Water; soul and death

The planets of water are Moon, Pluto, and Neptune. They rule over the signs of Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces. These signs and their ruling planets have dominion over the emotional realm where, as archetypical fulcrums, exists the symbols of Soul and Death. Whereas Fire has to do with the spirit and one’s energy for staying in the fray, fighting through, re-emerging—to dance as fires dances—these are the movements of life. But water, that involves giving in to the current and getting comfortable with submersion, ultimately with sinking, going within. They are analogolous, the dance of fire—life; the depth of water—death, stillness, the eternal realm and resting place of the soul.

To understand the meaning of these planets in the horoscope, we have to grapple with the idea of death itself. I see death as tangoing with the rhythm of life—it is the pause beside the beat, the underneath which gives rise to the external, weight to our actions. This life is transient, our bodies finite, and death is inevitable, we know that, but I believe it is a different concept than simply ‘the other side’—it’s actually necessary for life to be of meaning—death, the presumption of death. All states of pause and of very great emotion, like islands, have as their counterpoint, what holds them up, the fact that it will end, that there will be this deep release. Water rules over conception, time in utero, swimming in the womb, the birth process ( as well as fire ), the closeness to the other world that is early childhood, and the elderly stage of life. Water is deep dominion with solitude, respite, renunciation, deep connection, the sexual act (only when in love—), meditation, high spiritual states, and low humbled states. Of course, water IS life, thus the paradox. We are made of water, we need water to live. It revives us, nourishes us. We just must also remember that in order to die we have to have been living—to die presupposes that there was a life lived in which the intimate knowledge of death slept beneath the urgency and transience of our days. Perhaps it is not something to be so scared of; perhaps life is stronger than we can imagine, as strong as death is total, something sleeping, silent, patient and waiting for a certain time, of which we cannot know, and in some way, as the Tibetans say, must always be prepared.

When I sat by my mother’s death bed, I grappled with the meaning of these planets, not only because I was philosophizing, but because I was watching out for her death as a crow watches from the power lines. My own life had been sucked into the orbit of her passing and there’d be no dealing with grief and recovery for me until she actually passed. I was her death keeper and her only daughter. It was my duty, so I saw it, and a traditional one, though no one taught me such a thing. I wasn’t raised in a tribe but a house of televisions obliterating the night and the snore of my father asleep in his chair who I remember told me casually, just leave if it’s too much, she’ll die either way, with or without you. But, then, it was as much for me that I was present, that I became of service at her death bed. What in the world else was there for me to do more important than be part of the irreconcilable rite of passage that is a daughter releasing her dying mother? So I stayed, enduring my life piled up like a snowstorm. From what I understood, there needed to be planetary alignment with her fourth house, the house of the Moon, and I could look out also for any motion in her eighth house, the house of Pluto, or the last, the twelfth, the house of undoing, Neptune’s. But specifically—the fourth—there must be something transiting through the fourth for everything to fall into place and her sacred passing to occur.

The fourth house is the first water house, lying along the angle of the Imum Coeli, at the foot of the meridian of power, directly opposite the Midheaven, point of corporeal ascendance. It is the point of midnight in the chart, and symbolizes solitude and the beginning and end of all things. It is the rain-soaked earth, the very bottom, the ground where our ancestors’ bones are buried. It is also where gravity is most pooled, where we kneel, and where our hearts fall in deep silence, grief, or in gratitude. It is a brilliantly personalized space, a secure home that coddles so deep that a rare specificity of soul begins to glow; it is as rich, multitudinous, and populated with spirits as the earth yet ground into the single essence of one soul, where one is alone but not lonely. Neptune’s twelfth house realm which we will get to soon enough is for depersonalization, but not here, at the fourth, where our deepest tie to our life and our body resides. To die, there has to be an untying of this emotional tie to the body, and so—there has to be a transit to the fourth house. This is the cardinal sign of Cancer’s realm traditionally, that of the Moon. As you can see, this house is much more than just ‘home and family’ as magazine astrologers like to say. Here is where you hope to nourish yourself, by deep rituals, close ties, and in this holy ground of peace and solitude, your own temple, your own abode. Of course, not everyone feels safe in themselves, though there is always potential, and that is just what’s so fascinating about the chart, how this can be seen.

