The 6th House in Cancer

When Cancer stands on the cusp of the 6th house, the tradition handed the house to the Moon, the one planet the texts set over the Crab. Lilly listed the 6th as the house of sickness, of servants and of small cattle, and he read the sign on its cusp and the lord of that sign before anything inside it. With the Moon as lord, an astrologer of 1647 judged the house by the Moon’s sign, its house, its phase and the planets in aspect to it, the same Moon that Culpeper’s decumbiture method put first among the significators of a patient. The texts described the sign itself as cold and moist, a water sign, and a Cancer cusp carried that description into the house. Under Whole Sign houses the Crab is the sixth sign only when Aquarius rises. Under the Placidus cusps this site draws, the placement arrives from three rising signs, and the table further down says how often from each.

The table counts charts cast for every day of 1900 to 2050, at seven birth hours a day, and asks at each latitude how many of them put Cancer on the Placidus 6th cusp. The equator answers 8.94%, the fortieth parallel 8.31% and the sixtieth 7.24%. South of the equator the figure climbs instead, to 9.36% at 30 S. Cancer belongs with the six signs whose hold on the sixth cusp loosens as a birthplace moves north, Cancer through Sagittarius, the signs of long ascension in the northern hemisphere.

The cause sits in the house opposite. Whenever Cancer holds the 6th cusp, Capricorn holds the 12th, and the 12th cusp lies just above the Ascendant on the eastern side of the chart. Capricorn is a sign of short ascension in the north. It crosses the eastern horizon quickly, so the stretch of sky around the Ascendant is in Capricorn for less of each day the farther north the chart is cast. The 6th cusp, as the mirror of the 12th, inherits that scarcity. In the southern hemisphere the two groups of signs trade places, and the Cancer share grows with distance from the equator.

The rising signs that produce the placement are the second thing the table records. At the equator the cusp falls in Cancer almost only when Aquarius rises, which is the Ascendant a Whole Sign count would demand, with Capricorn rising supplying a sliver and Pisces rising a trace. At 40 N the placement comes from 3 rising signs: Aquarius in 6.05% of all charts, then Capricorn, then Pisces. At 60 N the same 3 signs appear, but the gap between the first two has nearly closed, and a Capricorn Ascendant puts Cancer on the 6th cusp almost as often as an Aquarius one. A Capricorn Ascendant has Gemini for its sixth sign, so in those charts the Placidus cusp has moved a whole sign ahead of the Whole Sign house.

A sign is intercepted when a house swallows it whole: the cusp before it falls in the preceding sign, the cusp after it falls in the following sign, and no cusp lands inside. Whole Sign houses can never do this, since every sign is a house there. Placidus houses do it more the farther a chart lies from the equator, because the houses near the horizon stretch and shrink with latitude.

For Cancer the table gives 7.27% of charts at 40 N, 12.21% at 50 N and 20.85% at 60 N with the sign on no cusp. At the equator the row reads zero: not one chart in the sample intercepts Cancer there. That is a property of the two solstice signs. Near Cancer and Capricorn the ecliptic runs parallel to the equator of the sky, and a Placidus house at the equator spans less than a sign of longitude in that part of the zodiac. A house narrower than a sign cannot contain one. The signs around the equinoxes behave the other way, as the Virgo and Pisces pages of this series set out.

An intercepted Cancer still has a lord. The texts did not know interception as a doctrine of its own: the Hellenistic writers used whole signs, and Lilly worked with Regiomontanus cusps, where a sign can be swallowed too but no chapter is given to the case. A Placidus chart on this site with the whole of Cancer inside the sixth house has Gemini on the cusp and Mercury for its lord. The tradition’s order gives the cusp sign and its lord the first word, and the sign inside the house the second.

The ruler table beside this section sets out what Ptolemy, Lilly and Culpeper assigned to the Moon, since the Moon’s assignments are what the lord of this house carried with it. Ptolemy gave the Moon the stomach, the belly and the womb, together with taste and the left-hand parts. Lilly’s planet chapter in Christian Astrology added the brain, the bowels and the bladder. Culpeper kept the brain, the stomach and the bladder and wrote the left side where Ptolemy had written the left-hand parts. All three described the planet as cold and moist, the pairing of qualities the humoral scheme called phlegmatic.

The Moon was never only the lord of a house. In Lilly’s method for a nativity it was one of the two lights of life, the one that came first in a night birth. In Culpeper’s decumbiture method it was the first significator of the patient, judged by its sign at the moment the person took to bed and by the planets it met at each quarter afterward, the critical days. So when Cancer set the Moon over the 6th house, the astrologer found one planet doing two jobs, and Lilly’s rule was to weigh how the lord of the sixth stood toward the lord of the first.

A lunar lord changes sign every two or three days and completes the zodiac in a month, so its sign and house in a nativity hang on the hour of birth more closely than any other lord’s. The texts read its phase as well. Lilly and the writers before him judged a waxing Moon and a waning Moon differently, and the temperament guide on this site shows the phase casting a vote of its own. Combustion, which the texts applied to any planet standing close to the Sun, meant the new Moon in this case. The Moon is never retrograde, so that part of the planet pages has nothing to say about this lord.

The four source lists this site follows agree that the Crab stood over the chest of the Zodiac Man figure, below the Twins and above the Lion. Manilius, and the Greek list that Ptolemy presupposed, wrote the breast alone. Lilly’s table of 1647 filled the entry out to breast, ribs and stomach, and Culpeper’s of 1655 to breast and stomach. The region carried in the ruler table and on the body map is breast and ribs, the words the lists share. The Zodiac Man guide follows the stomach, which Ptolemy had listed under the Moon, on its way into the Moon’s sign.

That region belonged to the sign, and the house was a separate matter. The 6th was the place of sickness in the texts, and a cusp sign brought its region into the reading only because Lilly judged the part of the body concerned from the sign on the cusp and from the sign that held its lord. Culpeper’s decumbiture rule did the same from the Moon’s sign at the onset. Both rules are reported on this page as the history they are. The pages of this family apply them to no one, and the body map that draws the figure gives every region one size and says nothing about any of them.

A cusp sign was the first step of a reading and never the last. Lilly’s order for the 6th house ran from the sign on the cusp to its lord, then to any planet inside the house, then to the aspects those planets received from the Sun, the Moon, Saturn and Mars. With the Moon as lord, the second step was the Moon’s own sign and house, which the Moon’s page in the planet series takes up, along with the Moon’s share of time in the sixth house at the same latitudes as the table above.

The lord of the 1st came after that. The tradition compared the two lords, the first for the native and the sixth for the house of sickness, and asked whether they stood in aspect, which was the stronger by dignity, and whether either occupied the other’s house. Aquarius rising, the Ascendant that most often gives this cusp at every latitude in the table, has Saturn for its classical lord, so on most charts with Cancer on the 6th the comparison ran between Saturn and the Moon, the cold and dry planet against the cold and moist one. The 6th house guide sets out the whole order, the house systems question behind the table, and the planets in the sixth.