Continued from Part I

Whatever the rejected planet, the subconscious awareness of its loss leads to a kind of victim consciousness, a conviction, in fact, that it's morally right to feel sorry for ourselves. Weren't we robbed after all? A businessman I know with a 12th-house Mars was keenly aware of his inability to embrace his assertiveness ("My mom owned all the anger in the household, she never let me be me.") So when he learned that he had a reputation among his co-workers for being thoughtless and cruel (his shadow Mars), he was actually thrilled. "Doesn't it bother you that you might actually be hurting people?" I asked. There was a momentary confusion in his eyes before they glazed over. Lost in the memories of his past and unable to fit them with a different picture of his present, he spaced out and forgot my question.

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The 12th rules temples, prisons, and hospitals; and we get three similar choices in housing our inner worlds. Close your eyes and imagine a scene. Dissolve that and imagine another, then another. Is there an end to the scenes you can imagine? No. In this vast inner world, there are no restrictions on space. So in structuring your 12th-house psyche, you have infinite choices. You can, like the young Dalai Lama in Potala, roam an inner residence a quarter-mile long with a thousand rooms, enjoying this precious incarnation, and taking advantage of centuries of history and learning from vast inner libraries. Or you can pace a small prison cell of past mistakes. Or you can lie upon a sick bed of wounds. Whether your 12th feels like a temple, prison, or hospital is your choice. The invisible 12th-house field is full of possibilities. It does, however, hold a long past, from this lifetime, and prior lifetimes. And it's this past that can either confine you or lead you to liberation.

But what is it in us that actually builds this expansive or constricting world? If we're serious about mastering the 12th house, it's a necessary question, though not an easy one. Poets, scientists, and mystics have been weaving answers to this mystery for as long as humanity has been thinking. I won't pretend to have anyone's answer. Actually I think we're each free, in fact required, to know the 12th house on our own terms. Gurus and priests fall in the 9th house; in the 12th we're on our own. The image stream of dreams, the sixth sense of intuition, this field is something more and less than our memories. Perhaps the 12th house is composed of what's just below the mind, like subatomic quanta particles that drive the electricity of thought. Perhaps it's the field of consciousness itself, and below that, whatever it is that gives birth to consciousness. Perhaps it's the invisible plenum that connects me to you and you to me. Maybe all of creation derives from here. Perhaps this is Ultimate Reality. Or maybe God. Whatever this invisible field means to you, on this at least we might agree -- this world doesn't operate like the visible world of matter. So we probably shouldn't act like it does.

In the material world if I am harmed, I can go about crying and blaming. If I am just a material being, and my early environment didn't support the expression of Venus or Uranus or Mars, I can consider myself a piece of genetic material that had the bad fortune to be born in a bad situation. Not so in the world of karma. If I decide I am a spirit being, then I must consider my existence before the womb and after, and accept perhaps it is my choices or actions that bring my soul into exactly the right situation for its next stage of development, that what I do now can affect what happens after I die. When we shift perspective beyond this lifetime, the 12th house takes on a whole new look. We acquire new responsibilities. And planets here are not just deprived.

Loss or Sacred Rite?

In fact, what looks like loss on the material plane may be a sacred rite, a necessary sacrifice, in the spiritual realm. There's a 12th-house Aries Sun that I know. His 12th-house loss was his father's abandonment at three; his dad walked out the door and never returned. It was this loss, this missing piece of solar influence, that shaped him differently from the other boys in his neighborhood, that made him, among other things, a varsity basketball player who leaned toward poetry. As a young man, one of his first major works of poetry was addressed to this missing father, whose absence had served as a kind of muse, forever calling his spirit from the dark. It is said of 12th-house Suns that they are meant to serve or they will suffer, that they should work behind the scenes. Such simple formulas often miss the real depth of a life. Gary is a strong and opinionated Aries, who, like a true Aries individualist, founded his own company. The publishing market is tough to succeed in, yet his small press has become one of the most prestigious in the country. His poetry is admired, too. But what is especially remarkable about Gary is the way he connects, supports, and nurtures other writers. Having lost his father to the 12th house, he has become a father to many, especially his own two precious sons.


