on the 8th house in astrology
The 8th House in astrology is one of the so-called “dark houses,” that is, one of the houses that does not make one of the 4 classical aspects (opposition, square, trine, sextile) to the 1st House of the chart. As a dark house, it’s often difficult to fully understand it, to enter into it, and to engage with it in ways that are meaningful and insightful.
One of my Patreon patrons recently asked about the 8th House in one of my Patreon-exclusive live chats. Her question, edited for clarity.
“I have an eighth house Sun. I’m very into the 8th House, but I don’t know why. The explanations that I’ve been given started with cookbook astrology, which says I’m intense with a bananas life, which doesn’t ring true. It reminds me how in your talk about the 12th House, you share that so many delineations are just too simple. I’m bored by them and I’m wanting to complicate it. Others in my life have the Moon in the 8th house, and I have some friends who have Venus there, which is very interesting. Other resources say things like, ‘weird stuff happens in the 8th House, things are delayed, things get stuck there.’ But I know there’s more. I’m wondering if you have feelings about the 8th house, for yourself and in client work?”
This question brought the following reflections out, reflections on the 8th House that build on its classical associations with death, inheritance, and other people’s resources:
One thing that I see associated with the 8th House is a lot of shame. And it’s interesting, when I think about this, because there are a few directions this moves in.
We see the 8th House sandwiched between the 9th House of Meaning and Philosophy and Religion, the exploration of existence, and then on the other side we have the 7th House of significant one-to-one relationships. With the 8th House in the middle, we can ask: what’s the meaning inside these connections?
But! The 8th house is off-axis or averse from the 1st house, so you can’t look at it easily, directly, straight-on. So then the question transforms into what are the unspoken meanings occurring inside of these relationships?
[Important clarification: when I say “relationships,”, I don’t only mean with other humans. Significant one-to-on relationships can be with more-than-human beings of all kinds, with concepts, with egregores, with worldviews, with places, etc etc etc.]
If there are unspoken meanings within a relationship, if they’re not easy to illuminate or perceive, if it’s challenging to be fully forthright with full coherence and full honesty, that can feel like shame or guilt.
Beyond that, within our hyper-capitalistic, individualistic, exploitative, colonialist context, sharing resources can feel shameful. Consider the shame foisted upon people who continue to live with their parents after they’ve reached the age of majority. Consider the shame that goes along with asking for help, even from those you’re close to. Consider the massive essays people write to explain why their GoFundMe exists, why they’re worthy of financial resourcing during massive difficulty. All of that is shame around sharing resources.
We can also think about the 8th house as the moment of exhaustion. According to diurnal motion, where the Sun rises over the Ascendant, reaches noon at the Midheaven, and then sets towards the Descendant, the 9th House is where we make meaning of our efforts, where we find wisdom. After that wisdom, after the distribution of that knowledge, we move towards the setting place of the 8th House, towards exhaustion. Inside a productivity-obsessed culture, it’s shameful to be tired. Even well-earned and necessary rest can be incredibly challenging to engage with, because shouldn’t we always be operating like a noon-day Sun at the height of summer? Shouldn’t we always, always be laboring and producing and being useful? Shouldn’t we be immortal? The 8th House reminds us that, like the daily setting of the Sun, we cannot always burn at full brightness and full visibility; we also have to lay down, relinquish constant doing, rest.
The 8th House’s connection to death also connects it to ancestry. One of the functions of hwhyte soopramassy* is the elimination of connection to ancestry, the subsuming of individual culture into the gaping maw of sameness. As a house of death and the house of other people’s resources, the 8th House is where we find inheritance, both literal inheritance like money or property and metaphorical inheritance like intergenerational joy and epigenetic trauma.
Inside of hwhyte soopramacist colonialist capitalist hyper-individualism, people who do receive substantive material inheritances can experience too much shame to admit as such because this society puts independent creations of success on a gilded pedestal, completely dismissing the reality that there is no such thing as “completely independent creation of success.”
For people who don’t get material, substantive inheritances, the things that we do inherit that are relatively easy to perceive are often issues attached to marginalization, whether that marginalization finds its roots in poverty, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc., or a combination thereof.
In both of these circumstances and within the gradation between them, the 8th House becomes a place of shame, a place where those things prioritized by hyper-individualistic capitalism are questioned and complicated. The 8th House reminds the person who inherited success that their success is not individually-created; it reminds the person who inherited marginalization and its challenges that there’s more than personal effort involved in the quest to disentangle from oppression.
This can make the 8th House a potent place of transformation: when you do decide to do the hard work of looking at the ucky feelings the 8th House can hold, you also find the tenderness that’s there, the richness, the reconsideration and re-contextualization hiding there, the reclamation of inheritances and shared resources, and the relinquishing of the shame attached to acknowledging that none of us have ever lived in a vacuum, and none of our successes are independently created. There’s meaning available here, the kind of meaning that only emerges thanks to interrelationship.
*I misspell this on purpose. If you’re not sure what this term is, say it out loud.
Painting detail from Charles Beaubrun’s 1600s work“Portrait of a woman in a blue dress with lots of jewellery”
Want to learn more about the 8th House in astrology? Here are some resources I recommend:
how to show love to eight house moons, a post by Ari Felix
Diving into Darkness: the 8th and 12th Houses, lecture by Kelly Surtees
Temples of the Sky, a traditional astrology textbook on the houses by Deborah Houlding
The 2nd & 8th Houses with Sam Reynolds & Bear Ryver, episode of The Strology Show Podcast
The Significations of the Twelves Houses Part 2: Houses 7-12, episode of The Astrology Podcast
This post was written based on a conversation that happened inside of one of my Patreon live chats. If you’d like to join a live chat, watch previous live chat recordings, partake of a backlog of other posts and resources, and gain access to my 1:1 session calendar, you can join me on Patreon here.