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Astrologer's Notes:
Thinking Magically and Critically: Contemporary Astrology and What It Can Do For You:
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The Water Houses:
The Ancestral Eyes Of The Soul
part 1 of 3
by Erin Sullivan |
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The water houses are the places of ancestral lineage. Although each house in the horoscope has its relation to the family, and all aspects of the horoscope are familial, these particular houses focus intently on three levels of ancestral relationship. The water houses are the most mysterious of the twelve sectors; all of them symbolize varying levels of merging and bonding, feeling and emotion, body and soul.
I have begun with the twelfth house because that is the primordial womb, wherein lies our personal connection to the anima mundi, the world soul. In that realm, we are, indeed, all one. Where energy and matter are indistinguishable, we find the stuff and matter of the world redundant and the transcendent exists outside time. We are connected to the ancestral lineage to the human race. This is the quantum-family house. From there, we incarnate through a specific womb, the mother, who houses us during the incubation of the body. In the fourth house we are the gene-pool of the family-of-origin, the astrological meeting place of the personal ancestors, wherein we become alive with our families all around and meet ourselves in the faces and souls of real people. In the eighth house we have the task of living with the dead; here is where we, as the incarnate soul, individuate our personal ancestors. They call us from that place, requiring that we receive our inheritance from them, and use it wisely.
Transits through these houses will awaken their realms of experience, and bring us closer to the domain of the ancestral lines.
The Twelfth House: The Cosmic Family Soul
'All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness or primordial night. There he is still whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all ego-hood.'
Carl G. Jung
In ancient astrology, the twelfth house was considered to be malign - it was the house of hidden enemies, incarceration, insanity and self-undoing brought on by influences outside one's own control - in short, a dreadful locus. In modern astrology, it is still mainly interpreted as such, in the sense that the twelfth house is the house of sleeping characteristics and of self-undoing, the shadowy realm where traits can remain unrealized, undifferentiated and not rendered in any way personal. It is seen now as the house of the collective unconscious - a way of saying it is the place where we are deeply united with the greater ancestral line, that of the entire human race back to its origins, and that we have no recourse but to fall into this primordial womb regardless of the degree to which we are conscious of this place.
There is a place in which the origins of all humanity reside, and they dwell in the ancestral site. Perhaps this site is located via the reptile brain, the pre-cortex brain which has record of the primal struggles for survival and evolution - a place where our darkest survival instincts are still very active and functioning. We know we have this place in us, as well as racial memory, where we dream of gods, monsters and of unknown skies where three suns or eight moons are rising and setting. It is this place where our recollection of the cosmic womb lies.
Somewhere in the deepest recesses of the soul in all people is a place of perfect bliss - and a place of ultimate horror. This is the twelfth house. Since the twelfth house represents the first couple of hours after birth, it is likely to house the earliest recollections we might have after incarnation. It is with great interest in this mysterious area that hypno-therapists, re-birth workers and depth psychoanalysts try to help individuals reach back into this realm. Lying in the twelfth house is the source of Weltschmertz - world pain. That we are all connected to each other - we are all one - is the basic tenet of the oldest religions, and although it flies in the face of logical positivism, is fast becoming a generally accepted idea. That somewhere deep in the genetic and psychic (spiritual) realm, all individuals are connected to each other, and to every one who has gone on before.
It is in the twelfth house we meet the ancestors of the entire human race. And very likely, the pre-human race, the organism of humanity. All the ancient interpretations of the twelfth house have relevance if we see it in this light. In that deep in our own psyche is our personal shadow stemming from the shadowy origins of humanity, then it is the house of hidden enemies, as well as guardian angels. Darkness came before the dawn, and our archaic memory of the Dark Age and the time before the bicameral mind resonates in today's freshly conscious person.
The twelfth house contains the time-out-of-mind period of our human development, the time the ancient poets of the oral tradition sang of, the mythic realms when all was Night and Chaos, before the gods and long, long before man. When we are in the womb, we are this prehistoric creature, unformed, with a tail and swimming around in a small salt-sea, without consciousness, without reason and totally dependent on genetics (and fate) to keep us alive long enough to give birth to ourselves.
Too, it is the house of incarceration - if we take the literal meaning of the word in carcere to be in the flesh - and to be incarnated means to fold the soul into a body, which happens in the fourth house. But, what happened before the soul incarnated, where was it incarcerated? This is the longest of the mysteries, the untraceable one. Whereas in the fourth house we can trace our known ancestors and in the eighth house we peel back the layers of our personal unconscious and our 'this life' connection to the ancestral line, the twelfth house offers no such rational exercise.
