exploring your 8th house

How to describe the 8th house?

I imagine the 8th house as this mouth of a cave. You can hear the dripping of water as you approach its entrance. It’s darkness seeping out of it. It’s cold and wet and not exactly inviting. But its mystery does also pull you in. You want to explore the depths of this cave, but you are also unsure. This is your 8th house space.

We all have times in our life when we will walk through his 8th house terrain. When life demands you enter the cave. And according to a timing technique in astrology called profections, everyone experiences an 8th house coded year at the ages of 7, 19, 31, 43, 55, and 67. This means that this year of your life will be themed by your 8th house, and you will be exploring things that are traditionally associated with the 8th house during this time.

So what are aspects of life that are traditionally associated with the 8th house?

The 8th house has an association with Scorpio, and so death/rebirth, transformation, sex, deep intimacy, and merging all fall within its domain. The 8th house does not form any kind of standard aspect with the 1st house (of self), and so it has a hidden quality to it. The light that we find in the 1st house (often see as a kind of dawning of self) cannot reach the 8th house. It is the cold, dark, wet cave of depth. Shadows lurk in the darkness here; some of our most deeply held fears and mental anguish call this space home.

Sounds intense, right? Well, yes. This is the house associated with Scorpio, LOL! But what the Scorpio archetype reminds us is that while yes confronting some of your deepest fears can be intense (and highly, highly uncomfortable)… this is also where your power lies.

I have always been fascinated by the connection between fear and power. I wrote a song in my early twenties where one of the lines went… “Where there is fear, there is power, there is power, oh”. You might have hidden your power away in the depths of the 8th house and piled a lot of fear on top of it. But when I speak of an 8th house kind of power— I am not talking about a kind of power where it’s like a forceful assertion of your willpower or sovereignty. When I speak of 8th house power… I speak about the power in letting go. The power that comes from surrendering.

You find your power in the 8th house by confronting your darkest demons and realizing that you do not need to give them so much power. That you can surrender your fears and become anew. That transformation is possible for those of us brave enough to practice metaphorical death.

And… physical death can also be found here in the realm of the 8th house. Charlie Kirk was in an 8th house profected year when he was killed (there were a bunch of other signs in his solar return chart for that year that pointed to his assassination, so do not think that you will die if you go through an 8th house profected year! For the vast majority of people it is a metaphorical death, not a literal one).

Death is something we avoid as a society currently, and in modern society, there is a lot of fear around death. From a spiritual perspective, death is not something you need to fear. It is simply a doorway into another realm. An exit that is final for your physical self but just a next step for your eternal self. And in this way, the 8th house is a bridge between the worlds: the physical and the energetic. Birth can also be found here as another portal between the worlds where souls walk into flesh. The 8th house is traditionally seen as a place where we merge. Sex and deep intimacy is found here. There is this blurring of the lines and boundaries that happens here. Whether that is between bodies or between worlds.

If the 2nd house is where we find our individuality, autonomy, and sense of self-worth, the 8th house is where we are called to collaborate, merge, and lose ourselves in the other. If the 2nd house is where we find your individual relationship to resources and money, the 8th house is where we find how you relate to other people’s money, inheritances, and the merging of resources.

If you have a lot of 8th house placements or the ruler of your 8th house is strong or pronounced in your chart, you have a certain depth to you that cannot be ignored. You might find yourself drawn to the occult aspects of life, and you might experience death & rebirth cycles throughout your lifetime.

You are likely quite intuitive, psychic, and attuned to the realms of spirit. You might struggle with mental health and have experienced significant trauma, and you likely have to go on a deep journey into yourself through shadow work and psychological and spiritual processes to heal and transform. You are a natural healer and have an affinity for facing your mortality and undergoing profound change. There is no love and light spirituality found in the 8th house. The spirituality that is found here is forged from descending into the very depths of the human experience and bringing back that wisdom.

My personal reflections navigating my most recent 8th house profected year:

The 8th house does not fuck around. 31 was one of the most challenging years of my life, as I was forced to confront a lot of deeply seated fears that seemed to come out of nowhere in my psyche.

I “lost myself” to these fears for about half of the year; becoming the fear fully and watching my world become smaller and smaller as a result. Fear of death was a big one. It wasn’t until I surrendered to this process, stopped resisting it, and started actually doing the deeper healing work that was being asked of me (unearthing very deep old childhood traumas) that I began to experience the rebirth. At the end of my 31st year, I was shaken. But I felt strong. Like I could live through fucking anything if I could live through that.

To note: I also experienced a deepening of intimacy with myself and with my new-ish partner during this time as well. It is something to walk through the fire with someone else. It deepens you and creates a kind of intimacy that is real and earned.

How this shows up for you will depend on the exact aspects in your natal promise and how strengthened or challenged these are in your chart.

If you are curious to explore your 8th house or if you are in an 8th house year and want to know more about what this year will hold for you, book a Signature Reading with me, and we can explore your questions from a psychic AND astrological perspective.