Recreation

The fifth house in Lilly's catalogue is a fair picture of what the seventeenth century took recreation to be: children, pleasure, banquets, ale houses, taverns, plays, and messengers and ambassadors. It is the house of enjoyment taken publicly and in company.

The organising idea is the one that also puts children there. The fifth is what a life produces for its own delight, as against the second house, which is what a life accumulates. A play, a feast and a child are all issue, and the tradition groups them by that rather than by any modern sense of category.

The Sun has a claim on the house because Leo is the fifth sign and the Sun rules Leo, and because the Sun's own signification, display, generosity and the visible centre of a gathering, matches the material well. Venus has the stronger claim in practice: the fifth is where Venus has her joy, one of the seven houses in which a planet is held to be at home in its own affairs whatever sign occupies it. A benefic in her joy in the house of pleasure is about as unambiguous as traditional astrology gets.

Jupiter contributes abundance rather than pleasure as such. The distinction the tradition draws between the two benefics is worth keeping. Venus supplies the sweetness of a thing and Jupiter its plenty, and a reading that treats them as interchangeable has lost the difference between a good evening and a large one.

What the fifth house is taken to mean has travelled further than almost any other house in the catalogue, and the journey is easy to trace.

The Renaissance list is social and physical: banquets, taverns, plays, gaming. Twentieth century astrology keeps the pleasure but reorganises it around the self, so the fifth becomes creativity, self expression, hobbies, romance and the child within, and the ale house drops off the list entirely. The reorganisation is not arbitrary. It follows a general shift in what astrology was for, from a technique for deciding what to do to a technique for describing who one is. Every house was rewritten in that move, and the fifth shows it most plainly because its subject matter is the least practical.

Both readings are recorded here. Neither is the true version, and the difference between them is better evidence about the periods that produced them than it is a defect in either.

The electional tradition, meanwhile, treats recreation the way it treats everything else, as a thing with a right moment. A gathering, a feast or a game is elected on the same principles as a journey: the ascendant for the participants, the Moon's condition and applications for how the interval will run, and the fourth house for how it ends. The astrologer who elected a good day for a banquet was not doing something separate from the astrologer who elected a good day to sail.