Teaching

Teaching is held between two planets in this tradition, and the division of labour between them is precise enough to be worth stating carefully.

Mercury is the faculty. It governs speech, writing, calculation, argument, the trained skill and the transmission of information. Anything to do with the mechanics of learning, the words used, the notation, the memory and the pupil's aptitude belongs to Mercury, and the tradition treats Mercury as morally neutral in a way it treats no other planet. The same planet supplies the scholar, the merchant, the messenger and the thief, and the chart around it decides which.

Jupiter is the authority. It governs law, doctrine, religion, philosophy, and the institutions in which learning is licensed and handed on. Where Mercury has the skill, Jupiter has the standing to say what is true, and the tradition's word for what Jupiter carries is not information but wisdom, meaning a settled body of teaching with a lineage behind it.

The two are not rivals, but they are not interchangeable either. A chart strong in Mercury and weak in Jupiter describes someone quick, articulate and unanchored. The reverse describes someone with a doctrine and less facility in expressing it. The tradition's ideal teacher has both in good condition and in aspect to one another.

Jupiter's joy is the eleventh house, which the Greek sources call the Good Daimon.

The house side of teaching runs along an axis, and it is the same axis that carries travel, which is not a coincidence.

The third house holds elementary learning, letters, writing, and the exchange of news among neighbours and kin. It is where a person acquires the tools: literacy, numeracy, the local language, whatever the world immediately around them requires. Mercury is at home there and the Moon has its joy there.

The ninth holds higher learning, philosophy, religion, the church, foreign languages, dreams and prophecy. That is Jupiter's material. The ninth is where a person acquires a frame rather than a tool, and the tradition puts learning to see the world differently in the same house as travelling to a place where it is seen differently. The Sun has its joy in the ninth.

Reading the two as one axis is what makes the scheme coherent. The third is knowledge that operates inside the native's world. The ninth is knowledge that changes what that world is. A teacher works at both ends, and the tradition would ask of a teaching chart which end its significators favour.

The resemblance between the ninth house list and the higher faculties of the medieval university, theology, law and philosophy, is close enough to be striking. The atlas records it as a resemblance rather than as a line of influence, because the direction of any borrowing between them is not something this entry can settle.