Chapters

On the Soul's Terms

#123 | The Twelfth House | Containing Multitudes

Mar 13, 2026 Episode 123

Chris Skidmore

The 12th and final house of astrology is often given a bad wrap. It's considered the house of hidden enemies and of our own undoing. It rules over places we'd rather not be such as prisons, hospitals and asylums.

And yet, deep in this oceanic place in our charts we may meet the gods themselves. Figures from the collective unconscious who shape shift and morph, reveal and conceal themselves into and out of our minds.

It's a place that has associations with Neptune, Jupiter and Pisces; the deepest places of the ocean where our surface world probes can't reach. A place where Saturn, brooding and moody as he is, is in his Joy. Yes, that's right, Saturn has a joyful place.

In order to enter this house we need to leave our conscious tools at the door. We need to journey away from the known world on a wonderful sea journey with fantastic companions.

Hercules' 12th labour, Ariadne abandoned on Naxos and Hephaestus, the wounded goldsmith whose workshop is in a cave under the sea, will help us get a better feel for this place. Help us take a good look around and see what it is that we might be missing about this much maligned house, and what secret treasures it might be already, right now, shaping and re-shaping in the forge.

Podcast Cover: "Mercury Confiding the Infant Bacchus to the Nymphs of Nysa" by François Boucher.