When I was living in Brussels, the seat of the European Commission (akin to the central government of Europe), I got to know some of the prostitutes there. Belgium is close to the Netherlands, and prostitution, though technically illegal, is practiced in the open. I learned that the best hookers work early in the morning, at around 7am or earlier, because that’s when the politicians can see them. The guys leave for work early, stop in the red light district, then head in to serve in various capacities of government officialdom.
Every hooker, every astrologer, and every therapist has at least one thing in common: Doing these particular jobs, you meet people in all capacities of life, at all levels of worldly power and economic status, from the destitute to those sitting on millions or billions. You learn quickly that people all have the same basic needs, the same fears, and the same basic problems.
So it should not really surprise us that Eliot Spitzer, the former crusading state attorney general and now former governor of New York, should want or need to consult a prostitute, or that he allegedly did so regularly. Must we act like he strangled a puppy for fun, or dined on human flesh?
Well, perhaps on forbidden fruit. There are few people in Western society more verboten than prostitutes; nobody, except maybe a convicted murderer, would you be less inclined to bring home to your parents and introduce by their proper profession.
Everyone loves a good sex scandal. Heck, I have even come back to work during a supposed week off to write about one.
Most people who take umbrage with the governor’s alleged choices claim do so on the basis of hypocrisy. As one sworn to uphold the law, he should not break it; it would seem that he did both. (He spent much of 2004 busting prostitution businesses in New York City.) However, as attorney general, he was obliged to enforce the law; as a human being, he needs to have sex. He was in a double bind; this is often the case where people are expected to prosecute on the basis of subjective morality. We might ask where the real problem resides.
It is difficult to discern who exactly is the victim in a crime involving someone paying thousands of dollars for an hour of sex. This was not sex tourism or human slavery; it was ordinary high-end prostitution. If human trafficking or child prostitution is really the issue behind the issue, what were the feds doing going after call girls and their customers?
In a word, the answer is politics. On March 12, Truthout republished a February 14 op-ed that Governor Spitzer had written for the Washington Post. Interestingly—based mainly on the astrology, which we’ll come to in a moment—Spitzer went after the Bush family on the issue of banking and the mortgage/credit crisis. In that article, he wrote, “Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.”
He continued, “In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC [Office of the Comptroller of Currency, obscure federal bank regulators] invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government’s actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.”
Many people in high positions go to prostitutes. It is rare that we ever hear about it. Though you might, in an instance of political payback.
I read this week that this bust was considered so sensitive, federal agents had to go directly to the United States attorney general for approval. This would be the esteemed office so recently held by Alberto Gonzalez, the place where it’s generally accepted that waterboarding is not torture. Hypocrisy exists on many levels. Over the weekend of March 8 through 9, George Bush vetoed a law that would have banned the use of waterboarding by the CIA. Wednesday, the governor of New York announced his resignation because he was caught having sex. Or rather, sex with a prostitute. Society has a long tradition of projecting its shadow onto sex in general and prostitution in particular.
Let’s consider the issues, in total: sex, money, power, and control over people’s lives. The place you find all that material is, conveniently, in one place: the eighth house of astrology. Let’s take a look at the chart for Spitzer’s March 10 news conference, where the issue first came out. This chart has an impressive cluster of planets in the eighth house, one of which is Chiron.
Chiron is a place of hyper focus in a chart, and also a place of potential injury. There can be a long-term struggle any time you see Chiron somewhere, and we will invariably seek healing there, by hook or by crook. Chiron will often point you to the real issue.
Because the Earth is always turning, in any chart, a house can be associated with any sign, and in this chart the eighth is connected to Aquarius—the sign of “all of us here.”
To put it mildly, Chiron in Aquarius in the eighth house is the personal manifestation of a collective sexual wound. And that wound involves hypocrisy. Not the hypocrisy of being the avenger of the sex trade and then seeking some comfort or relief there; rather, the comfortable hypocrisy of the way that sex, sexual power, and the entire sexual discussion are transacted throughout American society.
Last month’s developments have nothing at all to do with the governor’s sexual habits, whether they were legal or who paid for them. Rather, it is all about how we react to them. By that, I mean anyone who found the events anything other than heartbreaking or a reflection of cultural sickness; anyone who pointed a finger; anyone who judged him, even for being stupid and/or unable to cover his ass sufficiently to not get caught. Of course, it’s difficult when your phone is wiretapped and nearly everyone around you in politics is a zombie who recoils at the mere notion of human pleasure.
