The Eighth House

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THE EIGHTH HOUSE

Dane Rudhyar

The life of an individual is like an ellipse which has two foci, as opposed to the circle which has but one center. These two focal points, principles or tendencies around which gravitate the life and the consciousness of a human being, are, as we saw, selfhood and relatedness, represented respectively by the Ascendant and the Descendant. Because astrology refers all of its symbols and interpretations to the beginning of cycles — the first point of individualized existence, the first breath which relates the newborn organism to an open environment — the houses of the birth chart are numbered starting from the Ascendant, one through twelve. Cycles of existence, however, are not closed circles; the two forces derived from the principles of selfhood and relatedness dominate one half of the cycle each. The below-the-horizon hemicycle is dominated by the drive to actualize as fully as possible the potentialities inherent in the individual at birth; the above-the-horizon hemicycle, while still deeply affected by this process of self-actualization and the drive toward self-fulfillment, is powerfully conditioned by the character and the results of the relationships the individual must enter into if there is to be complete personal fulfillment.

For these reasons, while it is perfectly logical to number the houses from one to twelve, one should also take into consideration the fact that at the Descendant a new set of factors begins to occupy the person's attention — factors related to change-producing and, at least at some level, purposeful relationships. Thus the Descendant is also, in this sense, the starting point of a series of experiences which require productive relationships — relationships which also inevitably transform the individual's outlook and consciousness in a basic way. The house numbered eight, if one begins with the Ascendant, should also be interpreted as a second house when one starts from the Descendant. Every one of the six houses above the horizon can therefore be said to have two fundamental meanings, one related to the Ascendant — principle of selfhood — and the other to the Descendant — principle of relatedness. The individual unfolds and actualizes his powers through the first six houses, and the relationships encountered in these six areas of existence are experienced and valued primarily in terms of the individual self.

In the same way, what becomes actualized and productive in the six houses which begin with the Descendant is primarily whatever the individual encounters in terms of relationships which have an increasingly dominant momentum and power — and this is so whether one considers conjugal or strictly social relationships. The individual henceforth focuses his attention less on his own self than on what relationships bring to his life. Eventually, of course, what these relationships bring will be fed back to his sense of self, and a new cycle will begin at a more conscious and mature — or, negatively, at a deteriorating — level of personal existence.

This does not mean that at any moment of his life a person has experiences only in the area of a single house. All houses are potentially involved in every moment of life — just as summer is implied in winter, and the icy polar wastes in tropical jungles. What the astrologer does when he gives definite meanings to a house field in terms of a cyclic process of personality-unfolding is to establish basic categories of experiences, and above all the relationship between these different categories, that is, the way in which they fit in with each other and one type depends upon and conditions the others. Every type of experience is potentially implied in every other, and each important experience can be related to a basic archetype. It is the relationship of the experience to this archetype which gives it its essential meaning in terms of the whole life of the individual.

Such is at least what a holistic approach to existence asserts. A truly full experience may be lived in the Now, but if there is a character of true plenitude in the experience, every field of activity — every house — will be involved to some extent. Nevertheless, one field will be accentuated, and it is this accentuation, this focus of conscious attention, which will deeply influence the meaning of the experience and condition its results.

When the traditional astrologer speaks of the eighth house as the house of death and regeneration, his interpretation is based mainly on the correspondence so often — and in my opinion, unduly — stressed between zodiacal signs and houses; that is, the first house corresponds to Aries, the second to Taurus, and the eighth to Scorpio. There is some validity in making such correspondences, but usually it is just confusing. Zodiacal signs and houses represent two fundamentally different sets of values. They refer to different factors, even if the two sets of values are related in various ways — particularly from the numerological point of view. In the case of the eighth house nothing is to be gained from such a correspondence because Scorpio is one of the less understood signs of the zodiac and the most unintelligently maligned.

In the seasonal cycle of the solar year, Scorpio refers to mid-autumn. In temperate climates at that time the yearly vegetation is indeed normally experiencing "death." But within the process of disintegration and in the midst of the decaying leaves there are also seeds which do not die. To identify one's consciousness with the seed process is for the individual to rise above cyclic death, and perhaps to experience if not a transforming mutation or fundamental repolarization, at least to participate in the eventual rebirth of vegetation 'in springtime. Numerologically, and according to the Gnostic-Christian tradition, eight repeated at three levels is the symbolic number of the Christ (thus 888). The Christ mythos being centered around the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, this number 8 fits well the house of death and regeneration.

