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.