I find Spitzer’s apparent, and understandable, hypocrisy much more bearable than, for example, knowing that all the people who did their best to shoot him down, including the journalists writing about the story, the publishers profiting from it, the politicians on the “other side of the fence,” and the cops involved in the bust—each and every one of them—has their own sexual secrets, their own shadow side, their own injuries that need attending every bit as much as Spitzer’s do. How many, to raise an obvious example, have been to a prostitute?
We know, or at least believe, that when “he who has no sin casts the first stone,” nobody throws a single one. It is, however, time we begin questioning the notion of sin.
In the wake of a major sex scandal, these are the questions we need to be asking ourselves. Running in the background of all eighth-house themes is one big theme—death. When we see a power struggle like this, it’s about death, and death is something that, sooner or later, every living thing must face. The eighth house is the great equalizer.
Think of the eighth house at its best as where we dance with inevitability. Everything that we experience in the eighth is going to happen—sex will happen; if we are due to inherit money, the person eventually will die; we will eventually die; if we are having sex, the orgasm (if we are open to change) will eventually come. Typically, the eighth becomes a dance of death: ego death; flirtation with orgasm and desire (often secret desire); pregnancy; the death of one’s reputation; actual physical death.
Part of the eighth is the quest to be free of the struggles of these dramas and embrace self-acceptance in the face of others. Part of self-acceptance is being aware that all living things die; we die; and relationships, as part of the changing world, will invariably change.
Mortality, taking any one of the forms of these dramas, is one of the most crucial eighth-house issues we can address if we want to be healthy, balanced people and have up-front relations with others. In that curious eighth-house way, it is one of the topics we keep from ourselves, and stuff under the surface. Often, we stuff it below the surface of our relationships as well. It then arises as neurosis (playing dead games and resistance to change), scandal, suppressed orgasm, or power struggles. Indeed, it is often the fear of death and the fear of being alone (a kind of fear of death) that leads us to plunge into eighth-house bonding unconsciously, and get ourselves stuck there.
If we transpose this onto sex, we often come up with some form of power struggle or scandal. Outside of public life, it usually emerges as jealousy. This emotion is an extreme attachment coupled with resistance to change, projected onto sex and/or a sexual partner. Jealousy is a kind of dance with death, and it can certainly kill a relationship. Indeed, often it is evidence that a relationship is already dead, locked into a neurotic pattern that can only change when the partnership passes through the crucible of the eighth house and transforms into some other form. One way or another, the people in the couple must let go—of or into their love for one another, to their mutual independence, to their need to be apart, or to some combination. But let go we must, if we want to move on with our lives.
This necessarily involves grieving, something that our culture does not sanction much less encourage. Consider that after September 11, there was no national time of mourning. We were told by our government to go out to dinner to stimulate the economy. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy less than 50 years ago, the nation shut down, black, for three days.
To successfully pass through the eighth house, people must either pay off the debts they have to one another, walk away, or forgive them entirely. Forgiveness is a huge theme here: of the transience of life; of ourselves for changing and necessarily moving away from, or betraying, others as a result; for their experiencing these things in relationship to us; and ultimately forgiveness of the fact that even if a partnership is not separated by other factors, usually one partner will die first and, in so doing, demand that the other let go of the relationship.
In sum, the entire mystery of existence (and how we enter and exit existence), as we struggle with it and embrace it in ecstasy—consciously, and not in our dreams; in the presence of another; and in the face of death—comes home to the eighth house.
The eighth contains the thing that we fear the most, be it death, pregnancy, surrender, intimacy, separation or isolation. The profound sense of obligation that we feel to others, and the sense of a debt that we cannot pay, can, and often are, abused. The eighth is a place where total trust is necessary and extremely rare to find. It is the place where we must embrace what we want but cannot have. It is that zone of consciousness where we must relate to ourselves and to the other simultaneously; that perfect contradiction.
When you think of the ways that people have the most power over one another—through giving or withholding sexual gratification, through sexual secrets, and through the giving and withholding of resources, you can see the kinds of struggles that emerge when we enter this house.
There are remedies to these struggles. They include embracing mortality and therefore the process of change, being absolutely honest, and having a gentle relationship to obligation. To truly be free of eighth house struggles, we need to master the material of the second house, which is about being reasonably self-sufficient when it comes to sex, money and our values. Having a strong relationship to the second house includes having this seemingly elusive thing called good self-esteem, which actually means self-awareness, respect for one’s values, and giving oneself the means to express one’s actual values in tangible ways.
When you’re the governor of New York State, apparently that’s not so easy. What about for you?
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This article appears in April 2008.