But the cyclic sequence of houses has another important meaning. It refers to twelve basic phases in the unfolding of the consciousness of an individual. Consciousness, in the western sense of the word, implies two opposite poles: selfhood and relationship. As no individual is born alone or without a past, the results of past relationships — karma — condition the new self, which in turn proves himself to himself and to the world by the way he meets and experiences new relationships. These relationships later on condition a new self.

Thus, astrologically speaking, the Descendant should be seen to begin a new process of which the seventh house is the first phase and the eighth house the second. The eighth house also refers to possessions, but — except perhaps in horary in which every symbolic concept is personalized and interpreted in terms of separate events — the traditional interpretation of this eighth house type of possessions as "the partners possessions" is inaccurate. What is indicated are the possessions of the relationship; that is to say, the eighth house refers to the whole existential situation which the relationship has to face in order to actualize its potentialities. It also reveals what is available to the relationship on order to become an operative factor in society.

Obviously what the relationship "owns" is what the partners bring to it. But it is only the sum of the two contributions, for the moment there is a seventh house type of partnership the stabilized and goal-oriented interactions between the two partners adds a plus value to these contributions considered separately. The quality of the partner's relationship becomes an active and productive — or inhibiting and perhaps destructive — factor. This is a very important point. For instance, if there is a planet in a person's seventh house it will affect not only this person's capacity for relationship, but also the fruitfulness of the problems affecting the eighth house.

Moreover, just as no person is born in a void, so no relationship occurs in empty space. The space is both the biosphere as a whole, and the particular society to which the partners belong or in which their relationship starts and will develop. The biosphere provides the partners — according to climate, land, and season — with their basic physical needs; the society has established ways in which any partnership is to be conducted. The conjugal relationship has to meet social and religious-ethical taboos just as a business partnership has to be incorporated, to follow a set of regulations, to pay taxes, etc. The relationship has to conform to precedents valid in its environment. Society provides it with a great many opportunities, but with many restrictions as well. All of this refers to the eighth house.

The house, its cusp, and the planets located in it indicate how a person can best and most realistically approach both the opportunities and the restrictions involved in bringing the relationship he enters to a fruitful state. Fruitfulness may mean money, growth, influence, or it may signify that, through this relationship, the individual will experience a valuable self-transformation and be able to reach depths of awareness and experience which he could never have attained alone.

Relationship should not be thought of only as involving two partners in an exclusivistic kind of conjugal or business association. Several partners, and indeed a group, can come together on a relatively stable and solid basis — certainly as solid as most marriages are today. Such a group can have a business meaning, but its purpose may be religious, political, or "occult." The group relationship usually operates through some kind of ritual: modem business is a long series of rituals, from the office and factory to Wall Street and its stock exchange; Army life is almost nothing but a painful sequence of rituals, ending on the battlefield. A whole city, if it were observed from above during a whole day, would present a motion picture of traffic rituals, congestion and decongestion, light and darkness. Religious organizations have their rituals. The purpose of all these rituals, and of all collective festivals, including concerts, operas, and baseball games, is to strengthen collective psychic bonds between the members of a particular society or group. In other words, the ritual is meant to generate the special plus factor that is produced when the group is psychically and emotionally integrated. There is even a physical or electromagnetic integration which takes place when human bodies touch and move together according to shared rhythms.

The rituals that various occult or mystical groups follow in their meetings, especially in the dangerous form of "ceremonial magic," have the same purpose as any social or religious rituals, except that they have, or should have if they are effectual, a still more conscious, deliberate, and often powerful purpose. Mantras, incantations, traditional gestures, and the use of symbolical objects may bring to a sharp focus their will-force as well as the emotions of the participants in the group. The rituals of the American Indians are quite typical of a certain level of this group operation, those of Free Masonry another. Indeed, society as a whole is founded on rituals.

It is only when individualism is intensely emphasized that the ritualistic patterns of social institutions may break down. But soon enough the rebellious individuals establish a new kind of rituals. The business of living alters its group formations, its standardized procedures, and its fashions, but the eighth house type of experiences are always there to be faced. Sexual rituals, too, remain although fashions and moralities may change.

