Daily labour, service, the body's maintenance.
The sixth is cadent, falling away from the fifth toward the western horizon. Classically Bad Fortune, and the house where Mars rejoices — a pairing that says more about the tradition's view of daily labour than about anything astronomical.
Work, service, illness, and the maintenance of the body. What unites them is that none of it is chosen and none of it is finished; the sixth is the house of upkeep.
It stands opposite the twelfth, and the two cadent houses below and above the Descendant carry the tradition's least comfortable material between them.
Cadent, which is the houses' mutable
Houses 3, 6, 9 and 12 — each falling away from an angle toward the next. They are the transitional houses, and in quadrant systems they are usually the narrowest.
The parallel with the signs is exact rather than a metaphor. Cardinal signs sit three apart in the zodiac; angular houses sit three apart in the wheel. Both divisions are the circle cut into three, and both put the opening term at the point where something begins — an equinox or solstice for the signs, an angle of the chart for the houses. This house shares its class with the third, ninth and twelfth.
How wide it really is
Placidus and the other quadrant systems divide time, not arc, so a house's width in the zodiac depends on which degree happens to be rising — and that changes through the day and with the latitude of the birthplace. Sampled every ten minutes across a full rotation, here is how far the sixth house stretches:
| Latitude | Narrowest | Widest | Mean |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0° | 27.6° | 32.6° | 30.0° |
| 20° | 24.4° | 37.7° | 30.0° |
| 40° | 19.7° | 47.5° | 30.0° |
| 55° | 14.0° | 67.7° | 30.0° |
| 65° | 5.5° | 126.8° | 30.0° |
The mean is 30° at every latitude, and that is not a coincidence or an artefact of the sampling: over a full rotation each house passes across the entire zodiac, so twelve houses sharing 360° must average exactly thirty. All of the inequality is in the spread, which is why an averaged figure tells you nothing and the range tells you everything. The twelfth house has an identical span in every chart, since its cusps are exactly 180° from this one.
Traditionally attributed
Work, service, illness, and the small maintenance that keeps a life running.
Listed because it is what the tradition says, not because this site can check it. Everything above this line is geometry; everything in it is convention.