Certainly, insanity falls into this house as well, because a person who has lost the tentative boundary between the personal realm and the deeper, archetypal realm enters the place which we call mad. But, then, madness and civilization have been a dialectic for æons, and a discussion on madness and the twelfth house could be reduced to saying one thing. That being: madness is loss of differentiation, lack of individuation and complete disregard for the conventions of consciousness. It is being returned to the infantile state, or possibly even pre-infancy, to a time when gods, monsters and chaos was the state of being in the world. Through the twelfth house, we understand, though perhaps not condone or accept, the horrors of the human condition and what people can do to other people to reduce them to ash - this is a house of amorality.
It is through this understanding that we have the possibility of redemption of the dark side of human-nature, as well. It is a very complex house, one not as easily rationalized as its counterparts, the fourth and the eighth houses.
The Platonic picture tells of the soul making a journey through the underworld after departing from the body, meeting various experiences and undergoing trials, all of which are tailored to the incarnate soul's previous experience and are designed to prepare the soul for it's next reincarnation. One of the last trials of the liminal soul is to cross a blazing hot plain - the Plain of Oblivion - and reach a river of the same name (Lethe in Greek - the root of our word 'lethal') where Plato's advice to the soul is to drink not too deeply from the River Lethe because it encourages oblivion (forgetfulness) which is lethal to consciousness in the next incarnation.
This story is the underlying hypothesis of Plato's theory of recollection - that is, we spend the entire of our lives recalling what we knew before we were born - that we do not learn anything, but recall everything that exists in the realm of the archetypes. What we perceive as learning, then, is actually a process of midwiving already extant knowledge in the soul and bringing it to consciousness and applying it to the present. Though it is not stated as such this philosophy implies a diachronous time, and that our souls live in this pan-temporal place, locked into temporality by the incarceration in the body. According to Plato, the highest achievement in life is to go about recollecting the soul's knowledge (wisdom). This is the path of the philosopher. On a humorous note, someone once said that God invented time so that everything didn't happen all at once - this 'all at once' is the soul's time, not incarnate time!
That, in this region called the twelfth house, in this horoscopic place, the incarnate soul resides, deeply buried in the body and longing for recollection of the past, and connected to the ancestral spirits of all humanity. Neptune is the twelfth house ruler, Pisces its sign and those two symbolized the cosmic womb, the place of pre-memory. In the twelfth house, things do happen 'all at once'.
The aspect of Neptune and all its domain which most interests me in this circumstance is its anæsthetic properties. Wherever we have Neptune is where we have natural endorphins, pain killers. The first pain is the pain of birth. The pain begins in the womb, when the fœtus begins to reject the mother by way of releasing hormones into her bloodstream via the umbilicus (which once was its source of life) which then cause the uterus to contract - the uterus becomes lethal. This process continues until the fœtus is expelled, the umbilicus is severed and all symbiosis between mother and child has ceased. The ouroboric life has ended. This must hurt. In comes Neptune, for its first act, that of obliterating the pain of birth and initiating its role for the future: that of dividing consciousness from the archetypal realm, the world of unity-with-all and the oceanic state in which the preconscious being exists. The infant is now an entity in itself. One which will long to return to Neptune, to the womb to the collective undifferentiated state of being over and over again.
People with planets in the twelfth house find that they have a difficult time contacting the energies and agencies with which those planets are identified that are embodied in practical, conventional means. They seek and find myriad ways of re-connecting to the archetypal realm. The twelfth house planets are 'last to be born' as they reside in this watery womb of the collective.
Very often, the only way to consciously connect with the planets therein is to mythologize, spiritualize or universalize them. They find that it is easier to turn the embodied aspect of the planetary agencies into something outside the human experience, or at least the earthy human experience. This is why heavily tenanted twelfth house people are hard to pin down, they find themselves hard to grasp, as well! They want to find cosmic order in the sordid aspects of human life.
That the twelfth house planets are last to be born means that it takes greater conscious effort to individuate out of the archetypal collective consciousness - the tendency to cosmologize the function of the planet renders it infantile and undeveloped in the psychological sense. Reason remains too far outside, it stays in the transcendent realm, and thus does not come into the lower regions where psychology plays a role in transforming the conscious mind and working on the connection between the deeper layers of the recessed psyche and the upper air of the mental, intellectual realms. People with twelfth house planets are always speaking of their helplessness in the face of the larger reality, whether that is society, divinity or history. It takes great energy and conscious effort to make a thread of a bridge from the personal back to the collective, and thus, be personally conscious of being responsible for the collective.