The basic problem is whether these daily rituals are to be given a positive, exalting, or emotionally enhancing meaning, or if they are to be experienced as a boring routine and drudgery. It is when facing such a problem that the ideal of the Practice of the Presence of God at every moment of the day acquires its beautiful and healing significance. Every ritual could evoke the Divine in its participants. It can achieve this realization only when the quality of the relationship between the participants makes the evocations possible — and thus their rebirth at a higher level of inclusiveness and egoless love.

In a society in which almost everything is affected by "business" it is indeed strange that this word is not mentioned in the traditional list of matters to which the houses refer. To think of the second house of a birth chart as the house of business is to miss what the word business, essentially implies. The second house refers to what an individual privately owns and what he can use to actualize his birth potential — whether the possessions are tangible assets or psychological and spiritual capacities. The eighth house deals with business proper because any type of business implies some kind of contract or agreement involving at least two persons and being more of less legally guaranteed by society as a whole. Marriage is or was a contract theoretically valid "until death do us part," and guaranteed by legal and religious sanctions. Installment buying, mortgages, and all varieties of exchange, whether or not they involve money, are based on interpersonal and social relationships, and this basically means on trust.

Three basic factors are implied in all matters which really deal with the eighth house field of experience: trust — which itself implies honesty — management, and responsibility. And back of them stands the broad seventh house activity of love — love as the capacity to give a constructive meaning to interpersonal, and thus social, relationships; thus, as the substantiation of the experienceable and concretized meaning and value of togetherness.

To participate in a ritual activity when one does not trust the participants can be very dangerous, even though this is what one does constantly when living in our modern society, particularly in modern cities; and this is why our society gives to the eighth house a mainly negative meaning. Politics is the negation of trust; and until the very concept of politics no longer finds place in social and interpersonal relationships, social togetherness must have its bitter fruits in the eighth house, as well as some instances of bountiful harvest. Politics must be superseded by management in the social and business sense of the term. That is to say, the outcome of a relationship or a business contract — and the plus value generated by human cooperation — should be managed, not only for the sake of the participants, but for the sake of the relationship itself and of what it brings to society and to mankind and the Earth, the vast planetary organism in which mankind should perform a definite function, just as the vegetable and the animal kingdoms, the winds and the sea, do perform.

If a seventh house relationship is truly functional and purposeful, it is in the field of experiences related to the eighth house that this functional purpose finds itself substantiated. As it is substantiated and takes on a very concrete character, the partners must face up to the responsibility of whatever it is that the relationship brings to other persons, and especially to the whole community and to the Earth.

The cooperative activity of a couple or of a group produces various results, releases new energies, or creates new wealth. How are the fruits of this activity to be used? This is the basic eighth house question because this house is a succeedent house and all such houses — second, fifth, eighth, and eleventh — deal with the use of the power made available by what occurred in the angular houses — first, fourth, seventh, and tenth. In the second house an individual uses what he owns, and a certain kind of personal management is implied. But in the field of business, proper management takes on a superpersonal meaning, that is, the manager uses the fruits of group activity not for himself, but for the relationship between the group participants — thus for the firm, the government, the nation as a whole.

Responsibility means the ability to respond. Respond to what? To the conjugal or social situation created by the concrete results of a cooperative relationship. This means the ability to control, handle, and put to constructive social purposes the fruits of this relationship.

This responsibility applies to all levels of seventh house activity — to sexual activity as well as to business profits, or losses! Power is released. It may be substantiated as the conception of a baby, or as both monetary gains and the pollution of air and water by an industrial enterprise. Every release of power can be both positive and negative — most often it is a little of both. Is the business profitable? What legacy does it leave for the future? And this means, above all, the future of the participants, for any relationship entered into and any signed contractual agreement will bring a legacy to the participants. It could mean death to the past followed by rebirth, or the kind of dying which surrounds the future with karmic ghosts and unresolved frustrations.

The eighth house is a very important house, but one that is hard to interpret in an individual's chart. It is in terms of eighth house types of experience that a person has to make perhaps his or her deepest and most vital choices. These choices will affect not only the individual, but society as a whole. In that sense, the Existentialist philosophers are right in saying that every man is responsible for the whole of mankind.

The Astrological Houses