Father

Ptolemy's chapter on parents, in the third book of the Tetrabiblos, sets the pattern the rest of the Western tradition inherited. He does not give the father a house. He gives him two planets, the Sun and Saturn, and reads the father's fortune, standing and length of life from how those two sit in the chart: whether they are free of the malefics, how they stand to the Sun's own light, and whether they rise before or after it.

The pairing is not arbitrary, and its logic becomes visible once the doctrine of sect is in view. Hellenistic astrology sorts the seven planets into a day team and a night team. The Sun, Jupiter and Saturn belong to the day; the Moon, Venus and Mars belong to the night; Mercury takes whichever side it rises with. The father's two significators are the luminary and the outer planet of the day sect. The mother's two, the Moon and Venus, are the luminary and the benefic of the night. The parents are read as a sect pair before they are read as individuals.

That structure does real work in a reading. In a chart born by day the Sun is the stronger of the father's significators and Saturn the harder one. By night the emphasis reverses, and the same Saturn that merely disciplines a day chart's father can weigh heavily on a night chart's. Sect is the first thing a traditional astrologer establishes and the thing a purely modern reading is most likely to omit, which is why one placement can be described as sober authority in one book and as absence in another.

The planets are one route to the father. The houses are the other, and the two branches of the tradition do not agree on which house he occupies.

Lilly's Christian Astrology, the fullest English statement of the medieval house catalogue, puts the father in the fourth, along with lands, houses, tenements, inheritance, hidden treasure and the end of any matter. The fourth is the lowest point of the chart, the ground under the native, and a tradition that reads land and inheritance there reads the man the land came from there too. The tenth, in the same catalogue, carries kings, princes, honour, preferment, office, trade, and the mother.

Modern astrology very often reverses this. The tenth is read as the father, on the argument that the midheaven is the public, authoritative, outward parent and the fourth the private and interior one. Much twentieth century psychological astrology writes it that way without noting that it has swapped the traditional assignment, and a chart interpreted under one convention will not match a chart interpreted under the other.

The atlas records both rather than choosing, because the disagreement is genuine and old, and because the argument on each side is about something real: whether the parental axis is sorted by gender, by sect, or by which parent the native experiences as the household's public face. Anyone reading a fourth or tenth house placement should say which convention they are using before they say what it means.

Sources Christian AstrologyWilliam Lilly with The Contemporary Astrologer's HandbookSue Tompkins