I like to call the eighth house What We Owe to Each Other. Before you ask, yes, I was totally inspired by the show The Good Place and no, I have not read the book (yet). The eighth house is often seen as the house of "other". Other people's resources, taxes, inheritance, death, debt, and the like. But I want to look at the eighth house by examining its relationship to its neighboring houses, so that we can get a full view of what the eighth house actually entails.
Let's take an honest look at the houses here. Each astrological house blends into the next. They both remind us of the house that came before it, and the house that will come after it. In this first instance, the seventh house comes before the eighth house. The seventh house represents marriage, open partnerships, and relationships to others. The eighth house shows us what it's like, sometimes very intimately, to intertwine our lives with other people. Some even consider the eighth house to be the house of marriage, not the seventh house.
But I digress. My point is, when we come to the intersection (or rather, overlap) of the seventh house and the eighth house, we have to acknowledge our responsibility to one another. I think of this post that I saw years ago and had scour the internet for, just for this blog.
The eighth house shows the depth and intimacy of our relationships, as well as how far we are willing to go for and with the people in our lives. It shows us how we can create a path forward. It shows that our relationships with others take real, hard, tough, work.
In these moments, we have to think about what we owe to one another in our relationships. Is it love? The ability and willingness to listen? The willingness to sit with our loved ones in their darkest moments, in their grief? The eighth house shows us pain, sure. But it also shows us another thing - the depth of our love. It shows us how we are willing to burn our ships to forge a life with one another - consequences be damned.
The eighth house exhibits how love, grief, and death, can transform us. All of the topics of the eighth house are combined and fused together. It shows us grief, death, and rebirth. That is not something I want to shy away from. Death is something that impacts us all. But to quote Vision from WandaVision,
But what is grief, if not love persevering?
The eighth house shows us how, when all else has been stripped away, what do we have, if not our relationships? If not love? It shows us how love and death are so fundamentally a part of the human experience, that we base our entire lives, our thought patterns, and our beliefs, around these things. We see how these things actively impact our lives. We see how others react to death, and grief, and how they carry it on their shoulders everyday.
We also know how heavy of a burden that can be to carry. The eighth house shows our responsibilities to one another, and how we can show care and love for one another. We see the depths of our relationships in the eighth house, and how we can get strengthen our relationships through the house's sign.
We see just how much it takes to care for and love one another. We are faced with ourselves, stripped to the core, left with nothing, and have to ask ourselves what it is that really matters in our life.
We owe it to our partners to try. We owe it to our friends to be there for them. We owe it to ourselves to form deep, committed, relationships. (Note: This does not just mean romantic relationships.)
And I think this shows us the crux of the ninth house as well. What we believe about ourselves, and ourselves in relationships, has a huge impact on how we see the world. Our beliefs and thoughts shape reality, and the third and ninth house polarity showcases this greatly. I'm reminded of this scene of Disney's Meet The Robinsons as a perfect point (the clip is only like six seconds long, I promise!)
Credit to Hello Hello on Youtube
So, if the seventh and eighth houses show us our relationships, what matters, and how to strengthen them, the eighth and ninth houses show us how these relationships affect our worldview. And our worldview has a great impact on not just us, but on others. If we are a bit prickly (as my Scorpio rising and I oh so need to work on!) that, in turn, impacts how we interact with and view others. Our interactions with others serve as a kind of feedback loop, which impacts how we see ourselves. Everything in life, just as astrology, is interconnected. And isn't that the beauty of it all?
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The alternate art of this post.