The sign on your fourth house typically describes the energetic nature of the home you grew up in and how you felt in your own body, as shaped by your earliest influences, your mother’s arms, the bed you slept in, your first room, the energetic nature of the house. What you feel here you will create or seek thereafter subconsciously, for this is the makings of what we need to feel nurtured. The Moon in the chart symbolizes those habits we inherit or absorb that have the highest amount of efficiency for making us feel safe, like ourselves, making us feel home. As you can see, it’s not so much about a literal place but a disposition of the seat of our emotions. The Moon is a dependent body, cleaved to the earth, and so our emotional natures are cleaved to the nurture we did or did not receive from our earliest caregivers. Essentially, as we grow, thirsty for positive connections that will ‘bring us home’, we are acting on instincts shaped from unconsciously reacting to the way our mothers raised us, and which our mother had to shape out of her own mother’s way of treating her, and on and on forever. Of course, the Moon does not just signify the relationships we will crave, but how we nurture ourselves, what makes us feel safe and by what road we can return to the deep dark seat of ourselves where the essence of our safety is encased. Cancer is the sign of the crab, the shell, for a reason. The twelve signs into which the Moon can fall signify the flavors of these different roads. Additionally, the twelve signs on the cusp of the fourth house indicate the energetic nature of our earliest influences, the atmospheres that we were forced to contend with. This in the horoscope, I believe, is the most important mystery to unravel. For once we grow up we will call people to us who will aptly recreate the source of our depths, this fourth house, and we will project everything out that we felt back then, that we repressed and forgot about. This is necessary to find our way back home, back to the deep secrets of these depths, essential for tapping into authenticity, true identity, safety within, and our deepest powers. But that’s an eighth house matter, in which it is essential to discern everything or succumb to endless wrecking cycles. In the fourth house though, as an example, if Scorpio is present in the house or on the cusp (and I have known many of these types of people, been intimate with them, and am raising a son who owns this placement) there will be deep tension and underlying sorrow and rage in the home when the child is young. That unfortunately was my own feeling as a young mother washed up on the shore of heartbreak when I became a mother at twenty-four. The child absorbs a painfully unconscious projection that has to do with the parent’s guilt over rejecting the child over things that cannot be the child’s fault. The child learns early, too early I’m afraid to say, the necessity of reading people’s energies and being on guard. This child, too, survives on scarce affection; it may even be said affection is rerouted to another time and place that is safer than the present when the child will finally unlock all his or her own rage and sadness. The child with Scorpio in the fourth will draw atmospheres of danger or betrayal upon themselves so as to practice the relevance of their skills, which eventually forces them to alight upon the old memories that made those skills necessary in the first place. Then must dawn the realization that those very skills have to be dismantled from their source to purify the depths of the self, and let the light in, let the love in.

The Moon and the state of the fourth house are the primary cursors for the healing we must undertake in order to experience unconditional love and safety in our own selves. The process by which we uncover and secure this for ourselves happens in the eighth or through Pluto. The eighth house is the most complicated house in the chart—as a chart reader, I can say this for sure, which is interesting as I am extremely Plutonic. What I think is that I am so very close to Pluto, so intrinsic, that I lack objectivity. That is all I can assume. Pluto represents an absorption into the madness of our subconscious attitudes and the compulsion to play them out to their tragic inevitable ends. This realm is so primordially powerful and intrinsic to the human condition that paths will open and symbols arise anytime someone is submerged in the underworld and looking to go deeper. The signs will appear so that the person can reach the root, the archetype that can reveal his or her condition. The search for the holy grail is a metaphor for this journey. It’s no wonder this is also the realm of psychology and Jungian practices. The imprisonment of consciousness in Dostoevsky’s characters lies here as well, and in anyone entangled in tragic acts that undercut higher motives by playing the opposite and end in the killing or sacrificing of what is most valued. This can happen in subtle ways or extreme ways—through murder, betrayal, prostitution, suicide, etc. It is also through this realm that heroes meet their dark counterparts, as symbolized by their fights to the death with serpents and gorgons, before emerging as the conquerer of their lower beings, and as all powerful. Power is really consciousness, the ability to see clearly, just as wisdom is in knowing when to step back from the edge. Not only power and wisdom come from surviving the underworld of one’s psyche, or coming through it, but the perpetual access to rest, relaxation, and safety comes from conquering one’s demons. Without knowing this state, love cannot bring deep exchange, love cannot be peace. Love must be battled for, which is one reason the eighth house rules sex.

