere. A stellium usually pairs with several empty houses, and those departments run thin. People with a heavy stellium often describe feeling lopsided, extremely developed in one area and oddly unformed in others, and that is an accurate reading of the geometry.

Sign versus house

A sign stellium describes a manner: four planets in Virgo means a great deal of the chart operates through precision. A house stellium describes a subject. When both coincide, which is common, the effect compounds.

The generational caveat

If a stellium is made mostly of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, everyone born around you has it. It only becomes personal when it involves the fast bodies or sits on an angle in your chart specifically.