The 6th House in Leo

Leo on the 6th house cusp handed the house to the Sun, the one planet the tradition set over the Lion. Lilly’s sixth-house chapters in Christian Astrology read the sign on the cusp and its lord for the quality of a sickness and for servants and small animals, so a chart with this cusp sent the astrologer to the Sun’s sign, house and aspects. The Sun was also, in the same method, the giver of life for anyone born by day, and Lilly weighed it in that office before he came to the houses at all. The texts called the sign hot, dry and fixed, and Ptolemy described the Sun as hot and dry too, so the sign and its lord agreed in quality. In a Whole Sign chart the Lion is the sixth sign when Pisces rises. On the Placidus cusps this site draws, the table further down shows the placement arriving from two rising signs at middle latitudes and from three near the pole.

The ruler table lists the Sun’s assignments in the three sources. Ptolemy gave the Sun sight, the brain, the heart, the sinews and the right-hand parts. Lilly’s planet chapter of 1647 named the heart, the back, the eyes, the right eye of a man in particular, and the vital spirit. Culpeper in 1655 wrote the heart, the arteries and the eyes. The heart stands in all three columns, and it is the entry that later writers carried from the planet into the planet’s sign.

A chart with Leo on this cusp therefore had the Sun doing two offices. By day the Sun was the light the texts looked to first for the length and vigor of life, the hyleg of the Greek writers, and the astrologer judged its sign, its house and its aspects to Saturn and Mars for that purpose. As lord of the 6th the same Sun stood for the house of sickness, and Lilly’s rule was to see how the lord of the sixth and the lord of the first were disposed toward one another. When one planet filled both roles the comparison collapsed into a single judgment of the Sun’s state.

Two of the tests the planet pages describe never applied to this lord. The texts called a planet combust when it stood within a few degrees of the Sun, and the Sun cannot be combust by itself. A planet was retrograde when it moved against the order of the signs, and the Sun never does. Lilly judged the Sun by sign and house alone, by the planets in aspect to it, and by whether it stood in Leo, its own sign, in Aries, where the tradition placed its exaltation, or in Aquarius and Libra, where the same tradition placed its detriment and fall.

On the Zodiac Man figure the Lion stood on the chest, below the Crab and above the Maiden, and the consensus region this site carries for it is heart and back. The columns disagree more here than for any other sign. Manilius in the first century wrote the flanks. The Greek list Ptolemy presupposed wrote the heart. Lilly listed heart and back, and Culpeper followed him word for word. The Zodiac Man guide argues that the heart entered the sign’s row from the Sun’s row of the planet table, which is also why the ruler table on this page and the region line agree with each other.

In the texts that region was the sign’s, and the house was a separate matter. Lilly judged the part of the body concerned in a sickness from the sign on the cusp of the sixth and from the sign that held its lord, and Culpeper did the same from the Moon’s sign at the decumbiture. This page reports both rules as the history they are. No sentence here describes where anything sits in a living person, and the body map calculator, when it places a chart’s cusp on the figure, draws every region at one size and says nothing about any of them.

The sample behind the table is every day of 1900 to 2050, seven birth hours a day, at nine latitudes from 45 S to 60 N, with the Placidus cusps computed for each chart. At the equator Leo holds the 6th cusp in 8.32% of those charts. At 40 N the figure is 6.8%, and at 60 N it is 4.81%, so between the equator and the sixtieth parallel the share falls by close to half. At 30 S it runs the other way, to 9.33%.

Leo shares that downward curve with Cancer, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio and Sagittarius, the six signs that rise slowly in the northern hemisphere. The cause lies across the chart. Leo on the 6th cusp puts Aquarius on the 12th, the house just above the eastern horizon, and Aquarius in the north is a sign of short ascension that clears the horizon in well under two hours. The part of the chart around the Ascendant holds Aquarius for a smaller piece of each day the farther north the birthplace lies, and the 6th cusp, the point opposite, follows it down.

The rising signs tell a second story. At the equator almost every Leo cusp comes from Pisces rising, with Aries rising adding a little. At 40 N the placement comes from 2 rising signs, Pisces at 4.4% of all charts and Aries behind it. At 60 N the count rises to 3, and the order turns over: Taurus rising leads, Aries rising comes second, and Pisces rising, the only Ascendant that gives Leo as the sixth sign under Whole Sign houses, has dropped to a trace. By the sixtieth parallel, most charts with the Lion on the Placidus cusp have the Scales or the Maiden as their sixth sign by the Whole Sign count.

A Taurus Ascendant at 60 N with Leo on the 6th cusp means the Placidus cusp sits two signs before the house a Whole Sign count would give. The reason is that the Placidus method divides each quadrant by time rather than by degrees of the zodiac. When a sign of short ascension rises at a high latitude, the Midheaven stands close to the Ascendant in longitude and the quadrant below the western horizon stretches across four signs. The 6th cusp marks the point that set a third of its night arc earlier, and in that stretched quadrant it falls within a sign or so of the IC, leaving the signs between it and the Descendant to the sixth house itself.

The same stretching intercepts the sign. In the sample Leo lies on no cusp in 9.07% of charts at 40 N, 13.08% at 50 N and 20.02% at 60 N, a fifth of all births at the latitude of Helsinki or Anchorage. Interception happens when a house is wider than a sign and swallows it, and under Placidus the houses near the horizon widen with latitude. At the equator the Leo row is nearly empty, with the sign intercepted in only a handful of charts. The Whole Sign astrologer never met the case, because in that system every sign owns a house. A Placidus chart that holds the whole of Leo inside the sixth house has Cancer on the cusp, the Moon for its cusp lord, and a sign inside the house that the texts read second.

The cusp sign opened the reading and the lord carried it. After the Sun the texts looked at any planet within the house, judging it by its own nature, Saturn cold and dry, Mars hot and dry, Jupiter and Venus warm and moist, and by its sign. Then came the aspects. Lilly asked whether the lord of the sixth and the planets in it received a square or an opposition from Saturn or Mars, or a trine or a sextile from Jupiter or Venus, and he weighed each aspect by the dignity of the planet casting it.

The lord of the 1st was the other half of the comparison. Pisces rising, the Ascendant that most often puts Leo here at the equator and at 40 N, has Jupiter for its classical lord, so the usual pairing was Jupiter against the Sun. At 60 N, where Taurus and Aries rising take over, the pairing became Venus or Mars against the Sun instead. The 6th house guide sets out the whole sequence and the house systems question that produces the table above, and the Sun’s page in the planet series gives its share of time in the sixth house at the same latitudes.