The 6th House in Taurus

When Taurus stood on the cusp of the sixth house, the astrologers whose books this site draws on took two things from it. The sign named a region, the neck and throat, which is where every list from Manilius to Culpeper placed the Bull on the figure of the Zodiac Man. And the sign named a lord, Venus, whose own sign, house and aspects then carried most of the judgment. Lilly’s sixth house covered sickness, servants and small cattle, and the cusp sign was read for each of those matters in turn; Culpeper, writing for physicians, kept only the sickness. Nothing in either author described a living reader, and nothing here does. The sections below set out the assignment as history and the Placidus figures as a count.

Venus rules Taurus and Libra in the classical scheme, and the table shows what the three planet lists gave Venus in the body. Ptolemy placed the planet among the warm and moist, moistening above all, and assigned it the sense of smell, the liver and the flesh. Lilly in 1647 listed the reins, the womb, the throat and the seed under Venus. Culpeper in 1655 kept the reins, the womb and the throat and added the liver, which brought his column closer to Ptolemy’s. The throat appears in both English columns, and it is the same word the two writers used for the Bull, the sign of Venus’s own house.

That overlap is worth a sentence, because it is the kind of agreement the sign list and the planet list did not always produce. For Taurus the cusp sign and its ruler pointed at the same region, as Leo and the Sun did at the heart. For Aries, by contrast, the sign held the head and its ruler Mars held the kidneys and the gall. An astrologer of Lilly’s time working through the sixth house with Taurus on the cusp therefore found the region doubled, by the sign and by its lord, before any planet in the house was considered.

The texts also judged a lord by its nature. Venus was warm and moist in the humoral language, and Culpeper read a warm and moist lord of the sixth as marking a cause of that quality, of blood rather than of choler. Lilly weighed the same planet by its dignity: Venus in Taurus or Libra was in its own house, in Pisces exalted, in Scorpio and Aries in its detriment, in Virgo in its fall. These are states of the planet, not of anyone, and the planet page for Venus in medical astrology follows them through the years.

Manilius gave the Bull the neck, one word, in the second line of his sequence from the head to the feet. The Greek list that Ptolemy presupposed used the same word. Lilly and Culpeper wrote neck and throat, naming the passage as well as the column, in the way the seventeenth-century lists added organs to the regions the Latin had named. Across the four columns of the Zodiac Man table the second region of the figure is one of the steadiest; the changes of word begin lower down, at the Lion and the Crab.

The sign page for Taurus carries this note in its own voice, and the Zodiac Man guide explains why the lists were drawn and what the almanacs did with them. Here the point is narrower. With Taurus on the sixth cusp, the texts gave an astrologer a region from the sign and the same region again from Venus, as the previous section showed, and then sent the reading on to the planets.

Under Whole Sign houses Taurus is the sixth house when Sagittarius rises and at no other time. The Placidus count in the table starts from the same place: at the equator every chart in the sample with Taurus on the sixth cusp has Sagittarius rising, and the table lists no second rising sign there. Taurus and Scorpio are the two cusp signs the equator reaches from a single Ascendant in this sample. The share of charts is 8.31% at the equator, close to the one-twelfth an even division of the sky would give.

Moving north the share climbs, to 9.81% at 40 N and 11.81% at 60 N, and a second rising sign enters the count. At 40 N Sagittarius rising still supplies 6.67% of the charts, with Scorpio rising behind it. By 60 N the order has turned over, and Scorpio rising produces more of these charts than Sagittarius does. A Scorpio Ascendant puts the Descendant in Taurus, so in those charts the sixth and seventh cusps share one sign and the sixth house is a narrow one. South of the equator the share falls instead, to 7.28% at 30 S, and the second rising sign there is Capricorn, the sign after Sagittarius rather than the sign before it.

Interception follows the same curve. Taurus falls on no cusp at all in 9.05% of charts at 40 N, 13.08% at 50 N and 20.02% at 60 N, where it is a fifth of the sample. The sign and its opposite, Scorpio, are swallowed together, since Placidus cusps mirror across the chart. The frequency of interception is reported here as a fact of the house system. What a ruler without a cusp signified is a question the later handbooks answered in several ways, and those answers are theirs rather than Lilly’s or Culpeper’s.

Lilly sorted the signs by quality as well as by region, and the quality entered his sixth-house chapters through the question of how long a sickness lasted. Movable signs, he wrote, marked the short, fixed signs the long and settled, and common signs the kind that went and came again. Taurus is a fixed sign, earthy, cold and dry in the scheme of the elements, and so on the cusp of the sixth it was read toward the slow and the lasting. The reading was made from the cusp sign together with the sign of the Moon and of the lord of the sixth, never from the cusp alone.

Two cautions belong here. The first is that the rule is Lilly’s, stated in 1647 for the chart of a question or a decumbiture, and this page repeats it as his and nothing more. The second is that the element of the sign and the nature of its ruler disagree for Taurus: the sign is cold and dry and Venus warm and moist. The texts kept the two as separate factors, the sign by its element and the planet by its nature, and read each in its own place.

The cusp named Venus, and the texts followed Venus. Lilly asked for its sign and house, for its dignity or debility there, for whether it was retrograde or near the Sun, and for the planets casting aspects to it, with Saturn and Mars weighed most. He set the lord of the sixth against the lord of the Ascendant and looked at the Moon as the general significator in questions of the sick. A planet standing inside the sixth house was judged on its own account, by its sign and its nature, and could outweigh the lord.

The 6th house guide walks through that order for any cusp sign and carries the table of the sixth cusp by rising sign at three latitudes, from which the Sagittarius and Scorpio columns on this page are drawn. The planet page for Venus in medical astrology follows the ruler through its stays by sign and its retrograde share. The Zodiac Man guide holds the full sign list. Each is linked in words rather than promised in figures, and none of them describes a reader.