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How the Reading of Leisure Has Moved

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How the Reading of Leisure Has Moved

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.

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