Traditionally the 8th house is called the House of Death, the place of endings, loss, experiences of betrayal, intimacy, and inheritance. If this house was a bumper sticker, you could call it the House of Sex, Death & Taxes. It is a dimension of experience colored by how other people’s resources and influence affect our lives. This is the sphere in which we experience how sharing financial, emotional, and psychological resources transform our lives.
While in the 7th house, we signed the marriage/business contract, it’s in the 8th house that we see how this union now influences and affects our lives. If the 7th house is how the world sees marriage, the 8th house is what happens behind closed doors in the intimacy of the bedroom.
In this intimate space, we navigate the edgy emotions that constellate a relationship, such as jealousy, envy, rage, (hidden/secret) fears, grief, loss, betrayal, and the merging and the naked vulnerability with the other. Marriage can look one way to the world, but the vulnerable intimacy of the sexual encounter reveals the truth of the relationship. 8th house topics don’t make for cocktail party conversation but are the fodder for novels, salacious gossip magazines, and urban myths.
As a counterpoint to the 2nd house of resources, the 8th is where we receive/share resources from others – it’s other people’s money. It’s the money we must pay in taxes, our experience of loan/debt, but it’s also the money we inherit through the death of another. Thus the connection of this area of the chart with death and taxes.
These aren’t resources we gathered on our own; they are what comes or is taken from us. And if you think of the many family dramas that ensue because of the inheritance or the (mis)managing of shared resources, you can see why this sphere of the birth chart is such a charged territory.
Death & Initiation through Loss
While in the 4th house, we explore our feelings around the family – home, emotional environment, and even our ancestral lineage; in the 8th house, we pick up on the story that is left over to us through what our family left as incomplete.
In the 8th house, we’re not only dealing with what we inherit through the wills and testaments of a deceased family member but also the psychological inheritance of what comes down to us to complete. No wonder this is an area of the chart experienced as the initiatory Underworld of our maturing. This is where secrets are hidden or revealed, only to be inherited by us, where we may (finally) bring into awareness and transformation.
Not that every experience is ‘negative.’ the experience of death, both literal and symbolic, is our underworld initiation and transformation because it’s through loss that we awaken into more consciousness. Even losing one’s virginity to a beloved, which can be felt as a beautiful experience, is an initiation into intimacy and a loss of an old identity.
Psychological Inheritance
Alongside the 4th and 12th houses, the 8th house is complex and nuanced because it speaks to how each of us navigates the initiation into the mysteries of life. But in looking at this area of our chart from the perspective of purpose and livelihood, we come across a theme that needs to be brought firmly into our cultural awareness: the psychological inheritance of the unlived lives of our parents/family.
What we do in life, be it our intimate relationships and work, is often linked to the stories, patterns, and unconscious stories/myths we inherit from our family. The unconscious relationship patterns that govern our lives are part and parcel of the psychological inheritance from our family. How experienced the undercurrent of our parents’ marriage informs much of how we live out our intimate relationships later in life. Therapists’ couches are often where couples first understand the implications of what they’ve inherited from their parents’ relationships.
But in terms of work and what we’re able to do (or not do) is also linked to the psychological inheritance from our parents. The more insidious and challenging of these inheritances is the unlived lives of our parents. Their unfulfilled dreams, wishes, and desires for what they wanted to do but couldn’t often come to us through overt mandates, or unconscious desires that we, if we look deep, may discover aren’t ours but belong to our parents.
How many babies are crowned future doctors, athletes, and artists the minute they’re born, before even having the chance to express their unique tastes. “Little Johnny” will be the next baseball champ. “Little Annie” will become the first doctor in the family. Granted, talents will often travel down the family line, only to blossom in the latest generation that does get to do what their ancestors could only dream of.
However, the unconscious unlived life of parents can also cause havoc in one’s search for purpose and how to align it with their work. Unknown fears may deter possibilities for growth and expansion or, on the other hand, are pursued as a way to fulfill the unlived dream of a parent, not because it’s what one really wanted.
In these cases, the challenge relates to feeling that a parent is living vicariously through one’s life, even beyond the grave. What one accomplishes isn’t wholly theirs but has this invisible thread to the parent. Or one’s deepest wishes don’t have a place to come into the world and be received, because the parent’s unconscious unlived life takes so much psychic space.
“Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment, especially upon children than the life which the parents have not lived.” – C.G. Jung.
The problem with this psychological inheritance is that a lot of psychic energy that could be directed towards what one truly wants is hijacked by feelings of ambivalence, self-sabotage, anxiety, and myriad other side effects. Parents can unconsciously compel their children to fulfill their dreams or compensate for their disappointments and failures. This parental shadow can manifest in the many ways one takes up their parents’ aspirations, makes up for their parents’ deficits, follows their dictates, or rebels against the constraints.
This requires that one does the necessary archaeological dig for themselves to bring into awareness what motivates them onto a particular path and career. Or they have to disentangle themselves from the inherited parental beliefs and mindsets that now asphyxiate their creativity and sense of independence and ability. Through working to differentiate ourselves from our parents, we discover who we are, and in doing so, we live a crucial aspect of purpose: become more fully who we are and claim all the spokes of our life’s wheel.
Psychological archaeology and healing take time and requires courage and determination to journey through the labyrinth nature of self-discovery. To live a more conscious life, one has to undergo a journey through the Underworld, which is a mythic way of describing how we engage with the mystery of the unknown. For that, the ancients always advised that one know their intentions and why for the journey, and also find a trusted guide to help them navigate the territory.
Much like when one inherits a large sum of money and assets and has to hire an attorney and a wealth advisor when diving deep into the psychological waters, one also needs to work intimately with those who know the territory. The 8th house is also where we experience the transformational nature of working in depth with a healer, therapist, life coach, or others who have undergone the journey themselves.
Photo Credits:
Main image: Sandy Millar
Subsequent images: Marek Piwnicki, Laura Fuhrman, and Sharon McCutcheon via Unsplash
