Mars in the sixth house

Mars in the sixth house (Western)

What the tradition reads

The sixth house, in Alan Leo's summary of the twelve, carries service and the attachments arising from the expression of the tenth house, denotes sickness arising from worry and anxiety, and is named there the house of employment; in the chapter he gives it he says it relates to work and servants, to sickness, and to the condition of the physical body. Mars placed there is read by the tradition as a genuine drive to work hard, sometimes to the point of real exhaustion, preferring to handle a task independently rather than wait on a team that is not moving at the same pace. The astrologers read real skill at organising and reorganising a workload here, together with a sharp impatience toward procrastination, whether it belongs to this placement or to anyone else involved in the same project. Criticism of the work itself is read as landing hard, since the placement tends to identify personally with whatever it is currently doing.

The story

Every March, Mars's own priests, the Salii, performed a demanding ritual duty that repeated year after year without exception: dressed in full armour, they danced through the streets of Rome in a set sequence of leaps, a rite meant both to prepare the city for the coming season of war and, according to the tradition, to expedite the growth of the year's crops. It was physically taxing, precisely repeated, entirely public work, undertaken as a fixed obligation rather than as a single dramatic gesture performed once and then set aside. The Salii's whole religious value lay in the discipline of doing the same demanding thing correctly, every year, on schedule. Mars in the sixth house is read through this same disciplined repetition: real value found in a hard task performed reliably and on time, work whose worth comes from being done correctly and consistently rather than from any single spectacular effort.

Written from

Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity (archive.org howtojudgenativi00leoa, full text at https://archive.org/download/howtojudgenativi00leoa/howtojudgenativi00leoa_djvu.txt, chapter I, "The Twelve Houses of the Horoscope", and chapter XIII, "The Sixth House: Sickness, Servants, Work, etc.")
Cafe Astrology, Mars in the Houses of the Natal Chart
Wikipedia, Mars (mythology)

Corpus key planet-in-house:Mars:6.