Almagest

The library · The Western houses

The sixth house

what the sixth house governs in the Western chart

What the tradition reads

The sixth house, the tradition holds, is the house of the working body: illness, daily labour, and the service one gives or receives in the ordinary course of a life, together with, in the older texts, small domestic animals kept for use rather than pleasure. Ptolemy's chapters on the injuries and diseases of the body draw heavily on this house and on the sign and planets found in it. Alan Leo counts the sixth among the cadent houses, the least outwardly expressed of the twelve, and calls it an unimportant house where no planet is found in it, or where the sign on its cusp gives no definite indication, which the tradition takes as a comment on health itself: a house of vulnerability rather than strength, the place where the body's routines can go wrong. Lilly's later English tradition keeps sickness as the house's first business and adds servants and those who work under another's direction, distinguishing this house's service from the seventh house's marriage as a bond of duty rather than partnership between equals. Leo connects the house with the mid-heaven and the second and gives it work and servants, sickness, and the condition of the physical body, holding that any planet in it bears directly on the native's work and the ill health he is liable to suffer; his summary of the twelve adds the service and attachments arising from the expression of the tenth house, sickness arising from worry and anxiety, and the bowels and solar plexus.

The story

The sixth house is a cadent house, falling away from the angular strength of the houses that precede it, and the tradition reads its cadency as fitting its subject matter exactly: illness and service are both conditions of diminished command over one's own circumstances. Alan Leo writes that influences from the cadent houses are often accompanied by lack of opportunity and an inability to bring practical reward, however great the merit or skill: they lack power. Ancient medicine and ancient astrology were never fully separate disciplines: Wikipedia's page on the zodiac man records that Europe "was, at the time, required by law to calculate the moon's positioning before taking action on a patient or any kind of medical procedure", and the sixth house's link to sickness belongs to the same habit of reading the sign on the cusp and its ruling planet for which part of the body would be strained and by what kind of ailment. Ptolemy's own extensive treatment of bodily injury and disease draws directly on this house's condition, a seriousness the modern reading, focused more often on daily habit and workplace stress, sometimes underplays. The house's older association with small useful animals, kept for labour rather than delight, has mostly dropped away from present practice, though it survives as a curiosity in the older texts and as a reminder that the house has always been about labour given in service to something other than pure enjoyment, whether that something is a household, an employer, or the body's own needs.

Written from

Corpus key house:6.