First and foremost, the tenth house is the house of the mother. This is in part derived from the father, signified by the fourth house. There is a bit of an assumption that your father and mother are supposed to be partners. However, the mother can be signified by the fourth house when the fourth house signifies both parents or they can be signified by the tenth house, which is particularly about the mother.
Most astrologers describe the midheaven as having the largest influence on a person out of all of the angles. Manilius says that it rules “glory, distinction, honors, popular favor” and “fame.” Firmicus says that it rules “all our actions,” “all our dealings with others,” and “professional career.”
The root of the word career is chariot. The midheaven is where the chariot of the Sun appears when it is at its highest. For the aristocrats, for whom careers were available, a career was not work that they did to earn a living since being an aristocrat meant that they didn’t have to earn a living. A career was simply what defined their life, which included charity and education and publishing. Those who enjoyed a career in education, for example, didn’t earn a living teaching. They saw their course in life as defined by their relationship to the academy.
Before that, around the time of Manilius and Firmicus, the cursus honorum was a clearly defined rung of ladders. Patricians began in the military, served ten years, then became cops. Only after that could they work in law making professions. The highest rung of the ladder was that of dictator. The common man was represented by those in the Tribune of the Plebs, which held non-Patricians who had immense capital. Career, in this sense, had everything to do with status under the state.
When we talk about career today, we carry these aristocratic and Roman associations into the word. Careers are supposed to be different from jobs even though most of us depend on the jobs that make up our “careers” to pay the bills. Women and the working class are all supposed to have careers now. We’re supposed to achieve purpose and meaning through our work, even though we rely on getting paid for what we do.
The Tenth House Changes
In the first phase of life, before the Saturn return, the tenth house is about the mother. Before a Saturn return, the only times you have a tenth house year, the only times you’re defining the tenth house, are when you are nine and twenty one.
I’m sorry but I don't think that nine year olds should have any kind of career. Call me old fashioned or progressive or whatever but age ten should be when you enjoy not knowing what the hell is going on and getting ready for inevitable puberty. I understand that there are nine years with careers who are working but I stick by what I said. I also don't think twenty one year olds should have clear life purpose. At that age, you still haven't hit your second Jupiter return. That age should be about fucking around and fucking up.
My roommate once told me about mothering. He told me that a friend of his had just done a presentation about mothers, about how mothering is not gender specific and about how mother exists in so many ways. He said that, when you write a poem, you mother that poem into being. He talked about how trans culture was mothered into being by the people in ballrooms. I think about this a lot in relationship to the tenth house.
When you reach mid age, your tenth house is supposed to be about honors and dignity and fame but I still think it’s about mothering. You might mother a biological child or you might mother other things. You might mother young people around you, a brilliant idea, some research question, or you might mother yourself. You might mother your own purpose into being.
So, it’s not just twenty one year olds who are powerless against careers. It’s a lot of us. I’m reluctant to talk about the tenth house as the career because careers can seem so fantastical. There’s a lot bound up with the idea of career. But I do talk about it, with very young people and with very old people and everyone else in between. We talk about the emotions that the concept of career brings up. It can bring up anxiety, creativity, or a bit of both.
In the last phase of life, the tenth house is meant to stabilize its other significations. I think about how my mother’s mother mothered her by mothering me. Mothers, I think, were not meant to exist in isolation even though so many of us drop into isolation when we mother something into being. Mothers are a lineage of methods, tactics, and habits.
Mars
There is no planet that rejoices in the tenth house. Only Mars signifies it.
In the last article in this series, where we talked about the house of God, we also talked about how Mars is not included in the house of the social class of men. However, Mars is in the tenth house. The reason, I think, is leftover from Rome. The reason, I think, is because Roman patricians began their careers as law enforcers, as military men and as cops.
There is an aspect of the tenth house that is about the state. I know that, when we think about the modern career, we are often thinking about a bloated private sector. However, careers weren’t always about the corporation. They used to be about maintaining the state.
We still see this today. Cops are more likely to become bureaucrats who become politicians. Politicians are expected to have some kind of military experience. But the military isn’t just about war. The military is also an informational and technological sphere that exists to circulate public money into private hands.
Masculinity shifted after the two world wars. There was suddenly a new type of masculinity available. It was a traumatized and corrupted protest masculinity. It’s the masculinity of James Joyce, of working class men who realized how disposable they were meant to live. We still see this type of masculinity in the form of the anti hero, in Walter White and the joker or even Batman.
I think that, with how we’re expected to interact with matters of the state, in how we portray our public selves, there is still a level of militancy involved. We’re expected to discard people as if they’re disposable, we’re expected to make cutting hot takes, and we’re expected most of all to respond urgently and immediately. But movement building or movement mothering often doesn’t work like that or, at least, it doesn’t work well when it works like that. All that stuff is about representation. It’s about maintaining the state.
I like to think about Mars as protection. I’ve talked to a lot of Mars in the tenth house people who are seen as these rebels or protectors but who also feel this deep unease and overwhelm or fear about the world. It’s funny how some of our most courageous people are also the most scared. That, I think, is Mars. She’s fighting because she’s scared of something.
Working with the Tenth House
One way of working with the tenth house is to look at the sign it is in and to see whether or not you have any people in your lineage with those signs. This is a lineage that is specifically around mothering. It can be your biological mother or it can be other lineages that have to do with learning mothering for you. Again, mothering doesn’t have to be biological birth.
A lot of the time, people will have lineage relationships through the tenth house. They might have Mercury there and realize that they have a lot of labor stuff in how they learned mothering. They might have Venus there and inherit aesthetic rituals as a form of mothering. They might have a lunar node in the tenth house and feel like they were constantly subjected to thinking about what other people would think of them, which is something I’ve noticed with people who have south node in the tenth.
The other thing that you can do with the tenth house is, you can think about what you'd like to protect and mother and how you tend to protect and mother. We tend to think about mothering as very insular or introverted, which has to do with the isolation of mothers, but mothering can also take other forms. Mothering can be about making big guesses or trying something new.
That’s the tenth house. What I don’t think people should do is look at the sign that their tenth house is in, some attributes of that sign, and decide what kind of job they want to work. Remember, the concept of purpose isn’t necessarily connected to labor. The types of jobs that you can access might have less to do with purpose and more to do with class. I get why people want to streamline it all—we spend so much fucking time working that, of course, we want to look for purpose from work. That’s frustrating. But you don’t have to have a purpose all of the time, your purpose can change, and you don’t necessarily find it in the place where you spend the most time.
