Welcome To The House Of Death

That title got your attention right away, didn’t it?

Many people would rather talk about anything if it meant that they could avoid a true heart-to-heart discussion about death. Even astrologers aren’t immune. We learn in our early days of study that death is the domain of the 8th house, but discussions about that house often quickly veer off into the safer territory of symbolic deaths – endings making way for new starts in life, psychological epiphanies, and so forth. That’s all valid astrology too – and far more comfortable emotional terrain for most people.

Let’s keep perspective. The 8th house does in fact cover a lot of ground that has nothing to do with mortality. There are twelve houses in astrology. Into those twelve boxes, we divide everything that has ever existed or could ever exist. Naturally, they are big boxes! It’s quite legitimate to relate the 8th house to many other subjects – deep psychological work, the mysteries of sexual bonding, profoundly honest conversations. It is even legitimately taken to represent “other people’s money” since it’s the 2nd house from the 7th – and that line of thought quickly leads to investments, inheritance, and similar subjects. All of it flies under the 8th house banner.

Still, from ancient times, astrologers have primarily connected the 8th house with death. Of all of the points on its wide spectrum of meanings, none rival death and dying for sheer “emotional relevance.” In thinking about mortality, it’s helpful to note that we’re not just talking about your own death or any brushes you might have with it – we’re also talking about the impact of other people’s deaths on you: bereavement in all its forms from parents to pets to partners. 

There’s no doubt about it – the practical connection between death and the 8th house is real. For one quick personal example, with Jupiter making a station in my own 8th house opposite my Sun and square my Neptune, my father died. For another example, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, his wife Jackie’s north node was on her 8th house Venus by solar arc, while the transiting north node was closing in on her 8th house Pluto. When Kurt Cobain died, the transiting lunar south node was right on the cusp of Courtney Love’s 8th house.

Such signals in one chart reflecting the death of another person are very common. They don’t always involve the 8th house, but they often do. That should be no surprise. Needless-to-say, death – whether it’s our own or that of someone we love – is on everyone’s short list of life’s major turning points. In fact, perhaps the single most telling reality about human life is that it ends, at least physically. 

• There is no teacher on Earth more powerful than death, no guru who so effectively focuses our attention on what is truly important, what is not, and the difference between the two. 

Still for most people, thinking about death is sort of like thinking about entering psychotherapy – we know it probably might be a good idea . . . for sometime, maybe next year, or possibly the year after that . . .

A MAN WITH A BIG 8TH HOUSE

A while back, I got an email from a former Apprenticeship Program student of mine named Rick Borutta. He wrote to suggest a newsletter topic. We’ll have a look at his chart in a moment, but for now suffice to say that he has a striking 8th house stellium. His note to me began with these words:

In an effort to help some of my older friends "have a good death," I asked them if they wanted to talk to me about what they wanted to have happen and how I could help. They basically told me where to go and what to do with myself and that it was none of my business.

Once again, as Rick painfully learned, death is generally not anyone’s favorite subject. His intentions were good, but not well-received. No one walks into a crowded party and blithely announces “we’re all going to die.” We know that if anyone behaves that way, the next time those people have a party, his name is not going to be on the guest list.

Still, death comes to everyone. At some point, its reality can no longer be avoided. 

Just as with everyone else who has ever lived, that was also true of a friend of Rick’s named Myron. At first, he had been one of the people who told Rick to back off. But then death came knocking on his door. Rick’s words again:

Four years later, Myron was ninety-five. He called me and simply said, "When are you coming?" I flew from California to New York City. Myron was at home in a hospital-style bed, tied to an oxygen tank, being forced to eat and to take medications he didn’t want. 

In classic 8th house fashion, Rick embraced the situation. As we will be seeing, if you have major planetary concentrations in that sector of your chart, there is a high probability that you, like Rick, will someday have front row seats for someone else’s death. While claiming that “facing death is easy for you” would probably be a big exaggeration, there is a good chance that you’re more comfortable in such situations than the majority of your fellow humans. In these next lines, Rick Borutta illustrates that quality:

It didn't take long for my instincts to kick in. I had never done anything like this before. I told the caregivers to stop feeding him unless he asked (he didn't). I told Myron that the only pill I was giving him was for pain, and he stopped fighting the pills. On July 14th, I held his hand and told him all I wanted him to do was rest. He said "thank you." Feeling that he wanted privacy, I left him alone for a few hours. When I returned, he had left his body.

Here’s Rick’s chart. 

The eye is immediately drawn to the incredibly tight triple conjunction of Mercury, Venus, and the Sun, all in the third degree of Virgo and in his 8th house. Pluto is there too, isolated at the end of the sign. 

