Servant

The sixth house carries servants in the medieval catalogue, and it carries them alongside sickness, small cattle, day labour and, in Lilly, uncles and aunts on the father's side. The Hellenistic name for the same place is Kake Tyche, Bad Fortune, and Mars has its joy there.

The company the servant keeps in that list shows how the tradition understood the relation. This is not the house of colleagues, nor of people the native likes. It is the house of what must be attended to daily, of what can go wrong in the body and the household, and of people whose work is bounded by obligation rather than by affection. A reading that treats the sixth as the workplace in a modern sense has softened it considerably.

Read from the other side, the servant's own chart would carry the same relation in its seventh or its tenth, and the tradition is aware of the asymmetry. This is a chart of the native's household as the native stands in it, so the servant appears as a function of that household rather than as a person with a nativity of their own. The derived house method exists partly to correct for that: the sixth taken as a first house gives the servant a full set of twelve places, and the astrologer can then ask about their health, their money and their loyalty separately.

The modern equivalent of the sixth is employment, routine, health and the daily order of work. The change in vocabulary carries a real change in what the house is thought to describe.

Sources Christian AstrologyWilliam Lilly with Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and FortuneChris Brennan

The sixth house entry is one of several places where astrological technique preserves the social order of the societies that built it, and the atlas records that rather than tidying it away.

The Hellenistic and medieval texts on this house concern household dependants, in worlds where a substantial part of that dependency was unfree. Dorotheus of Sidon treats the buying of slaves among the inceptions in the fifth book of the Carmen Astrologicum, and the later Arabic and Latin compilations carry the material forward. The technique treats a person as the subject of an election in the way it treats a journey or a purchase, and no amount of retranslation into the language of employment makes that disappear.

Two things follow. The first is descriptive honesty. An atlas of correspondences that quietly replaces every mention of a slave with the word employee misrepresents its sources, and a reader who then meets the originals finds them very different from the summary. The second is that the sixth house's modern meaning, work, service, routine and health, is a real change in doctrine and not merely a change in wording. The relation the house now describes is one a person can leave.

The atlas therefore names both: what the tradition recorded, in the terms it recorded it, and what practitioners take the house to mean today. Living traditions are described here rather than prescribed, and the historical material is presented as history.