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Note: This article is from a 12-part series started in the October 1994 issue of TMA (The Mountain Astrologer). See www.mountainastrologer.com for back issue ordering information.


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Astrologer Dana Gerhardt writes for The Mountain Astrologer, StarIQ and Beliefnet.com. She also produces a unique and personalized astrology report called "Moonprints." For more info., email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and visit her website http://mooncircles.com/dana.html.

His is one of many stories that make me think of 12th-house planets as especially chosen and blessed. It is as though their early deprivation gives them a deep spiritual marking. Perhaps what the ego wants no part of is left more pure. The victimization of the 12th house makes a great training ground for compassion. But in developing the 12th-house planet, there is always more than one ego surrender. After the first loss, at some point, the shadow must be confronted. Gary's alcoholism got the better of him for years. He almost lost his own family before he was able to draw his addiction out of his blind spot and confront it. The dragons at the spiritual gate will patiently wait, but they offer no guarantees. Some of us may never fulfill the promise of our 12th-house energies. But for those who walk the path of transformation, this house seems to grow in strength over the life, reaching for consciousness, as dreams toward awareness, as a flower unfolds to the sun.

I know a writer and photographer with Neptune in the 12th. I described Neptune to him once and suggested that its imprint may have been knowledge he gained in the womb. His eyes lit up. His mother had played the piano throughout her pregnancy, he said, and he always felt this had made a deep impression on him; his thoughts tend to move in musical patterns. So what was his initial Neptune deprivation? An intensely private man, his Scorpio Sun is squared by a Saturn-Pluto conjunction and, not surprisingly, he is known for bouts of intolerance and rigidity. As one might surmise from his chart, his father was strict. I don't imagine Paul was allowed much Neptune as a child. As a young man he served in the military and later went to school for a business career. But in the past ten years I've watched him steadily withdraw from Saturn-Pluto to submerge in the Neptune world of his art. For the past two years he has been so deep in Neptune that he disappears for months at a time. Yet whenever you see him, he is intensely alive. More than anyone else I know, he lives an artist's life, completely on artist's time. He will spend hours catching just the right light for a photograph. He will go days without sleep, living with the characters in his novel as though they were roommates. His 12th-house Neptune has become the center of his chart. It is the sunken treasure he has been working his whole life to retrieve. It is something truly divine.

Special Quality of 12th-house Planets

Sometimes, when one comes to appreciate this special quality of 12th-house planets, the territory of the other houses seems to pale. Ego so greedily appropriates the rest of the chart for its personal desires, but this house refuses to give. It stands both higher and deeper, rings more resonant, more true. If, as the Buddhists say, most of what we worry about is delusion and illusion, then the 12th house may be the only slice of life that's not. We may wonder then, why is the 12th such a small portion of the whole chart?

I'm not sure I have that answer either. But perhaps it's that the direction of creation, from big bang to the cosmic accretion that builds a star, to the one-celled creatures that launched the life forms on this planet, represents an urge towards differentiation. The glory of the universe seems to unfurl in its will to individuate. And in the creative differentiation that moves the universe forward, it seems we have to forget who we truly are. We have to forget this cosmic unity. We must become a self that's separate from the whole. And so we pull away from our divine beginnings. But what the human ego necessarily forgets, the 12th house remembers. Perhaps more divinity than that would simply shatter frail ego's walls. The 12th is uniquely poised in the wheel -- before the beginning and at the end of our chart. It's where we came from and where we're going, out of the unity of creation and back again. It is a place of great measure. Without question, this house of self-undoing, confinement, and loss is my favorite house in the chart.

Note: This article is from a 12-part series started in the October 1994 issue of TMA (The Mountain Astrologer). See www.mountainastrologer.com for back issue ordering information.

?1996 Dana Gerhardt - all rights reserved