The Sky Library · House 6 of 12
The Sixth House
The House of Labor and Infirmity
The body's toil, the body's trials, and the work that must be done.
The sixth house bears the tradition's plainest hard name, Bad Fortune, and it is the joy of Mars. It governs illness and injury, servitude and hard labor, subordinates, and the beasts that work for us. The old astrologers did not curse this house; they named where the body's trials and the day's toil are found, so that they could be met with care.
Mars here rejoices, its cutting nature set where the tradition expects trials.
Saturn here speaks of long or chronic complaints, borne with patience.
Venus here is said to soften service and bring ease to affliction.
Kake Tyche in Greek. A house averse to the Ascendant, hence its difficult reputation; the tradition frames it as the place where infirmity is read, not where it is promised.
A house is personal. It exists only in a birth chart, cast from your own horizon at your own hour; the sky holds no sixth house until someone is born under it. The kinship with Virgo is an analogy of order, not an identity.