The 6th House in Gemini

Lilly’s sixth house held sickness, servants and small cattle, and the sign on its cusp was read for whichever of those the question concerned. For sickness the cusp sign was one of four places he named for the part of the body: the rising sign, the sign of the sixth, the sign of the Moon and the sign of the lord of the sixth. Gemini on the cusp pointed those places to the shoulders, arms and hands, the region the lists gave the Twins, and made Mercury the lord to be examined. Ptolemy, in the second century, had looked to the setting angle and the sign before it, which is the sixth sign counted from the Ascendant, so the place itself was old even where the method was not. All of this is the texts’ assignment, stated as history; none of it is a statement about anyone.

Under Whole Sign houses the sixth house is the sixth sign from the Ascendant, so Gemini is the sixth house whenever Capricorn rises and at no other time. Under Placidus the cusps are computed from the rotation of the sky, and the sixth cusp drifts away from the sixth sign as the latitude grows. Lilly worked with the Regiomontanus system; Placidus is the system this site casts, and the one the table on this page counts. The two agree at the equator far more often than they agree at 60 N, which is the first thing the figures below show.

Ptolemy’s chapter on injuries and diseases used neither system. He named the setting sign and the one before it, the sign disjunct from the Ascendant, which is a count of signs and not of cusps. The sixth place in that sense is what the Whole Sign line of the table reports. For a reader who counts signs rather than cusps, that line at the top of the table is the whole answer, and the latitude columns are a comparison.

Gemini sits on the Placidus sixth cusp in 8.94% of sample charts at the equator, 9.57% at 40 N and 10.64% at 60 N, with 8.52% at 30 S. The spread is a narrow one. Where Aries and Pisces gain several points between the line and the far north, Gemini gains little, and the share stays near the one in twelve that an even division of the sky would give through the middle latitudes. The sign gains in the north because it is a sign of short ascension there, but it is the last of the six such signs, bordering Cancer, and its ascension is only a little shorter than the mean.

The rising signs change more than the share does. At the equator Capricorn rising supplies nearly all of these charts and Sagittarius a small balance. At 40 N Capricorn still leads with 6.35%, and Sagittarius rising provides the rest of the 2 entries. At 60 N the two change places and Sagittarius rising becomes the commoner route. A Sagittarius Ascendant sets the Descendant in Gemini, so in those charts the sixth cusp has run forward into the seventh sign and the sixth house is short. South of the equator the second rising sign is Aquarius instead, the cusp having dropped into the fifth sign.

Interception shows the opposite shape from the share: flat near the equator and steep in the north. Gemini lies on no cusp in 7.27% of charts at 40 N, 12.21% at 50 N and 20.85% at 60 N, a fifth of the sample at the last of those. Sagittarius is intercepted in the same charts. The table records the count; the reading of a sign without a cusp belongs to handbooks later than the texts drawn on here, and is attributed to them where this site mentions it at all.

Mercury rules Gemini and Virgo in the classical scheme. Virgo is the sixth sign of the zodiac counted from Aries, so in the modern habit of matching signs to houses Mercury is already the planet most often called the natural lord of the sixth. That habit is a twentieth-century one and is named here as such. In the texts the point is plainer: with Gemini on the cusp, Mercury was the lord of the sixth, and the astrologer went to it.

The table gives what the three lists assigned to Mercury. Ptolemy placed speech and thought under it, with the tongue, the bile and the buttocks, and described its nature as changing with the planets it stood near, drying with some and moistening with others. Lilly listed the brain, the tongue, the hands and the imagination. Culpeper kept the brain, the tongue and the hands and added the nerves. The hands stand under the planet in both English columns and under the sign in the same two columns, so for Gemini, as for Taurus and Venus, the sign and its lord named one part between them.

Because Mercury took its quality from company, the texts gave it no settled vote of hot or cold. Lilly wrote that Mercury took on the nature of the planet it was joined with, and Culpeper judged the cause of a sickness under a Mercury-ruled sixth by the planet Mercury stood with. The site’s planet table scores Mercury as changeable and leaves it without a vote for the same reason.

Ptolemy called Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces bicorporeal, the double-bodied signs, because each stood between a solid sign and a tropical or equinoctial one and shared in both. Lilly kept the class under the name of common signs. In his sixth-house chapter on the length of a sickness the common signs were read for the middling and the returning, between the quick course he gave the movable signs and the settled course he gave the fixed. Gemini on the cusp was therefore read toward a changeable course, together with the sign of the Moon and of the lord of the sixth.

The same class entered the question of servants, where Lilly read a common sign on the cusp of the sixth as more than one servant, by the ordinary rule that double-bodied signs doubled the matter asked about. The two uses sit side by side in his book, and the sign meant one thing for the sick and another for the household. On this page the sickness reading is history and the household reading is a curiosity; neither is a statement about a reader.

Manilius gave the Twins the shoulders and the arms, two parts in one line, which fits a sign the poets drew as two figures. The Greek list behind Ptolemy wrote the shoulders alone. Lilly and Culpeper listed the arms, shoulders and hands, adding the hands at the end of the limb in the way their lists added organs and extremities to the Latin regions. The Zodiac Man table on the guide page sets the four wordings side by side, and the sign page for Gemini carries the same note.

What the texts did with the region once the cusp named it was to pair it with the parts under the lord. For Gemini that pairing gave the hands twice, from the sign and from Mercury, and the shoulders and arms once. An astrologer of Lilly’s time then went to the Moon’s sign and the rising sign for the rest of the four places. Nothing in that procedure spoke about a person; it spoke about a chart.

From the cusp the reading passed to Mercury: its sign and house, whether it stood in Gemini or Virgo and so in its own dignity, or in Sagittarius or Pisces and so in detriment or fall, whether it was retrograde, and whether it was within the Sun’s rays. Mercury is within the Sun’s rays more often than any other planet because it never leaves the Sun by more than a sign, and the planet page for Mercury in medical astrology gives the share of days it spends retrograde. Lilly then compared the lord of the sixth with the lord of the Ascendant and set the Moon beside both.

The 6th house guide carries the full order of the reading and the table of the sixth cusp for every rising sign at the equator, 40 N and 60 N. The planets guide sets Mercury among the seven with its nature and its parts. This page stops at the cusp and its lord, which is where the texts began.