Naturally, the twelfth house planet wants to go back into the cosmic womb, the pain of being conscious and alive is often too great. It takes long periods of withdrawal and contemplation and small steps out into the harshness of the light (symbolized by the first house) and the responsibility for self and ego requires a cosmic purpose. Twelfth house planets do not speak so much of the family inheritance as directly as does the fourth, and secondarily the eighth, but more of the collective inheritance as it falls into the life of an individual born into a family in which there are many practical and physical difficulties. Twelfth house planets do speak loudly about secrets in the family, possible parental hatred or disgust with the child or the process of childhood, parents who were not cosmic enough and thus, a child had to be born to take on the collective identity, and become the cosmic one among them.
People with twelfth house planets often feel very lonely - and human relationships are not sufficient for assuaging that loneliness. Hence, relationships are formed with a divinity or a spiritual life. Blending these two apparently split domains is a life-path, for in the quantum realm, there is no distinction between energy and mass, but our current development in consciousness maintains this gulf. This singularity is not the existential despair that besets the eighth house planet, nor the gripping, burdening isolation of the carrier of the family fate in the fourth, but the cosmic loneliness which is the making of the monk on the mountain.
Twelfth house people might well have come from under the cabbage or through the chimney brought by the stork for all their connection to their family of origin. The fact is, they likely have jumped several generations and come in at a time when the family was becoming bereft of soul and it befalls the twelfth house person to do the soul-work for them. They are deeply connected to their nuclear family of origin, but have been given the inordinate responsibility of spiritualizing for the entire family, as far back as it goes to the priest, nun, monk, or novitiate.
Therefore it is essential for the twelfth house planets to become connected to the body somehow. If not, the person can suffer body-symptoms and emotional disconnection. The body is always a bit of a problem with the twelfth house person, anyway, because of the nature of the house itself, and its polar opposite, the sixth. The sixth is the body and the twelfth is the soul or psyche. . . the combination of psyche and soma in some form or other is the function of incarnation.
Hence, the psychosomatic dis-ease which can so easily and readily befall the twelfth house person. Care of the soul is necessary for us all, but it is the guarantor of health and life for the strongly twelfth house person. This is why many people with the personal planets in the twelfth do have weak constitutions especially in the first developmental years of their lives. Their souls are not terribly connected to their bodies.
This can be because the mother herself was disembodied during the pregnancy or during the labour and delivery. My younger brother was born within minutes of his mother being administered a new, experimental drug of the times called 'twilight sleep' (1962). It provoked horrible nightmares and an almost satanic reaction to the doctor and delivery-room staff on her part and it also slowed the contractions. All this as Neptune crested the horizon in Scorpio!
Excerpt from The Astrology of Family Dynamics. Erin Sullivan. Weiser Books. York Beach, maine. 2001. ISSBN 1-57863-1793. 401 pages, index, illustrated. Ppbk.
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Erin Sullivan,
Astrologer
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Erin Sullivan is one of the brightest lights in contemporary astrology. She has been integral to the growth of today's astrology, having founded many groups, run symposia, taught for over thirty years and presented at international conferences around the world.
She is Canadian born, and has lived in many cultures - in 1989 she moved to London England where she took on the position of Series Editor for Penguin, Arkana's prestigious Contemporary Astrology Series. Her tutoring for the Centre for Psychological Astrology in London gave birth to two of her books: Where in the World?Astro*Carto*Graphy and Relocation, and Venus and Jupiter: Bridging the Ideal and the Real.
Erin returned to North America in 1998, and continued to teach, write and consult with clientele from all nations. Her three other books are published by Samuel Weiser (now RedWheel/Weiser Publications):
The Astrology of Family Dynamics (a best seller)
Saturn in Transit: Boundaris of Mind Body and Soul,
and her masterpiece, Retrograde Planets: Traversing the Inner Landscape.
Her company, "Southwest Contemporary Astrology" publishes unique personalized astrology profiles - reports - available online on her website's secure shopper!
She now lives and practices and writes in her Rio Grande riverside home in Northern New Mexico.
Erin Sullivan
SOUTHWEST CONTEMPORARY ASTROLOGY Reports online at:
www.ErinSullivan.com
"As the World Turns: Your Personal Solar Return Profile" - a 60+ page booklet with predictive timing and trends for your solar year - fully illustrated with calendars, beautifully written.
"Your Personal Heroic Journey" - a 70 page booklet, illustrated with full interpretations for a lifetime of Saturn Transits - your cycles of growth and development.
1008 Paseo del Pueblo Sur, #255
TAOS, New Mexico,
87571-6412 USA
Tel: ( 1 ) 505-758-1931
Ext. 1 for SCA
Fax: ( 1 ) 505-751-1353
www.ErinSullivan.com
for Southwest Contemporary Astrology
Erin Sullivan
erinsullivan@newmex.com
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