Illness, daily labour, servants, small animals and the maintenance work life requires.
A house does not have a fixed zodiac sign or planetary ruler in this reference. Those popular correspondences collapse two different twelvefold systems and are not needed to read an actual cusp.
3 sourced claims:3traditional
Reading this house
Lilly's topics below tell you what kinds of question this place was used to answer in seventeenth-century astrology. Its position in the wheel is a different piece of information. For an actual chart, read the sign on the cusp, its ruler, any planets here and their aspects together; do not substitute the 6th zodiac sign for the 6th house. The historical medical or social judgements in Lilly are evidence of his practice, not present-day advice.
Lilly gives the sixth servants, day labourers, tenants and shepherds, along with illness and smaller livestock such as sheep, goats and rabbits. That is a seventeenth-century household and working economy, not a timeless list of job titles. The shared thread is work and care carried out under obligation, and the vulnerable bodies that need it. Historical medical judgements here are documented as astrology, never presented as diagnosis or treatment.
Paraphrased from Lilly's 1647 list; the period's social and medical vocabulary is documented, not treated as exhaustive or clinically reliable.
Sources (1)
Christian Astrology — Book I, chapter VII, ‘Of the Twelve Houses of Heaven’ (6th house)
The sixth is cadent and does not make one of the classical aspects to the Ascendant; Lilly treats that lack of visibility as part of its difficult reputation. He gives Mars a joy here, but a planet's presence is not a verdict about health or employment. The fifth and sixth are next-door houses with very different source lists: pleasure and children on one side, maintenance and sickness on the other. Virgo is not a fixed sixth-house sign.
Spatial structure and interpretive distinctions derived from Lilly's angular, succedent and cadent account; these sentences are not his verbatim wording.
Opinions, not this study's and not findings. These were published around 1900 by astrologers writing for a Theosophical readership, and most English astrology since has been reading them. They are quoted rather than restated so the distance stays visible, and each one names its astrologer and its page.
Sun in the sixth house
THE Sun in the sixth house is not good for the health of the native, the vital forces of the Sun having less power while in this house, but unless afflicted the native is careful and generally knows how to safeguard his health.
Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity,
p. 180 — Modern Astrology Office, London, this printing 1928
· The 1928 printing, scanned
Mercury in the sixth house
Mercury in the sixth house denotes mental troubles, and danger of nervous breakdown. This position affects the health when the nativity shows much worry or anxiety, and the native is always liable to be overstrung or easily affected physically by his surroundings and environment.
Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity,
p. 181 — Modern Astrology Office, London, this printing 1928
· The 1928 printing, scanned
Saturn in the sixth house
SATURN in the sixth house is very unfavourable for health and denotes much sickness, which is often the result of circumstances and conditions over which the native has little or no control. It causes sickness through privation and want or neglect, and causes many sorrows and disappointments through the state of the health.
Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity,
p. 177 — Modern Astrology Office, London, this printing 1928
· The 1928 printing, scanned
Uranus in the sixth house
Uranus in the sixth house denotes peculiar and exceptional complaints arising from nervous agitation and environment.
Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity,
p. 177 — Modern Astrology Office, London, this printing 1928
· The 1928 printing, scanned
Neptune in the sixth house
NEPTUNE in the sixth house is very unfavourable for health, denoting atrophy, incurable diseases, and strange complaints that are inherited.
Alan Leo, How to Judge a Nativity,
p. 177 — Modern Astrology Office, London, this printing 1928
· The 1928 printing, scanned
A planet missing from this list is one Leo does not delineate in this house, or one whose passage did not survive its own scan.
Who is quoted here, and who is not
Two astrologers, both writing around 1900:
Alan Leo, whose How to Judge a Nativity is the only
one of these books arranged as a lookup table — a paragraph per planet per
house — which is why everybody copied it; and Sepharial, who
arranged the same material by the question a reader brings rather than by
placement, so only a few of his judgements stand alone well enough to quote.
William Lilly is not here, and not because he was not asked.
Christian Astrology (1647) is the most important book in English on
the subject and this study holds it as a text already — but every scan of it is
long-s blackletter, and the OCR renders the title of its own first book as
“An Introduci ion to Aftrologje”. There is
nothing in it a reader could trust a quotation from. Ripley's
Compound of Alchymy and Anderson's Constitutions get
the same answer elsewhere in this study, for the same reason.