Getting older is a weird business. I’m quite aware that some of you readers and listeners might have no idea who Monty Python was and in fact some of you may even think he was one person. They were actually six Englishmen who formed a hugely successful comedy troupe back in 1969. It’s been said that they did for comedy what the Beatles did for music – and, give an old guy a break, you’ve all heard of the Beatles, right?

In any case, before I go any further, let me reassure you that this newsletter will be about astrology – in fact a very serious branch of astrology. It won’t just be me strolling down memory lane. 

Please indulge me for a moment though. It’s December 1969. I’m twenty years old and watching TV with my parents, who were actually pretty cool. Python comes on doing a skit about a man returning a dead parrot to a pet shop. A hilarious argument ensues about whether the bird is actually dead or not, when it quite obviously is. I have tears of laughter running down my cheeks, while my parents are baffled – and probably concerned about my mental health. 

That’s what critics meant when they said Python “did for comedy what the Beatles did for music.” They changed everything. As ever with such things, young people got it right away, while many of the older ones were left scratching their heads. They were funny, but more importantly they changed what “funny” meant. For example, talk about a paradigm shift – they did away with punchlines back in a time when the punchline was the point of every joke. They also pushed the far edges of what was acceptable – fat people exploding from eating “one more thin mint,” physical mutilations and witch burnings, a guy named Brian being mistaken for Jesus in Jerusalem, and him having sex and then being rescued from the mob by a flying saucer. 

Monty Python was hilarious – and often very dark. Times were looser then. Much of what they did would be forbidden today. Even back then, one of their films was in fact banned entirely in Ireland and Norway, while being shut down in many cities across the globe

To learn more, just Google them – or even better watch one of their films. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Life of Brian, or The Meaning of Life.

Astrologically, we’re lucky – the charts of all six of the Pythons are in astrodatabank and all but one has a Rodden Rating of A. The remaining one, Graham Chapman, has a C rating – his mom only remembers that he was born “around breakfast.” For our purposes, I will leave him out of our considerations. By the way, here’s the login for getting to astrodatabank nowadays – https://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Main_Page

Here’s the truly startling point, and the basis of what I want to explore with you: of the five members of the Python troop with accurate birth times, four of them have the south node of the Moon in the eighth house. The odds against that happening by chance are obviously astronomically long. Let’s see if we can make sense of it.

Let me start with the astrological facts. John Cleese and Terry Gilliam both have the south node in Aries, while Eric Idle and Michael Palin have it in Aquarius – and it’s in the 8th house in all four cases. (Terry Jones is the outlier, with his south node in Pisces and the 12th house.)  Meanwhile, in the C-rated chart of Graham Chapman, the south node is in Aries and the 2nd house – with the north node then in Libra and the 8th and conjunct Neptune. Even though Chapman breaks the pattern of Pythons having 8th house south nodes, his 8th house Neptune opposing his south node would make the 8th house a significant part of any reading of his karmic signature, but to keep everything pure and simple, we’ll ignore him.

By the way, as always, I am using Placidus houses. That’s the system that speaks to me.

There’s clearly a pattern here, but how can we explain it? These are comedians – funny guys – and yet the 8th house is always represented as profoundly serious. After all, historically, its most common name was The House of Death. Reading about it, you can feel its natural association with the 8th sign of the zodiac, Scorpio. 

What’s “funnier” than finding a scorpion in your shoe? 

Seriously, there is nothing funny about scorpions, or losing a loved one – or hearing the doctor say, “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.” Death and pain are not topics for party chit chat. There are of course many other such “taboo” topics. All of them are symbolized by the 8th house. 

• The 8th house references anything that’s so emotionally-charged that it becomes a candidate for being driven into the unconscious mind. 

The 8th house is also very sexual – but again we mean that word in its most serious, emotionally-stormy context. We’re talking about the feelings released as people try to mate and bond with each other, not just the obvious physical joys of sex. And when mating and bonding go bad, people experience extremes of feeling. Thoughts of suicide – or homicide – can easily arise, for example. Think of a heartbroken, jilted lover jumping off a bridge. Or think of how you felt when you discovered your partner had been “seeing” someone else.

Who would call the 8th house the house of comedians? How can that even be possible? 

Actually, yes. Think of the last 10,000 jokes and gags you’ve heard. Analyze them for content and what do you find? Throw away the puns and word plays, what you’ve got left is a profile of the unconscious mind – which is to say, everything that we’re not allowed to talk about, except perhaps in the form of humor. To put it simply for starters, before we’re twelve years old, most of the jokes we hear are about excretory functions – again, not cocktail party chit chat. After age twelve, most of them are about sex. A “dirty joke” might fly at that cocktail party, but you’d be in trouble there if you began to speak honestly – or inquiringly – about sex. Or death. Or disease.

Try this (and my apologies if it offends someone). “The doctor says I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that you have Alzheimers. The good news is that you can go home and forget about it.” 

It’s funny – but not if you or someone you love just got that diagnosis. The point is that life is so fierce that talking honestly about half of it will get you banned from most social gatherings. To put it in astrological terms, out in public you can talk about almost anything – unless it bears the fingerprints of the 8th house. Then it’s taboo

Even there, we have a loophole. Since the beginning of time, humans have used humor as a way of talking about those kinds of subjects. More precisely, it’s actually a weird way of sort of talking about them without really talking about them, in other words. Such humor probably serves a necessary psychological function in society – a release valve, so to speak. 

