The planets are one route to the father. The houses are the other, and the two branches of the tradition do not agree on which house he occupies.
Lilly's Christian Astrology, the fullest English statement of the medieval house catalogue, puts the father in the fourth, along with lands, houses, tenements, inheritance, hidden treasure and the end of any matter. The fourth is the lowest point of the chart, the ground under the native, and a tradition that reads land and inheritance there reads the man the land came from there too. The tenth, in the same catalogue, carries kings, princes, honour, preferment, office, trade, and the mother.
Modern astrology very often reverses this. The tenth is read as the father, on the argument that the midheaven is the public, authoritative, outward parent and the fourth the private and interior one. Much twentieth century psychological astrology writes it that way without noting that it has swapped the traditional assignment, and a chart interpreted under one convention will not match a chart interpreted under the other.
The atlas records both rather than choosing, because the disagreement is genuine and old, and because the argument on each side is about something real: whether the parental axis is sorted by gender, by sect, or by which parent the native experiences as the household's public face. Anyone reading a fourth or tenth house placement should say which convention they are using before they say what it means.
Sources Christian AstrologyWilliam Lilly with The Contemporary Astrologer's HandbookSue Tompkins