01Overview
02The house that runs the unglamorous half
Ari bhava holds the parts of living that nobody puts in a summary: the daily routine, the job as opposed to the career, obligations owed, disputes entered, and the body's maintenance. It is counted among the difficult houses and among the growth houses at once, which is why the classics expect it to be uncomfortable early and productive later. A graha here is describing what a life does on an ordinary Tuesday.
03The register this seat tends to set
04The house of enemies, and a graha without any
The naisargika table of natural friendships gives every graha its enemies — Mars and Mercury are hostile to each other, Venus and the Sun likewise, and the lists run through the whole set. The Moon's enemy column is empty: it counts the Sun and Mercury as friends, everything else as neutral, and nothing as an opponent. Standing in Ari bhava, the house whose whole subject is opposition, that is the most quietly useful fact available about this placement.
05Two ways a sixth-house Moon runs
| Routine carries it | Routine wears it | |
|---|---|---|
| Phase | Waxing, well away from the Sun | Dark fortnight, close to the Sun |
| Sign in the 6th | Taurus (exalted) or Cancer (own) | Scorpio (debilitated) — a Gemini lagna |
| The 6th lord | Placed where it can do its work | Weak, or tangled with the lagna lord |
| Age of the reading | Later — upachaya houses settle up late | Earlier — before the house has reported |
| How it shows | Steady output, quietly relied upon | Order rebuilt more often than it is kept |
06Whether a waning Moon is a malefic or merely weak
A well-known classification counts the waxing Moon as a benefic and the waning Moon as papa, a malefic, which would put a dark-fortnight birth into an entirely different category of graha. Another substantial reading holds that the Moon is a benefic throughout and that a waning Moon is simply weak — low on paksha bala and short of results, but not hostile in nature — and the boundary itself is disputed, with some texts drawing it at the eighth tithi of each fortnight and others by degrees of distance from the Sun. In the sixth house the difference is not academic, since a malefic in a dusthana is read one way and a weak benefic there is read another.