In my version of astrology, we take the personal very seriously. Because astrology teaches us that often, our internal situation matches some outside movement or cycle. That our mundane actions have meaning. One of my favorite ways to track the shifting meaning of my life is through profection years. This simple timing technique aligns each year of your life to a certain house. When you’re born, you enter a 1st house year, on your first birthday, a second house year, etc going around and around the 12 houses the older you get. There are many ways to complicate this technique but I find simply focusing on the house topics of your given year yields much insight into major themes. This means that while I also just left my 29th year, I also left my 6th house year.
This realm of the sky is considered a difficult house, literally called kake tuche, or bad fortune, by Hellenistic astrologers. Here is a repository for the plethora of difficulties that can physically befall a life. Demetra George lists “illness, accidents, injuries, infirmity, servitude, and just plain old bad luck, disappointment and failure”1 underneath this house in part because it can’t see the first house and is cadent. In astrology, a house’s ability to form a classical aspect to the house of the self is crucial to determining its beneficence because without sight, we don’t have any agency over it. Being cadent aligns it with the metakosmios, or the space between worlds, what distracts us from normal functioning or “business as usual”.
Think of the illness that puts you in bed and lessens your livelihood. The errands and bills and appointments you have to make as well as the labor you must sell in between these important tasks that no one sees. Think of the car accidents and computer malfunctioning and customer service emails you have to write to make your life turn. You are getting a taste for the sixth house.
George says the sixth house determines “where one encounters personal crisis”.2 Something that became apparent to me this past year was how life is often a series of accidents. On a given day we have so many tasks to complete, urgent and otherwise, spanning brushing our teeth and paying bills, to maintaining friendships and getting personal projects in motion. It’s often our job to “triage” on a given day and decide which tasks absolutely need to get done with our limited time and what must wait for the next day. We can use astrology to figure out our problem-solving style. In Demetra’s words, “The planets within the house show the basic kinds of challenges that arise when opportunities or growth are presented, while the lord of the sixth points to where these efforts should be focused”.3 I like this delineation because it points to a silver lining to the struggle: a honing and forging of the self that can only come through discomfort.
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