Virgo is classically the “sign of the servant.” With all that Virgo energy in the 8th house, a totally straightforward translation of the astrological symbolism paints Rick Borutta as a servant in the house of death. There are of course a million other things we might say about his chart, but in the light of his story about Myron, that piece of the puzzle jumps out – he literally served his friend as he lay dying. 

“Intimacy” is an 8th house word too. Usually we intend it in a far more pleasant way, but can there be anything more intimate than being with someone as they navigate the transition from this world to the next? Ask Rick if you want, but we all already know the answer.

Going further into Rick’s 8th house, Mercury suggests talking and listening, while Venus suggests counseling. Rick did all that with Myron. Pluto adds a potentially intrusive or confrontive note, drawing our attention to the way Rick’s early offers to “help his friends have a good death” were rebuffed. A little more Venusian diplomacy would have helped balance his Plutonian directness. Live and learn. 

Before we leave this very brief glimpse into Rick Borutta’s chart, I want to use it to illustrate one more piece of astrological death symbolism: the 8th house naturally has a strong resonance with the 8th sign of the zodiac, Scorpio. Houses and signs are not interchangeable, but they are related. No surprise there – when we think of “scorpions,” thoughts of death soon follow. 

The powerful 8th house focus in this chart is further reinforced by the presence of Rick’s Scorpio Moon on his Midheaven. Broadly, that configuration suggests a healing (Moon) mission in his community (10th house). Consistent with fulfilling that piece of his soul-contract, Rick felt the need to approach his older friends – note the plural – and broach the taboo subject of death. Built into that existential fact is the telltale sense of community that is the eternal fingerprint of the 10th house. 

• While the 8th house trends toward deeper one-on-one intimacy, in the 10th house we encounter a wider world.

Not knowing anything about Rick Borutta except for his astrological chart, I might easily take that Scorpio Moon on the Midheaven as a sign that he could possibly find himself in a career that brought him close to other people’s deaths. He could become a hospice worker, for example. Or perhaps an oncologist or a first responder in disaster situations or an emergency medical technician.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Going beyond Rick’s personal story, what do planets in the 8th house mean in a more general sense? As we have seen, the answer ranges far beyond death, but its specific connection with death is what I want to explore in the rest of this essay. 

Sitting with a client who shows significant 8th house influences, I might say, “This means that you will surely die, but you’ve always known that.” Inevitably, those words elicit a brief giggle. The last phrase contains the real message though – you’ve always known that. Famously, there’s knowing and there’s knowing. With an 8th house concentration, death simply feels more present and real. We might say that the collective denial of death doesn’t have quite such a tight grip on us. Of course, regardless of our natal charts, we all know at least in principle that death awaits us. Still, people tend to hold that truth at arm’s length, compartmentalizing it and not really knowing it in an emotionally integrated way. With an 8th house planet or two, death is simply a more vivid presence. A morbid or gloomy attitude is not the point, although people with an 8th house focus in their charts do tend to be somewhat more “intense” than most of us. They tend to be impatient with superficiality, “as if they knew that our time here on Earth is limited and too precious to waste.” Which it is.

• At the deepest level, an 8th house focus in one’s natal chart reflects an evolutionary intention to let an awareness of death operate as a spiritual guide – a kind of ever-present reminder about what’s truly important in life and what is not.

Again, there is no counselor more pointedly incisive than a constant awareness of how short life is. Born with an energized 8th house, we are likely to experience many “little reminders” of that truth. Some of those reminders are not gentle.

ENTER SYNCHRONICITY

I’m no fortune teller, but there’s a pattern that we often observe in the lives of 8th house people: life-changing deaths often happen close to them, marking major biographical turning points. 

We’re not talking about grandma slipping away at the tender age of ninety-six. That may be poignant and we may love her and miss her, but death in old age rarely shocks anyone. It is accepted as an inevitable reality. Often such a death even comes with a certain feeling of relief: there’s a good chance that grandma’s body was showing evidence of a century of wear and tear. She was probably happy to be shed of it.

• What we see with an 8th house focus is not the unsurprising reality of old people passing away. Instead we are talking about a pattern of unexpected or shocking deaths, often ones that we interpret as tragic. 

Again, emphatically, as a counselling astrologer, I would not want to “predict” these kinds of painful events for a hapless 8th house client. That would be needlessly destructive, sowing seeds of pointless worry that might lead nowhere. Some of my hesitancy is just an expression of the Hippocratic principle, “first do no harm.” Some of it is simply because no such one-dimensional astrological prediction is ever as reliable as, say, the law of gravity – rather, it’s all about as reliable as long range weather forecasts or stock market predictions. Simply said, a common pattern can be very real without being true in every case.