But who are these comedians? Who are these priests and priestesses of the unconscious mind? They’ve often got 8th house signatures. We hear all the clichés about “the tears of the clown.” There’s folklore about wounded or depressed comedians – and plenty of at least anecdotal evidence for it. How many of us were shocked and heartbroken when Robin Williams decided to end his life? What about all the comedians who’ve died of drug overdoses?

With an 8th house south node such as what we see in the Python troupe, the basic premise in evolutionary astrology is that in a prior life something hurt you very badly. That karma has ripened in this lifetime, which means the time has come for you to deal with it – to regain your 2nd house confidence and your sense of personal security. (There’s the healing north node signature.) Each astrological situation would be different depending on the signs, planets, and aspects involved, but they would all hold in common some element of nightmare.

• One possibility is that such a nightmare just might trigger an enormous sense of humor – at least humor of the edgy sort that we often call “gallows humor.”

Is that the case with four of the members of the Python troupe? Each man has his own karmic story, of course. An analysis of each of their individual charts is obviously beyond the scope of this newsletter – if you’re interested, I’ve posted their birth data at the end. But the core principles of evolutionary astrology guarantee that each of the four of them was born with enormous pain based on something tragic and hurtful that happened long ago.

I want to tie everything together with a long, slightly abridged quote about the 8th house south node taken from my 2008 book, Yesterday’s Sky: Astrology and Reincarnation. I’m doing this for two reasons. One, if you’ll forgive me, is simply to avoid rewriting it all here! But the second is that these are words that I started writing almost twenty years ago and which have been frozen in print now for sixteen years – it’s too late now to force-fit them them to John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin, so you know I’m being honest here. 

Read them and imagine the deep well of pain – and maybe healing – from which Monty Python’s dark hilarity emerged.

FROM CHAPTER SEVEN OF YESTERDAY’S SKY:

SOUTH NODE IN THE EIGHTH HOUSE

Storminess, strong emotion, and enormous intensity, all left over from prior lifetimes, define your mood. With the south node in the eighth house, your character has been forged in fire – and very possibly in a nightmare as well. We can safely assume that you have had experiences which were extreme, as intimately revealing as a psychic  X-ray, and laced with tragic elements. 

The eighth house is the traditional house of death. Mortality is not the only issue here, but it probably figures prominently in your prior-life picture. Of course, we have all died in previous incarnations, but here your prior-life death has drama. It was not “natural,” as we would normally define that word. Perhaps nothing creates such strong emotions in us as such deaths – just think of movie scenes that have put tears in your eyes. A friend has just given his life for a friend. The good guy whispers his last words. 

Imagine a young man drafted into war and seeing mangled, decaying corpses for the first time. Imagine a medieval woman loading the dead onto the plague-wagons. Imagine a man holding his dying wife in his arms, hearing the cries of their newborn infant. 

What do such experiences do to a person? How do they respond? The answers, of course, are as varied as individuals. Perhaps we see profound, emotionally naked honesty. Maybe we see shell-shocked denial. Maybe evolution is accelerated. Possibly it is stalled, as we are overwhelmed by the horror of our experiences. And in every case, the mark of deep wounding is left: fear, grief, anxiety. 

And, just possibly, a capacity for fantastic sex – and that’s not a spurious remark. The greatest enemy of deep sexuality is emotional distance. With an 8th house south node, there have likely been experiences of deep emotional bonding in your soul’s history, and perhaps of shared tragedy. 

But something was left unresolved there too – that’s always part of the meaning of the south node. With that south node, you will probably meet those lovers again in this life. There’s business to be finished. Such is the power of the soul magnetism. You find each other again decades or centuries later, in new bodies.

Let’s also recognize that human sexuality can ally itself with the most depraved aspects of our natures. With the south node in the 8th house, you may have been touched by those kinds of experiences too: sexual humiliation, rape, molestation.  

You get the picture. John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin were each born with a natural understanding of the tragic dimension of life. Each was born with an instinctive familiarity with life’s potential darkness. We could say that each man is “in recovery” in this lifetime – and to heal their wounded souls, each one was using one of humanity’s most ancient medicines: laughing in the face of darkness. They were laughing at death’s illusions. They were laughing at death’s frailty in the face of the immortal, indomitable human spirit. 

I smile to imagine some combinations of them as couples who shared a hard prior lifetime, whatever their genders were back then.

I also smile to realize that about one out of every twelve of you hearing these words has the south node in the eighth house too. May the Great Mystery smile on your healing journey – and I hope you’ve gotten a good laugh out of this newsletter.

That last sentence is more serious than it sounds. 

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Graham Chapman – January 8, 1941 at 8:30 AM in Leicester, England. C Rating

John Cleese – October 27, 1939 at 3:15 AM in Weston Super Mare, England. A Rating. 

Terry Gilliam – November 22, 1940 at 12:35 AM in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A Rating. 

Eric Idle – March 29, 1943 at 1:20 PM in South Shields, England. A Rating. 

Terry Jones – February 1, 1942 at 11:00 AM in Colwyn Bay, Wales. A Rating. 

Michael Palin – May 5, 1943 at 11:45 AM in Sheffield, England. A Rating. 

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