The Lot of the Father is taken from Saturn and the Sun, the two natural significators of the father in this tradition, Saturn as the general significator of the elder and the Sun as the significator of the father by day. The doubling is the source of the confusion: some authorities reverse the order of the two, and some apply a sect reversal while others do not, so published formulae differ. The underlying doctrine, that Saturn signifies the father, is old and is stated by Ptolemy, who assigns the father to the Sun and Saturn and the mother to the Moon and Venus; the lots simply give that doctrine a point in the chart. Modern practice more often reads the fourth house or the tenth for the father, and the lots of the family members are little used outside traditional circles.
Medieval sources agree that the Lot of the Father is built from Saturn and the Sun but differ, as with the Lot of Children, on the direction of the arc and on whether the sect reversal that governs the Hellenistic lots proper is applied to it at all; some medieval compilers, working after the Hellenistic sect doctrine had weakened in transmission, treat the family lots as fixed formulas independent of day or night birth, which if correct would mark a real break from the sect-sensitive construction of the seven principal Hermetic lots above. This shift, if it is one, is itself a useful marker of how much technical apparatus was lost or simplified between the Hellenistic period and the medieval Arabic and Latin reception of the lots.