The shadow realm, the shadow consciousness—this is the realm of the eighth. The child, in innocence, is born with a legacy of emotion that will play out in his or her life through unconscious projections and mysterious desires. These desires have as their root the legacy of our passed on mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, etc; I believe we are the dreams of the dead, the passed on. It’s only mysterious to us because we cannot grasp what is another’s mind, or was, long ago. We can only unravel through symbols, memories, and projections which are direct connectors to archetypes and inherited convictions in the psyche, the world of Jung. We think we are acting independently, or true to ourselves, but the truth is we are slaves to something, generally, some deep darkness which lives curled up sleeping in the eighth. There may seem little reason to trouble these primordial roots and old tragedies that ring through all the bones beneath our feet, but if you fall in love, and if you begin having sex, you’ll have no choice. An intense amount of chemicals, oxytocin for one, is released when two people fall in love and sets into motion what is commonly called the honeymoon period. But afterwards, as time passes and chemicals shift, the two in love must show their cards to keep their vulnerability going and the deep satisfaction of sex alive. One must sink into the eighth house or else stultification and cessation will be the result, the collapse of what began. But more than just love is at stake here; there can be no replenishing joy, and no higher consciousness without this journey.

As the ocean is disturbed by circles and then waves as a whale rises to the surface to breathe, so everything upends in us when our shadows come to the surface, when we finally face them. What was brought into life in innocence in the fourth, simply by our being born and surviving childhood, is by the eighth house and our young adult lives, become definite shadow consciousness. That is, our dark sides, the archetypes of the dark we don’t know we identify with but were left as last words in our ancestors’ mouth. Here also may be the swords or shrouds we bear for our mothers or fathers who could not speak what to us are important truths. Here also are smothering cloaks to keep fear down or stuff in the mouths of others. These are just pictures, symbols, generalizations, but they stand in for deep reactions in the psyche to something no longer in our waking world, that yet, speak. These states of deep mind become what stands in the way of us sustaining joy and keeping the boat level with someone. If you have conquered this realm, or shed light, a loving, understanding light upon your shadows, then the dark doesn’t pitch you over—even when you see it in the face of your partner or rising up in yourself, you understand it, you keep steady, act patient, or let rage have its voice, or sadness, anything can have a voice. But not everything need swallow you whole or require the sacrifice of everything you love. When we can’t identify where our darkest feelings come from, everything will be sacrificed to them. We’ll eventually decide something is so wrong with our environment, or the person we love, or ourselves, that we must go elsewhere. But, in truth, what is wrong is that we are not seeing. The eighth is the house of death and rebirth because we delve into the part of ourselves that is most desperate not to be seen and as long as it is not seen, it perpetuates itself to the ruin of all our intentions over and over again, in hopeless cycles. This is what needs to die in us. To go deep means to behead these monsters, and touch the stone of our innocence, like a stone deep in the lake (the lake is the fourth house) where none of this is our fault, and rise to the surface from there, no longer vulnerable to this sucking down unknown. No, instead, when this place is gone into and exposed to light and understanding, you become capable of being vulnerable because there is nothing you fear to hide. Usually in our depths, there is also some talent, some skill which is the key to us figuring it all out. So, you see, that is why it’s the hero’s journey. Not only do you lose your fear, you find your worth. The eighth house is the house of gems, of money, and it symbolizes that our deep inner worth comes from facing our darkest selves—there is no greater self respect than from that act.

