©2013
J. Lee Lehman, PhD
There is a controversy among horary astrologers over the question of how to place job horary house assignment. The question pivots around the fact that the ancient sources gave slavery to the 6th house, not jobs. The ancient sources gave “preferment” to the 10th house. Therefore, are job questions a matter of the 10th house? The discussion which follows is an expansion on the house attributions I gave in
Martial Art of Horary Astrology (MAHA).
One of the values of being able to create the historical lineage of ideas is that we can see where changes in viewpoint occur, which may help us to understand the context of the changes. This requires knowledge of both ancient and modern practices. I believe the biggest danger to astrological transmission emerges when we don't know our history, and because of that we make arbitrary choices just to do something different or new. However, clinging too tightly to past practices in the absence of admission of real societal change can be equally debilitating to our practice.
Modern
astrologers are split in their attributions. In the posthumous
edition of her work in 1942, Geraldine Davis gave the 6th
house to servants and tenants, and the 10th house to
getting, continuing, or leaving a job. In her section on the 10th
house, she refers to the 10th as relating to the career or
business that the person is in.
Robert DeLuce, originally writing in 1932, gives essentially the same
attribution, with the 10th house being given for
promotions. The one interesting wrinkle in his case was the use of
the 9th for corporations.
Ivy Goldstein-Jacobson gave an employment example in the 6th
house, but it is for the engagement of a servant. She gave questions
of trade or profession, as well as whether the Querent would get a
particular job, to the 10th.
It
is with Barbara Watters that we see:
“The Sixth House rules the querent's employment, the general
condition of his health, his tenants, employees, and servants. In an
event chart it rules the same things for the person who initiates the
action. Thus, in this case, there is an overlapping of values. For
instance, in the event that someone offers the querent a job, it is a
sixth house matter for both of them: a job for the querent, an
employee for the person who offered it.”
How,
we may ask, did Watters reach this conclusion? First, I think we need
to dispense with the polemical approach and state baldly: to a
classical astrologer, modern astrology is not the enemy. I
would call to your attention this quotation from Charles E.O. Carter.
In an editorial in 1945, Carter said:
“Most astrologers probably possess Zadkiel's Grammar,
published in 1910 by G. Bell & Sons together with Lilly's
Introduction;...”
This simple statement reminds us of something amazingly important. While modern students of Lilly reject that particular version as an unfortunate abridgment, Carter's reference to its ubiquity reminds us that through the 1940's, just about every serious student of astrology in Britain if not other English-speaking countries had a decent, if not wonderful, introduction to classical methods sitting right on their bookshelves. This means that all these modern horary astrologers I have quoted so far had access to the classical tradition – if they chose to read it and use it. So we cannot presume that Watters made this to shift the 6th out of historical ignorance. It was really only the astrologers who came of age in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s who could do so without being at least exposed to classical techniques. This requires deeper thought.
To extend what I argued in MAHA, the problem with our analysis of jobs is that what we forget is that our current understanding of them is completely a result of our living in a time after the industrial revolution. The references in the ancient texts to preferment describe exactly the world of what we now call the 1% - those who lived in a pre-industrial world in which energy was a scarce commodity: something provided only by wind, water, animals, and yes, slaves, serfs and servants. In these energy-poor societies, the vast majority of people lived lives of brutally hard physical labor while only a tiny portion could ever even conceive of asking a horary question about choosing a profession! If your father was a serf or a slave, what was your future profession? Professions were for the younger sons of the very small middle and upper classes.
And that brings us back to the 10th house – the king. And how did these systems of profession work, pray tell? Through the king, of course – or his equivalent! If I were a lord with three sons, then primogeniture reserves my rank and position for my eldest son, but what of the other two? As a lord, I can speak to my friend the Admiral, and get my second son his officer's commission in the navy, should that look like a good fit. I talk to the Cardinal and buy my third son a bishop's mitre. Now that's what used to be called a preferment – a boon granted by a nobleman or royalty to my son, based on bonds of friendship and loyalty – nepotism, in our current parlance. I work hard on my liege lord's behalf, and I am rewarded in lands or plum positions for my sons or relatives – that's how the 10th house works.
If
you go back and read Plato's Republic you will see the utopian vision for the 1% in
action – it is, as we would say, the rich men who benefit
from this form of government. The women are shared communally by the
men – not that they were asked - and the society depends on slave
labor. Very edifying.
Meanwhile,
in the emerging towns of the Middle Ages, we observe the beginnings of
the professional crafts and the guilds. How did this work? To a
degree, this system of apprenticeship allowed some social mobility
and flexibility. A candle maker's son might not end up a candle
maker, but perhaps a blacksmith or a baker: Lilly gives a table of
trades for the 10th house associated with this class of
people, but the bulk of his discussion is of officers, which are
people of the higher classes being given boons in the usual way.
But
here's the thing: if the child succeeds and climbs the guild ladder
to journeyman and then to master, what he achieves is to set up his
own house: he becomes that 10th house person by
going into business by and for himself. But if he does not succeed, but first
stays an apprentice for a long time, and then only grudgingly makes
it to journeyman, where now is his “profession?”
In
Lilly's day, the industrial revolution was just beginning. Coal was
being used for heating, but its use in driving steam engines was a
matter for the following century. Along with land reform and
enclosure, industrialization would drive a large proportion of the
population permanently from rural to urban venues, changing entirely
the meaning of “job” and “employment.”
Read
about the condition of the workers in early factories and tell me
this is different from the slaves and serfs of the Middle Ages?
Workers, often children, confined in buildings for long hours at pay
levels that were, as we would say, below the poverty line? Were these
children or their parents asking horary astrologers about their
“professions?” I think not!
Even
if conditions for factory workers, and later office workers, have
improved in the developed countries, we still see these stark
conditions every year in industrial accidents in the developing
world, whether a garment factory collapse in Bangladesh, or the
Chinese poultry plant fire. On this point, anyway, the Marxists were
right: it is radically different to own your means of
production than to work for someone else.
This
may be the clearest distinction between the 6th
house and the 10th
house: ownership. As
I indicated in MAHA,
there are other ways to relate to a job, the independent contractor
(7th house) being
the most common.
But I think we do people a tremendous disservice, especially in an
economically fragile period, to job-inflate their horaries by
implying that their circumstances allow more choice than they do. I
might add that the use of the 10th
for a job question for the typical employee in our modern sense also
removes the ability to see the boss as an integral part of the
question – there is no house to represent this person, who would be
in a clear 10th
house relationship. The absence of consideration of the boss in the
earlier works is actually a demonstration of how different the
circumstances of the 10th
house preferment idea was. In Lilly's day, a nobleman might grant a
retainer a tract of land – which would then generate revenue by
being farmed or leased. The retainer now becomes
the 10th house
person relative to this gift property or title: a petty nobleman
himself. This extension of the feudal society set
up personal links of service and reward for the people at the upper
end of the hierarchy. Serfs were not included in this largesse.
The
closest modern example of a 10th
house preferment is in receiving a grant. Here, a granting body –
whether an individual, a government, or a foundation – gifts the
individual with money, which is then used to create something,
whether skill, widget, idea, or artwork. The grant is not expected to
be paid back – it is a true gift.
By
contrast, a person can work an employee of a company for thirty or
forty years and retire as, what? A former employee, not an owner.
This doesn't preclude a comfortable life for the employee, a decent
standard of living. But it is not ownership.
Ownership is the 10th
house.