Money, movable possessions, sustenance and the means by which life is supported.
A house does not have a fixed zodiac sign or planetary ruler in this reference. Those popular correspondences collapse two different twelvefold systems and are not needed to read an actual cusp.
3 sourced claims:3traditional
Reading this house
Lilly's topics below tell you what kinds of question this place was used to answer in seventeenth-century astrology. Its position in the wheel is a different piece of information. For an actual chart, read the sign on the cusp, its ruler, any planets here and their aspects together; do not substitute the 2nd zodiac sign for the 2nd house. The historical medical or social judgements in Lilly are evidence of his practice, not present-day advice.
Lilly asks this house about estate, wealth or poverty, movable goods, money lent, gain and loss. He also uses it for a commonwealth's stores and support in a political figure. That breadth matters: a purse, a tool, a stock of food and the means to keep working all belong to the same question of material provision. His judgements about particular planets dispersing substance record his practice, not a rule that one placement alone makes anyone poor.
Paraphrased from Lilly's 1647 list; the period's social and medical vocabulary is documented, not treated as exhaustive or clinically reliable.
Sources (1)
Christian Astrology — Book I, chapter VII, ‘Of the Twelve Houses of Heaven’ (2nd house)
The second is succedent: it follows the angular Ascendant rather than defining the person. Lilly even records its older name, Anaphora. Read a planet here for how its activity bears on resources, then ask what sign governs the cusp and what the planet actually does with other planets. It is not Taurus by default, although Lilly uses Taurus as a numbered cosignificator in a separate symbolic scheme.
Spatial structure and interpretive distinctions derived from Lilly's angular, succedent and cadent account; these sentences are not his verbatim wording.
These historical opinions were published around 1900 by astrologers writing for a Theosophical readership. They are not this site's conclusions; each quotation names its author and page.
Moon in the second house
The Moon in the Second House signifies fluctuating finances unless fortified by good aspects from Jupiter, the planet of opulence, or Venus the planet of attraction. Good aspects from the Sun make matters more settled in that respect.
Max Heindel and Augusta Foss Heindel, The Message of the Stars,
p. 221 — The Rosicrucian Fellowship, Oceanside, this printing 1919
· The 1919 printing, scanned
Uranus in the second house
Uranus in the Second House, which governs finance, naturally indicates a restless and unsettled state of the finances of the person. There will be many ups and downs, and even though such a person may have other good aspects that qualify him to reason accurately concerning other matters, it will be found that in the financial department he is unable to protect himself against these sudden and unforeseen losses, or gains.
Max Heindel and Augusta Foss Heindel, The Message of the Stars,
p. 349 — The Rosicrucian Fellowship, Oceanside, this printing 1919
· The 1919 printing, scanned
Neptune in the second house
Neptune in the second house afflicting the Moon, makes the native the victim of a bubble company, or some big fraud.
A missing planet is either absent from Leo's account of this house or omitted because its scan could not be read reliably.
Who is quoted here, and who is not
Two astrologers, both writing around 1900:
Alan Leo, whose How to Judge a Nativity is the only
one of these books arranged as a lookup table — a paragraph per planet per
house; and Sepharial, who
arranged the same material by the question a reader brings rather than by
placement, so only a few of his judgements stand alone well enough to quote.
William Lilly is not included here.
Christian Astrology (1647) is the most important book in English on
the subject and appears elsewhere on the site, but the available scans use
long-s blackletter, and the OCR renders the title of its own first book as
“An Introduci ion to Aftrologje”. There is
those scans do not support reliable quotation extraction. The same
limitation applies to Ripley's Compound of Alchymy and
Anderson's Constitutions elsewhere on the site.