Why Is Career Astrology so Hard?

A lot of people have a hard time understanding the career houses in astrology. The reason for this isn't because the career houses are complicated. It's because the career houses were created in a culture that is very different than ours. 

This is natural. Everything humans created is an artifact of their culture, but it creates difficulties when we raid the attic of history and try to reclaim things that were made for a time that isn’t our own.

Modern astrology has attempted to adapt by reworking the definitions of the career houses to reflect the way we live, but the need to work around the old worldview has left astrology with a view of career that doesn’t quite make sense.

Long ago in the days of yore, astrology was for the rich and famous.

When astrology was created, the only people who had their birth charts read were very wealthy, privileged people. And so natal charts are set up in a way that assumes that you are also a wealthy, privileged person. 

In the traditional way of seeing the birth chart, the 2nd house is the house of wealth. The 6th house is the house of servants (as in, people you own). The 10th house is the house of fame. 

The problem with this is that most of us don't have wealth. Most of us don't have servants, and most of us aren't famous. 

When modern astrologers reworked the meaning of the 2nd house, it switched from describing your wealth to describing your relationship with money. This may describe money you have, money you don't have, or more intangible resources like self-esteem. 

Since we don't have servants, the 6th house has become about service. Something you hear from astrologers a lot is that we are all servants now. I'm going to leave the question of whether or not that is actually true and what it would mean to have a society of servants for another time, but the point stands that the 6th house in modern astrology is about the ways that we submit to earn money and keep ourselves fed. I like to call it the house of day jobs. 

The 10th house, the house of fame, is the most difficult house to understand. In order to understand it, we need to look at the life of an idealized Roman patrician. 

Confused by the 10th house? Blame the Romans.

A noble person in Rome wasn't supposed to think about the 2nd or the 6th houses. If they were thinking about money or slaves there was something wrong. The 2nd and 6th houses (money and slaves) were the corners of the bottom of the pyramid that supported the 10th house, which is how they actually spent their waking hours. (They spent their nights in the 5th house, the house of pleasure.) A Roman nobleman didn’t work. He wasn't even a chief executive. There were slaves for that. A nobleman might spend his days in the Senate. He might be a philosopher. He might "serve" in some civic or religious function, donating money to temples and buying entertainments to keep the plebs distracted.

We think of these roles in terms of public service... at least, we are supposed to. We all kind of chuckle when we talk about public “servants,” don't we? I think this is why. We as a society remember that historically "public servants" were able to spend a lot of time in those roles because other people were worried about feeding them and keeping them clothed and making sure there was enough wine for their drinking until they throw up parties (ruled by the 5th house). A Roman nobleman never had to do the laundry. Everyone else had maybe a few hours a week to think about anything other than keeping the nobility happy.

The 10th house is that thing you don’t have time for.

What you do when you're not worried about getting paid for it is the domain of the 10th and 5th houses. When you are doing something simply because it brings you pleasure, that is the 5th house. When you are doing something with some notion of the greater good in mind and you aren't calculating how you can keep doing that thing and still afford to eat, that is the 10th house.

This is why the 10th house is hard. It isn't because it's difficult to understand. It's because most of us don't have enough time to even think about what we would do if we had time for our 10th houses. 

My parting shot is this: There's a myth in our society that people wouldn't do 10th house things if they were left of their own devices. Without the threat of poverty or hellfire, they would never think about the common good. They would spend all of their time in the hedonism of the 5th. 

That is Puritan claptrap.  

The internet itself is evidence that this isn't true. If everyone only did what felt good to them when left to their own devices, all of the artists who aren’t being paid for their work would create things for themselves and never show their work to anyone else. When you make something and then share it because you want other people to feel something or you want them to think something or you want them to be able to do something, that's thinking of the greater good. (The community might not like what you're doing. They might even feel angry or trolled, but if you believe in what you're doing, that's the 10th house.) And when you think about the way most of us live, the fact that anything is offered for free on the Internet at all demonstrates just how determined people are to work for the greater good. 

And it goes to show what a tragedy it is that most of us don’t have time for the 10th house.

A version of this post was originally posted on The Witch at Land’s End on 21 September 2020.