Labour in the chart: The 4th house
April 11, ‘24
Capitalism defines labour as the production of goods and services. Yet this doesn’t account for the other kinds of labour that exist such as housework. Capitalism posits monetized labour as the only valid form of labour as it ensures our survival. Yet life requires all kinds of labour to sustain our being. We can use the houses in the chart to recognise this by mapping out different kinds of labour through each house topic. It’s useful to reflect on what kind of labour we naturally gravitate towards and where we encounter difficulty. So, we can bring awareness to how we navigate our own lives and build agency through this by conscious choice. With this blueprint of labour by each house, we can begin to examine our relation to the work we do that is seen or unseen. This blueprint can work as a base for you to overlay your planetary positions. These positions can ask questions about whether that work is something expected, admired, required, unacknowledged, overburdening or neglected?
The 4th house
When I think about the 4th house I think about the land.
The 4th house is like the root of the chart. It often contains the Imum coeli, a line that reflects our parents, our ancestors, where we have come from.
It isn't just people who produce us, it's the land too. Our ancestors have spent thousands of years living with their lands. We have come from, habitated around and made place in the land. We have told stories on the rocks and shaped our fortunes with the sky. Rivers are your parents.
4th house labour is land work. It's our relationship to it. What we do to it and what it does to us. It is unconscious familiarity woven over time through place, that creates sanctuary. The work of the 4th house is to make sanctuary.
In western astrology this house sits at the bottom of the chart, under the horizon at the furthest visible point. It's interesting that a place that bears the land we come from is invisible.
Industrialisation and privatization of land has led to monoculture; the land has lost diversity and a lot of us have lost some form of access to land. There are many whose lands have been devastated, whose lands are being devastated. Sanctuary is a luxury attributed to land ownership in a capitalist-colonial world.
So 4th house labour comes with the legacy of loss. In astrology the 4th house makes a trine to the 8th house of death and the 12th of undoing. Doing 4th house labour involves working with grief in some kind of way.
What kind of labour do you practice around acknowledging your roots? Do you honour it? Disregard it? How much do you know about your ancestors? Where does your family name come from? What kind of power did they have or not have? Which lands did they tend to? How much do you know about the land you currently live on and the wildlife that inhabits it?
The 4th house is about legacy; the imprint we make on soil and stone. It's the soil degradation we have been left with from intensive farming practices. The 4th house asks us what can we restore?