8th house

19,00  / 1 hour 15 Minutes

Transforming Lilith

Duration: 1 hour 15 minutes

The Black Moon is all the rage at the moment and many astrologers dig into this fascinating topic, trying to make sense of Lilith, the dark side of the moon, which is a point, not a planet.  In my chart I have her directly on my MC, so she must be of some significance to me, I reckon. The problem is, I don’t know in what way. I have read over a dozen books about Lilith, but unfortunately still haven’t quite gotten my head around her. It feels frustrating and I don’t think it does her justice to just boil her essence down to ’emancipation’. So, I did my own research, in order to make the ancient Lilith myths usable for modern chart interpretation. The kick off is easy enough. Lilith was the first wife of Adam, before the much more famous and familiar Eve. The two were very different, almost like the proverbial good and bad sisters in a fairytale.

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Description

8th house

Duration: 1 hour 

This is the recording of a lecture I gave at the 2021 conference of the Astrological Association of Great Britain 

Pandora’s Box

In the myth, after Prometheus stole fire from the gods, Zeus, the king of gods, took revenge by presenting the beautiful Pandora to Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus. She carried with her a mysterious box, which she was forbidden to open. But she was too curious to obey almighty Zeus and took a peek. This proved to be fatal. The box emptied its evil contents into the world. From that moment on the hitherto innocent world was exposed to vice, sickness and death. However, at the bottom of the box, there was one single precious thing left behind: hope.

The Mysterious Eighth House

This story exemplifies the main 8 steps in and out of the core properties of the 8th house:

• Mystery
• Taboo
• Temptation
• Self-conquest
• Shadow
• Crisis
• Guilt
• Transformation

By looking for the deeply-buried truth of the 8th house we have to face our shadow. Without this we can never be whole. This confrontation is essential and absolutely necessary, so it requires a lot of courage. We simply need to bite the bullet, because this journey can never be easy. Whatever awaits us here, it is not nice, clean or pretty, but rather brings out traces of bitterness, shame or rancour. This might be a dirty, ugly side of us which we would normally try to suppress and hide both from the world and from ourselves. The smell which comes out of Pandora’s box is foul and yet enticing. These are the secret vaults of our subconscious. Before there is hope for the future, we must deal with unfinished business. It is at the very bottom of the box that the treasure lies.

An 360° analysis

The 8th house in the chart is a place includes sensible issues like death, debts, possessiveness, entanglements, sexuality and boundary crossings. In this lecture I am linking the somewhat fatalistic Hellenistic view of ‘decent into the underworld’ with more modern psychological interpretations of shadow work, transformation and resilience. The deeper one digs, the more complex this house becomes, and ancient and modern approaches complement each other rather than contradict themselves.