The 6th House

The sixth house is the sixth of the twelve divisions counted from the Ascendant, and the old texts gave it a short, concrete list. William Lilly, in the first book of Christian Astrology printed in 1647, assigned it to servants of both sexes, to day laborers, tenants and shepherds, and to small animals such as sheep, goats, hares and hogs. He listed the profit or loss made through those animals. Then came sickness: its quality, its cause, and whether it would be long or short.

The same list, with small variations, runs back through the Latin and Greek handbooks. The medieval and Renaissance writers called the sixth the house of servants and of illness in one breath, and the modern reader who finds work, routine and health grouped together is reading a trimmed version of Lilly’s table. On this site the sixth house is set out as the texts described it, in the past tense, with the source named for each claim. Nothing on this page describes anyone’s body, and the lists below are history.

Two technical facts shaped how the astrologers read the house. First, it is cadent, falling away from the angle of the seventh, so the texts ranked it among the four houses of least strength. Second, it makes no classical aspect to the Ascendant, since the two cusps lie five signs apart. Lilly wrote that the house was unfortunate for that reason. The texts read a planet placed there as cut off from the native’s own house, and that reading is the root of everything else below.

The Greek astrologers named each house after its fortune. The sixth was called the place of bad fortune, and the Latin writers rendered the name as mala fortuna. Firmicus Maternus, writing in the fourth century, kept that title and listed under it the same matters the later tables repeat: slaves, four-footed animals, injuries and infirmities. Vettius Valens in the second century read the sixth for injury, illness and enemies, and his reading passed through the Arabic handbooks into the Latin West.

One detail survived every copying. The Greek scheme gave each of the seven planets a house in which it rejoiced, and Mars rejoiced in the sixth. Lilly repeated the rule in his chapter on the houses. The planet of iron, fever and the knife, as the texts described Mars, was at home in the house of sickness, and the astrologers read a Mars placed there as strong in its own kind. Lilly also gave the house two consignificators, the sign Virgo and the planet Mercury, since the sixth is the sixth sign and Mercury the sixth planet in his ordering.

By the seventeenth century the house had a settled role in three kinds of chart. In a nativity the texts read it for the illnesses a native was held to be inclined toward, under rules Lilly set out in the third book of Christian Astrology. In a horary question about a sick person the sixth stood for the disease itself. In a decumbiture, the chart cast for the moment a person took to bed, Culpeper’s Astrological Judgement of Diseases of 1655 made the sixth house and its lord the significators of the disease, and the first house and its lord the significators of the sick.

The word health, in its modern sense, is not what the texts put here. Lilly’s list was of sickness, and the reading of a native’s constitution belonged to the Ascendant, its ruler and the lights, as the hub page sets out. The sixth house entered that reading last, as the place the astrologer looked for the quality and cause of illness.

The lord of the sixth is the planet that rules the sign on the sixth cusp in the classical scheme of domiciles: Mars for Aries, Venus for Taurus, and so on through Saturn for Aquarius and Jupiter for Pisces. The texts read the house through this planet more than through the cusp sign. Lilly’s method took the lord of the sixth, any planet inside the house, and the Moon as the significators of sickness, and judged each by its sign, its house and its condition.

The sign the lord occupied was read for the part of the body and the humor. The texts held that a lord of the sixth in a fiery sign pointed to a hot disease, in a watery sign to a cold and moist one, and the sign’s place on the Zodiac Man named the region. Lilly then weighed the planet itself. Saturn as lord was read for a long, cold and dry illness, Mars for a short and hot one, Jupiter for a disease of blood and the lungs, Mercury for the brain and the nerves, by the planet lists the companion page on the planets sets out.

The next step was the relation between the two lords. The texts compared the lord of the sixth with the lord of the Ascendant, which stood for the sick person. Lilly read an opposition or a square between them as the disease and the patient at odds, and a trine or sextile as a milder course. When the lord of the Ascendant was itself inside the sixth, or the lord of the sixth inside the first, the texts read the native as bound up with the illness. Culpeper gave the same rules in his decumbiture chapters, with the lord of the seventh for the physician, the lord of the tenth for the physic, and the lord of the eighth for the end.

Condition settled the weight of each reading. A lord of the sixth in its own sign or exaltation was read as strong and the disease as a settled one; in its detriment or fall it was read as a disease of a confused or changing nature. Retrograde motion was read for a disease that returned, combustion for one that was hidden. These were rules of judgment within a historical method, and the planet pages set out what the texts said for each planet as lord of the sixth, read as history.

The sixth was never read alone. Three other houses carried the matters that the modern reader expects to find under the word health, and the texts kept them apart. The first house, the Ascendant and its sign, stood for the native: the body, its form and its complexion, in the old sense of a blend of qualities. Lilly assigned the lord of the Ascendant and the lights to vitality, the length of life and the native’s constitution, and read the sixth only after he had judged them.

The eighth house was assigned to death, its kind and its occasion, and to the estate of the dead. The texts drew a sharp line between the sixth and the eighth. The sixth answered whether a sickness was long or short, and the eighth whether the native would die of it. Culpeper’s decumbiture rules read the lord of the eighth as the significator of death and judged the disease by whether the sick person’s significators moved toward it. The line is historical. On this site no chart is read for death, and the person pages state a documented cause of death once, from public record, and never as something a chart explained.

The twelfth house carried confinement and sorrow: prisons, private enemies, large cattle, and the state of being shut away. The texts read it beside the sixth because a long illness meant confinement to a bed or a room, and because the twelfth, like the sixth, is cadent and makes no classical aspect to the Ascendant. Lilly grouped the two cadent houses that fall out of the native’s sight together, and read a sickness that moved from the sixth into the twelfth as one that confined the native. The 1st, 6th, 8th and 12th together formed the frame within which a seventeenth-century reading of illness was made; it is described here so that the sixth house can be seen in its place.

