The 6th House in Aries

In Lilly’s method the sign on the sixth-house cusp was one of the places an astrologer looked to name the part of the body a sickness lay in, alongside the rising sign, the Moon’s sign and the sign of the lord of the sixth. With Aries on the cusp that list pointed to the head and the face, the region every text from Manilius onward gave the Ram, and it handed the rulership of the house to Mars. Lilly read the sixth house for sickness, for servants and for small cattle, so the sign on its cusp spoke to all three matters in his chapters and to the body only in the chapter on the sick. The texts described the sign; they did not describe a person. That framing holds for every section below, and nothing on this page says what Aries on the cusp does to anyone.

The table counts every day from 1900 to 2050 with a birth hour stepping seven hours through each day, cast at longitude zero with Placidus cusps, and asks how often the sixth cusp lands in Aries at each latitude. At the equator the answer is 7.75% of charts. At 40 N it is 9.56%, and at 60 N it is 11.56%. South of the line the share goes the other way, to 6.51% at 30 S. Aries is one of the signs whose share climbs toward the north pole, so a chart cast for Edinburgh or Oslo meets this cusp more often than one cast for Nairobi or Singapore.

The rising signs behind those charts change with latitude as well. At the equator almost every chart with Aries on the sixth cusp has Scorpio rising, with a trace from Sagittarius, so the Placidus cusp and the Whole Sign sixth house name the same sign nearly all the time there. By 40 N the table lists 2 rising signs: Scorpio supplies 7.42% and Libra the remainder. At 60 N the two draw closer together, and Libra rising accounts for nearly as many of these charts as Scorpio does.

A Libra Ascendant with Aries on the sixth cusp is a chart in which the Descendant also stands in Aries, since the setting sign is always opposite the rising one. The sixth house is then short, its cusp and the seventh cusp share one sign, and some other sign in the chart carries no cusp at all. That is the Placidus geometry of high latitude: the houses stretch and shrink as the ecliptic tilts against the horizon, and the cusp of the sixth runs ahead of the sign the Whole Sign count would give it.

The same geometry that puts Aries on the sixth cusp from a Libra Ascendant also takes the sign off every cusp in other charts. In the sample Aries is intercepted, lying wholly inside a house whose cusps fall in the signs on either side, in 12.24% of charts at 40 N, 15.73% at 50 N and 21.22% at 60 N. At 60 N that is more than a fifth of all charts, a larger share than the one Aries holds on the sixth cusp at the same latitude.

Aries is a sign of short ascension in the northern hemisphere. The ecliptic crosses the eastern horizon at a shallow angle while Aries rises, so the sign passes the Ascendant quickly and the houses nearby cover more than thirty degrees of the zodiac. A house that spans more than a sign can hold a whole sign inside it, and the signs most often caught that way are the fast risers, Aries among them. Libra, opposite, is intercepted in the same charts, since Placidus cusps are symmetrical across the wheel.

The texts drawn on here built the sixth-house reading on the cusp sign and its lord. An intercepted sign had no cusp to rule, and what an astrologer made of its ruler is a matter the later handbooks took up rather than Lilly or Culpeper. On this site the frequency table records how often it happens and leaves the reading of it to those later authors, named as later.

Mars rules Aries in the classical scheme, and the table sets out what the three planet lists gave Mars in the body. Ptolemy described Mars as hot and dry in excess and placed the left ear, the kidneys, the veins and the genitals under it. Lilly’s chapter on Mars in Christian Astrology listed the gall, the kidneys, the left ear and the genitals, and read the planet in the blood as its heat. Culpeper kept the gall, the heat of the blood and the left ear. None of the three lists put the head under Mars; the head belonged to the sign, and the planet brought its own parts to the reading.

With Scorpio rising, the commonest case at every latitude in the table, Mars rules the Ascendant and the sixth cusp at once. Lilly’s sixth-house chapters compared the lord of the first with the lord of the sixth, and here there is nothing to compare: one planet stood for the native and for the sickness alike. Of the twelve cusp signs only two produce this under Whole Sign houses, Aries from a Scorpio Ascendant through Mars and Libra from a Taurus Ascendant through Venus. The sign on the cusp therefore sent an astrologer of Lilly’s time to the state of a single planet, its sign, its house, its aspects and its distance from the Sun.

Culpeper’s decumbiture method, printed in 1655 after the 1651 edition, took the same lord of the sixth and judged it by its nature against the nature of the lord of the Ascendant and of the Moon. A hot and dry planet ruling the sixth was read by him as marking a cause of the same quality, choler in the humoral language his readers shared. That is history, and the table above shows the assignments as the three texts made them.

Every sign list in the Zodiac Man table gives Aries the top of the figure. Manilius wrote the head alone, in the first line of his sequence down the body, and the Greek list Ptolemy presupposed kept the same word. Lilly in 1647 and Culpeper in 1655 wrote head and face, adding the surface to the whole. It is the one region on which all four columns agree without a change of word beyond that addition, which is what one expects at the start of a list that every later writer copied from the top.

The Zodiac Man guide follows the list through all twelve signs and shows where the columns disagree lower down the figure. For Aries the interest is in the pairing rather than the region: the texts gave the sign the head and gave its ruler a different set of parts, so an astrologer reading this cusp held two lists at once. The sign page for Aries carries the same region note under the same framing.

The cusp sign opened the reading and the lord of the sixth carried it. The next things the texts asked for were the sign Mars occupies, the house it falls in, whether it stands in Aries or Scorpio as its own houses or in Cancer, the sign of its fall, and whether it is near the Sun. Lilly read a planet within the Sun’s rays as combust and gave it less weight on that account. Aspects came after, above all from Saturn and from the Moon, since Lilly held the Moon to be a general significator in questions of the sick.

Any planet inside the sixth house was listed in its own right, with its sign and nature, and the ruler of the Ascendant was compared with the ruler of the sixth. The 6th house guide sets out the whole procedure, the table of the sixth cusp for every rising sign at three latitudes, and the question of house systems that this page touches only for Aries. The planet page for Mars in medical astrology follows the ruler through its dignities, its retrograde periods and its stays by sign.