Career in Astrology: Escaping the Pyramid of Privilege
Map of Purgatory, from Dante: con l'espostione di M. Bernardino Daniello da Lucca (Venetia: Appresso Pietro da Fino, 1568)
One of the biggest challenges of being an astrologer in the 21st century — aside from the strange looks I get when I insist that telling stories about stars is my real job — is inheriting a framework that was originally designed for ancient Roman aristocrats.
I’ll admit, this isn’t a problem for all astrologers. Celebrities are infamous for consulting astrologers. Princess Diana’s astrologer was her confidant. Robert Downey Jr. wrote a cover blurb for one of astrologer Steven Forrest’s books. And there’s a legend in the astrology community that Ronald Reagan got his “Teflon president” reputation because an astrologer helped him schedule his bad news press conferences for times when they would do him the least harm.
I, however, am not a celebrity astrologer. My clients are ordinary people. Most of them are going through some kind of transition. They don’t need a mental health practitioner, but they need help, in the words of Mary Oliver, finding their place “in the family of things.”
Helping you find your place in society is exactly what astrology was designed to do. It is a wonder that we’ve been using the same model (more or less) unchanged for over 2000 years. It’s even more startling that the same techniques work for Princess Diana as Joe the Plumber. It says a lot about the influence of Roman society on ours. Namely, we’ve inherited a lot more from Rome than roads.
Still, working with a system that is at least 2000 years old has its challenges, and one of the biggest challenges involves career.
The Pyramid of Privilege
Geometry is the foundation of astrology. As an astrologer, I spend my day finding meaning in angles, triangles, circles, squares, and lines. The shape that is most relevant to career in a natal chart is a triangle I call the Pyramid of Privilege. The pyramid is a highly simplified picture of how things got done in Roman society.
The bottom of the pyramid was made of the wealth and slaves who propped up the Roman aristocracy at the top of the pyramid.
Slaves (and women and some young men) did all the menial labor and messy stuff necessary to make the lifestyles of Roman aristocrats possible. They cooked and cleaned and harvested the grain. They weaved cloth, conquered new land, and protected Roman claims on land that had already been conquered.
Free from menial obligations, the aristocracy at the top of the pyramid wrote plays, argued in the senate, and meditated on Stoic philosophy.
When the Romans talked about “career” in the context of astrology, they weren’t talking about the labor performed by the people at the bottom of the pyramid. They were talking about philosophy, government, and the arts — the things the aristocracy were able to do because they were free from what most of us call work.
The Evolution of the 6th House: We Are All Servants Now
In the 20th century, the way astrology talks about career changed radically, and that change centered on the 6th house.
Young astrologers are taught that the traditional name for the 6th house—one of the points in the Pyramid of Privilege—is the “House of Servants.” They are told that in ancient times, an astrologer might consult this area of the chart to help a wealthy landowner understand why the grapes didn’t get pressed on time.
Today, by Roman standards, we are all servants. The Senators who genteelly argued finer points of rhetoric in Rome are called public servants today. Billionaires—the 21st century equivalent of wealthy Roman landowners—brag about their 100 hour work weeks. Today, astrologers consult the 6th house to help us find our inner servant, to discover what abilities we might refine and convince someone to pay us for.
The 10th house, the area at the top of the pyramid — the part the Romans called the “House of Career” — is better understood as the house of vocation. It is our higher calling, the reason we are on this planet, the meaningful stuff we would do if not for the need to work and eat and clothe ourselves and care for our families.
The Race to the Top of the Pyramid
In astrology’s model of society, the bottom of the pyramid is meant to support the vocations of those at the top. This model worked easily in a world where astrology was a domain of the privileged and the masses weren’t considered to have a vocation (or a “House of Career”) at all.
The reality today is much more complicated. When a client comes to talk to me about their career, I almost always hear about conflict between the top of the pyramid and the bottom of the pyramid.
That conflict is not because my client is a union member engaged in collective bargaining — though, I hear those stories, too. It’s because a modern understanding of astrology sees every individual as participating in every level of the pyramid. The division (at least, in theory) is in time, not in socio-economic class. We spend our work lives worrying about the bottom of the pyramid and our precious hours off thinking about the top.
Workaholic billionaires aside, the American dream is the dream of becoming a Roman aristocrat. This is the promise of The 4-Hour Workweek and the FIRE movement. Success is escaping the bottom of the pyramid, achieving freedom from concerns with money and menial labor in order to pursue a vocation and accomplish a Great Work.
Life Off the Pyramid
If you have finished the race (or were born on the top of the pyramid), congratulations. I hope you use your powers for awesome.
But what if you’re struggling on the bottom of the pyramid with the rest of us?
A lot of people consult astrologers because they are burned out on the struggle, and they are hoping that astrology will help them reconcile the Pyramid of Privilege in themselves. There are times when I can have strategy sessions with clients in which we talk about vocation and how my client might find a way to reconcile their need to complete their Great Work with the need to eat.
More often, I don’t see a Roman aristocrat trapped in the life of a real estate agent. I see a person whose work on this planet has nothing to do with career — or vocation — at all. They’re here to learn how to live with courage or relate to others with diplomacy. They’re here to raise children or tend to things that grow. They’re here for travel, to widen their minds with cross-cultural experiences, to read Marcus Aurelius and make YouTube videos about it.
None of these activities would be worthy of being called a career to Roman aristocrats, but when my clients and I explore the many different ways of finding meaning in a life, they find relief in having the deepest desires of their hearts validated.
Most of us aren’t here for the pyramid. We’re here for a life.
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