Seven planets cannot fill twelve houses, so at least five houses in every classical chart held nothing, and the sixth was empty in the greater part of charts. The texts took this as ordinary. An empty house was read through its lord and its cusp sign, with the Moon as a general significator when the question concerned sickness. Lilly’s rules for judging a sickness begin with the lord of the sixth and only then turn to any planet found in the house, so an empty sixth changed the order of the reading, not its possibility.

The modern worry that an empty sixth house means the house does not matter has no counterpart in the texts. In the astrology of Lilly and Culpeper the house was the same house whether or not a planet stood in it. What a planet inside it added was a second significator with its own nature and condition, which the texts weighed against the lord. The ten planet pages take each planet in the sixth in turn, and each page states what the tradition read for the planet there.

Which sign is on the sixth house cusp depends on the house system, and the two systems readers meet most often answer the question differently. In Whole Sign houses, the system of the Greek handbooks, the rising sign is the whole first house and the sixth house is the sixth sign counting from it. Aries rising gives Virgo as the sixth, Taurus rising gives Libra, and so on around the circle. The answer is fixed by the rising sign and does not change with the latitude of birth or the hour.

Placidus houses divide the time a point takes to pass from the horizon to the meridian, and they put a cusp at a calculated degree that is not the start of a sign. The system is named for Placidus de Titis, a seventeenth-century Italian writer, and its tables became the common English choice in the nineteenth century. Under any of these systems the sixth cusp can fall in the whole-sign sixth, in the sign before it, or in the sign after it, and the share of each outcome depends on where the birth took place.

The table below reads that dependence off a generated sample. It takes every rising sign and shows which sign the Placidus sixth cusp fell in, for charts cast on every day of the years 1900 to 2050 at several hours of the day, at the equator, at 40 N and at 60 N. At the equator the whole-sign answer wins in nearly every chart for every rising sign. Leo rising put Capricorn on the cusp without exception, and Aquarius rising put Cancer there without exception. The small remainder spilled one sign forward for Gemini, Cancer, Sagittarius and Capricorn rising, and one sign behind for the other rising signs.

At 40 N the whole-sign answer still led for eleven rising signs, but the second sign grew. Aries rising gave Virgo and Leo in nearly equal shares. Taurus rising is the exception at that latitude: it put Virgo on the cusp slightly more often than Libra, so the Placidus answer and the Whole Sign answer parted company for the majority of those charts. Leo rising gave three possible cusps, Capricorn in most charts and Aquarius or Sagittarius in a few. Aquarius rising again gave Cancer and nothing else.

At 60 N the two systems disagree for a large part of the sample. Aries rising never put Virgo on the sixth cusp at that latitude and gave Leo every time. Taurus rising gave Leo in most charts and Libra in none. Scorpio rising gave Taurus more often than Aries, Sagittarius rising gave Gemini more often than Taurus, and Pisces rising gave Cancer more often than Leo. Five rising signs, in other words, most often placed on the Placidus cusp a sign that the Whole Sign system never gives them. The rows are also unequal in weight: at 60 N, Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio each rose in more than an eighth of the sample, while Aries and Pisces each rose in about one chart in fifty, because the signs around the spring point cross the horizon quickly at high latitudes.

None of this makes one system right. It means that a reader who looks up a sixth-house sign from a chart drawn at high latitude is looking at an answer the system chose, and that the sign pages on this site each state, from the same sample, how often the Placidus cusp gave that sign and from which rising signs.

A quadrant system such as Placidus can draw a house wider than thirty degrees, and when it does a whole sign can fall inside the house with neither cusp in it. The sign is then said to be intercepted. Because the houses come in opposite pairs, the sign opposite is intercepted at the same time in the opposite house, and two other signs make up the difference by carrying two cusps each. An intercepted sign rules no cusp, so a chart with Virgo intercepted in the sixth has no house whose cusp Virgo governs.

Interception grows with latitude. In the generated sample, roughly one chart in ten at 40 N had any given sign intercepted, and at 60 N the figure for every sign approached a fifth of charts. At the equator it hardly occurred. The signs around the spring and autumn points, Aries, Virgo, Libra and Pisces, were intercepted a little more often than the rest at every northern latitude in the sample, since those are the signs that rise fastest in the north and are therefore most often swallowed by a wide house.

The texts had little to say about interception, because the question was mechanical rather than interpretive. A planet in an intercepted sign in the sixth was still in the sixth, and the lord of the house was still the lord of the cusp sign. Some later writers read the intercepted sign as a second, hidden sign of the house, and read its ruler as a second lord. That reading is modern and is noted here as such. The sign pages give the share of charts in which each sign was intercepted at three northern latitudes, so that a reader can see which signs the Placidus system most often leaves off every cusp.

The sign pages take each of the twelve signs on the sixth cusp in turn. Each one sets out what the texts attached to that sign in the house, the classical ruler, the region the Zodiac Man gave the sign, and the generated figures for how often the sign reached the Placidus cusp and from which rising signs. The planet pages do the same for each of the ten planets, with its share of time in the sixth by house system and what the tradition read for it there.

The temperament guide explains the reading that the texts made before they turned to the sixth house at all: the tally of hot, cold, moist and dry votes from the Ascendant, the Moon, the lights and the season. The guide to the planets and the body sets out the parts the texts assigned to each planet, which is what the astrologers turned to once they had found the lord of the sixth. The Zodiac Man guide gives the sign list that named the region. The hub page on medical astrology places all four pieces side by side and says what a chart cannot tell anyone.