When people generally talk about the 6th house it is in terms of work.
The sixth house has nothing to do with work, unless the concern is those who work for us or provide us a service. A person's own work, and not just work for pay, but their achievements, application to the world at large or public role, is always their tenth. This holds true whether we are talking about a waitress or a company director. We do not find a waitress, a plumber, or a postman in the sixth because they are 'servants', they are only servants to the people that they serve, and so are found only in those people's sixth houses, their respective jobs are to found in their own tenth houses of their nativities, always, without exception.
A distinction cannot be made between 'jobs' and 'careers', in finding the former in the sixth and the latter in the tenth. This is either ignorance, snobbery, or both, but ignorance can be amended.
Who decides the point at which a job is to be deemed a career anyway?
The working class is not relegated to the sixth house as 'servants', everybody, no matter what they do for a living provides a service to someone, even the company director, and when he does so and we do business with him, he is to be found in our sixth house, as our servant.
I can see where you are coming from in seeing a theme of subordination in the sixth, being the house of pets, domesticated and small animals, and as employees and servants, slaves even, and as the house of disease we can see how we might want to subordinate that.
I put inferiors in quotes because what I mean is those lower in the power structure than you
A person can have much greater power and influence than we have, and still be our subordinate servant, even if they cannot be considered 'inferior'. Our company director whom we do business with, is a rich and influential man, more than we are, so he is higher up in the 'power structure', he may indeed be considered 'superior' in many respects, but if providing us a service, he is our sixth.
e.g. servants, the person serving you coffee in the shop, people below you at work, maybe family members who are younger, people in grades below you at school etc.,
Those who serve us in any capacity are always the sixth. I agree that there is a general theme of subordination in the sixth house, yet the sixth bears other themes as well, but this isn't to be applied in every circumstance in life in which we may find other people lower than us in whatever rank or hierarchy.
People who are 'below' you at work, which I take to mean those who are payed less or those who have less authority, are your colleagues, and unless any of them happen to be appointed to you especially as a servant, such as a personal secretary, they are not your sixth. Your collegues are the third house, as they are considered to be 'kin', and you are all beneath the jurisdiction of the same 'parent' which is the boss, in the same 'home' which is the place of work.
Unless a person at work is designated as your servant in particular, they are not your sixth, they are your third. Being payed a little less or having less influence isn't enough to relegate them to the sixth house. If they work alongside you in the same environment under the same boss, and you have not been designated as their employee or primary authority, they are not your sixth.
Family members who are younger are not the sixth in general, and depending upon the relation they can be found in many houses.
Family members that would be found in the sixth would be your maternal cousin's spouse (seventh from third from tenth), or your father's brother (third from fourth), for example, but this would stand regardless of whether the relative is younger or older than you.
Siblings are always the third, and brothers or sisters in general will always be found here, younger or older. If you sought to differentiate however, between older and younger brethren, then you can continue counting the third from the third house along, to show sibling from sibling until you have all brothers and sisters represented in different houses.
If you have a younger sibling or siblings, the closest to you in age takes the third, and the next youngest is counted as the third from that third, showing brother of brother, which brings us to the fifth.
If you only have older brethren, then the closest to you in age takes the third, and you count three houses back to find the next oldest.
If you have older and younger brethren, then again, you take the younger sibling after you as the third, and count from there.
The people that we go to school with is a third house matter as well. Classmates are the third, and so are all else who go to school along with us, but if we sought to distinguish between higher and lower classes, we might count one forwards or backwards from the third, which is our own class.
as to the notion of "superiority" in the 12th, i think it might concern the "higher spirits" instead of social status.
The twelfth is the most unfortunate and malefic house possible. That this, the House of Evil, is associated with spirituality by so many, reveals a worrying modern misunderstanding as to the difference between both nature of spirituality and the nature of evil. Two things most certainly not to be confused.
Think of the likes of Sylvia Brown. Most of her astrologically curious fans would, I am sure, consider 'spirituality' a twelfth house matter - which speaks for itself.
Those channels that connect us to higher intelligences are always the ninth.
Maybe prison wardens (Punishers) would fall in the 6th house and the punished in the 12th the inmates (but just a theory could be completely wrong).
No, I think your completely right.
In a mundane chart, the twelfth is prisons, prisoners and the criminal underworld. Prison's themselves would be the twelfth, but the prison
service, would be the sixth from the twelfth, and so would be the sixth, and so would the police, in that they're servants of the state.