Pluto is the planet of the eighth and wherever it resides in the chart indicates where we must go deepest and with what tools. It indicates also how much power the underneath has over us, how huge our shadow is, how deep we have to go, and how necessary it is for us to go. For you see some of us the shadows are shallow; they are naturally calm and kind, naturally loving and not hateful when they want to love, not opening their mouths to speak and finding themselves screaming blame because love is too revealing. The truth is, sex is too revealing. Sex is something sacred, a door by which the underneath can begin to be accessed. To have sex casually is to dull the edges of our most precise tools for self-discovery and self-exaltation. So, it is important to love carefully, and best to have sex only if the other person has proved his or herself willing to go through his or her own depths too. Mutual diving, mutual descent, mutual commitment. Then sex is a power by which two people can be intrinsically bound, for life. Sex then translates into other things, safety, compassion, childbirth, home building, etc. It feeds back into the fourth, the rivers and the glaciers run into our lakes. A person who is plutonic is one who mirrors other people’s shadows and reveals that person to themselves. There is no hiding around them. But everyone has the darkest and coldest planet somewhere, and wherever Pluto is in the chart is where our deepest gems, our most beloved talents are hidden behind our shames, our fears, and our transgressions. We must only be brave enough to peel beneath them and to make the connection.

Though Pluto is much more symbolic of petit-morts we experience over and over, the life and deaths of our cycles, as for actual deaths, Pluto is indicative of sacred timing, our ‘time’ as people like to say, when the unknown of our myriad possible trajectories collides with the collapse of our body, and the spirit flies-—

To where does it fly? That would be in the great heaving ocean, as far as the eye can see, of the twelfth house. This house has less to do with dying, crisis, mood, or personal fierce loves than the other houses; it is actually the undoing of them all. The twelfth represents the collective consciousness, the whole of the unconsciousness, the entire history of mankind, from where the archetypes and our oldest, deepest symbols have derived, the very ocean beneath out feet. Everything there was to discover in the eighth, in the fourth house, is eroded here and depersonalized. Through Pluto we find our time, crystallize it, seize it—here, there is no time, or we are beyond time. In the twelfth house is where universal love comes from—to love without attachment, love with distance, love without end—-and universal justice, the laws of the universe, and their apotheosis, the black hole. The twelfth house is space, and the mystery of where the soul goes and transpires is within this house. Neptune, its harbinger, is the planet of mysticism and poetic sensibilities, of song and spiritiual heights. It’s also the melter of actions, decisiveness, and ego; it dissolves, and can corrode if one isn’t careful. The lunatic, the incoherent, the ruined, and all the speaking dead—ghosts—reside here in wistful silence where there is no ground, no touching earth, no coming home, no beginning and no end. There’s only vastness and void. Quantum physics and its mysteries. When Neptune is very personalized in the chart, the person can become at the mercy of many things that are too overwhelming to handle or that push the person to abandon specificity and become a potentially universal character, such as a drunk or a seer, a lush or a megalomaniac. We lose ourselves in Neptune and here in the twelfth house. All is swept up by an idea, a dream, and the person is lost. To make a difference in this world there must be a holding of boundaries, of wearing the human form with some dignity, until it is your time to escape, to let out the ghost. So Pisces and Neptune do better in the mortal world with some containment. Its opposite is Virgo, Mercury, layering in on the nitty gritty and the small details, working tirelessly to hone skills. In Neptune details are obliterated, the whole is soaked up like we soak in the sun. So in the house of undoing, we have the mystery of life after death and the general residing of our souls. Twelfth house matters generally bring something out of its ego-refinement and our personal attachment to it and show us the universal significance. Also, the twelfth house ends at that sharp line of the rising sign, which divides night and day. This sharp point is indicative of our first breath as infants out of our mother’s wombs, and of the lusty cry that says to the world— “I! I am born!” The awakening of specificity condemns Neptune and the Pisces realm where it belongs, deep in our psyche, as the whole of our unconscious, but it is always with us too, as the spirits are and the symbols we need to hearten us, to live meaningfully.