Here are some specific examples of what I am talking about. They’re all based on client experiences I’ve had.

• The early life-changing death of a parent when someone is, say, under the age of twenty-five.

• A close high school or college friend is killed in an automobile accident.

• A sibling dies of a fatal disease while we are all still children living in the family home.

• An older brother dies in a foreign war.

• We lose a child.

I suspect that anyone reading those words understands the emotional dynamite implicit in them. Once again, in my practice I typically avoid saying these things directly to an 8th house client unless they bring the subject up themselves – then I’m happy to talk about it. I even feel ambivalent as I write about such ideas despite the fact that they often prove true. Teaching astrology and practicing it are two different subjects. When I write, I am teaching.

Please know, reader, that if you have 8th house energy in your chart, none of this is certain to happen to you. As you will soon see, we can also be more precise in our thinking about what evolutionary necessities might underlie such patterns, assuming that they do appear in your life. Those kinds of insights can help a client too. 

There are deeper waters here. Let’s dive into them.

WHAT’S BEHIND IT ALL

When we love someone, they become part of us. To some extent, we become identified with them. Their happiness makes us happy. Their sadness puts tears in our eyes. And when they die, something in us dies then too – or rather, goes vicariously through a death experience. That, as we will soon see, is the crux of the matter.

As we have already observed, natal planets in the 8th house represent a soul-intention to let death function as a wise counselor for us. What kind of life do you want to look back on? What is your soul here trying to learn? Where is energy draining from you for no good purpose at all? The point is that emotionally-engaged knowledge of death can help us answer such questions in an authentic way. It can help anyone sort out the signal from the noise in their life. 

• This financial worry that’s keeping me sleepless at 2:00 in the morning – in the light of the brevity of life, is this where I really want to focus my attention? 

• This relationship that’s giving me nothing except a false sense of security – with the clock ticking in the background, do I really want to continue in it? 

• This job, this addiction, this tired psychological complex – how many seconds do I have left in this world and is this how I want to spend them?

There is no teacher like death when it comes to piercing the greatest illusion of them all: the belief that we have time to waste. With 8th house planets, that fierce lesson is what you have signed up to learn. Ultimately this is inner work – work on your consciousness itself. You could go “sit under the Bodhi tree” and do it all purely through a process of reflection and realization. Maybe you’ve already succeeded. There is no reason why you can’t.

What if you don’t? What if you are wasting time looping some dead-end behavior, living as if you’d be here forever and actually did have time to waste?

If that’s the case, then the universe steps in to help. It offers you a little reminder – a wake-up call. Maybe it’s a small, silly thing. One night you eat a little too much pizza and wash it down with bad red wine. The next day, your tummy feels edgy. And angels whisper in your ear, “it might be cancer . . .” 

It’s not cancer, it’s just indigestion – but for a few hours you ponder death. Hypochondria? Maybe – but another word for it in this case is synchronicity. You needed a little reminder of your mortality and you got one, even if you had to invent it. That’s a clause in that 8th house contract you signed with your first breath. If you don’t learn these lessons voluntarily through mindfulness, the universe will give you a little nudge.

Let’s increase the amperage on that same story. Say you are living as if you would be here forever – wasting time, in other words. Your phone beeps and you learn that a dear friend has just suddenly died. Because you love her, right in that moment you go through a little dress rehearsal for your own death. It’s sobering – and also clarifying when it comes to sorting out your true priorities. A bit of helpful urgency enters the equations.

And that’s the point. That is why we often see these patterns of unexpected death in the lives of people with emphasized 8th house energy. In the massive – and frankly awe-inspiring – synchronization of the universe, other people’s deaths come at exactly the right time for us.

A FINAL NOTE

None of this is comfortable to write about. If you have planets in the 8th house like Rick Borutta, there is a good chance that you’ve signed up to study with the fiercest spiritual teacher of them all: death itself. Take heart – everyone’s chart fits their evolutionary needs perfectly. You are ready for this or it wouldn’t be your chart. Get it right and it’s like hitting spiritual Warp Drive. You’ll live with a vivid awareness of how precious each moment of life is. 

On top of that, when death comes it won’t surprise you. You’re already familiar with it. There’s a good chance that you’ve already sat with it once or twice as it welcomed someone you love. Maybe, as that sweet chariot swings low, you’ll even hear your inner voice saying, “hello, old friend. I’ve been expecting you.”

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