Today, we move through the range of mystery and liminality that is the 12th house with astrologer Bear Ryver. Bear shares his perspectives on the questions and topics of the 12th house and guides us towards ways we can bring more consideration, care and space for its significations in our lives.
Bear Ryver is a professional astrologer helping his clients hone strategies for grounded growth and embodied empowerment by bringing them back to the BASICS. Winner of OPA’s Most Promising Astrologer in 2018, Bear has lectured at conferences like NORWAC and ISAR. He holds certifications in Hellenistic, Electional, and Horary astrology, and specializes in Intersectional Astrology. He was a teacher for the Portland School of Astrology, and has volunteered as a mentor for AFAN. When he’s not talking stars or pulling cards, you can find him climbing rocks and playing guitar.
we discuss —
LINKS
If you enjoyed the episode, check out —
Episode on the 2nd House w— Rob Bailey
Episode on the 6th House w— Michael J Morris
More about our guest —
Stay Connected —
Subscribe to the home—body podcast wherever you get your listens.
This podcast is produced by Softer Sounds. ✨
Today, we move through the range of mystery and liminality that is the 12th house with astrologer Bear Ryver. Bear shares his perspectives on the questions and topics of the 12th house and guides us towards ways we can bring more consideration, care and space for its significations in our lives.
Bear Ryver is a professional astrologer helping his clients hone strategies for grounded growth and embodied empowerment by bringing them back to the BASICS. Winner of OPA’s Most Promising Astrologer in 2018, Bear has lectured at conferences like NORWAC and ISAR. He holds certifications in Hellenistic, Electional, and Horary astrology, and specializes in Intersectional Astrology. He was a teacher for the Portland School of Astrology, and has volunteered as a mentor for AFAN. When he’s not talking stars or pulling cards, you can find him climbing rocks and playing guitar.
we discuss —
LINKS
If you enjoyed the episode, check out —
Episode on the 2nd House w— Rob Bailey
Episode on the 6th House w— Michael J Morris
More about our guest —
Stay Connected —
Subscribe to the home—body podcast wherever you get your listens.
This podcast is produced by Softer Sounds. ✨
Music. Welcome to the Homebody Podcast. My name is Mary Grace, and here we explore big questions in embodied ways. These conversations intersect the mystical, the practical, and the artful, bridging a range of topics such as astrology, creative practices, what healing can look like, and cultivating deep love and care for the more-than-human world. We not only want to live better, but live more fully, with more connection, courage, and creativity in our our day-to-day lives and work. And this podcast asks what are the ways we can do, that? We hope to enliven you and inspire you towards possible regenerative futures and we hope to encourage you so together we can become dynamic agents of beauty, fully awake, fully alive to all that life has for us. We want to be here for ourselves and for one another with more grace while making room for for curiosity, sensitivity, hope, and joy. If you enjoyed today's episode, please take a few moments to share it with someone else. Thank you so much for listening. Music. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you'll know that we've been doing a little spread out mini-series this year in which we look at the dark houses in astrology. And these, are the second, sixth, eighth, and twelfth houses. And today, this episode, we are on our final installment in this series, which is the twelfth house. And joining us today to talk about the twelfth house is astrologer Bear River. Bear is a professional astrologer helping his clients hone strategies for grounded growth and embodied empowerment by bringing them back to the basics. Winner of OPA's Most Promising Astrologer in 2018, Behr is lectured at conferences like NORWAC and ISAR. He holds certifications in Hellenistic, Electional, and Horiary Astrology and specializes in Intersectional Astrology. He was a teacher for the Portland School of Astrology and has volunteered as a mentor for AFAN. When he's not talking stars or pulling cards, you can find him climbing rocks and playing guitar. We try to get into some of the practical and everyday ways that we contend and encounter the 12th house while also trying to stay honest about the kinds of topics that we tend to find in this house through the thousands of years of accumulated data, pouring through some of the nuances and the paradoxes and the layers of meaning that we can find in this house. One of the reasons that we wanted to go through and make a series like this in the first place is that the dark houses frequently come up in sessions and in meetups and discussion topics because, you know, they tend to be houses that contain topics or areas of life that we as humans tend to do a lot of grappling with. And Behr shares his perspectives on the range of the 12th house topics, different ways we can relate to them and that can add value to our life as a whole. And we'll also share some chart examples of folks with notable 12th house placements to really help ground the material, more tangible stories, and we hope that you enjoy this deep dive. If you do, please take a couple seconds right now to pause, share with someone who you also think would enjoy it, and then when you're ready, let's dive into the 12th house with Bear River. Music. I usually like to kick off conversations with guests by giving them space to introduce themselves. And I like to frame the question with, how would you like us to know you today? What's feeling most forward about who you are and how you're showing up and maybe or maybe not in relationship to what we're talking about today. Do you mind starting us off that way? Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Bear River. I use he, him pronouns. And probably the most relevant things in today, I know you're gonna read an intro says that I play a guitar and climb rocks. And presently, I'm not doing either of those things because of an arm injury. We'll work that into the 12th house because it's pretty prudent. But a few other things that might help your listeners kind of understand where I'm coming from. I've been a professional astrologer for five years now, but I've been studying astrology since I was in my teens, about 20 years or a few more. And I came into astrology or my earnest interest in studying astrology started because I had converted to Buddhism and I had been wondering how it is that reincarnation could work. If we come here in order to experience circumstances that will allow our past lives to come into being, then what mechanism would allow that to happen? And I thought back then, astrology seems like a way that that would make sense, not knowing anything about electional. Much later, it seems like, oh, maybe our birth charts or elections for our karma, which is actually relevant to the 12th house, and we'll get to that a little bit later. At the same time as a teenager, I was really involved in queer youth activism and remained so into my early college years. And so, grassroots community organizing, especially the pre-social media and pre-cellphones variety is part of where I come from. And I bring that very much into my astrology. Some of your audience may know me from my intersectional astrology work. And that's something that's really important to me. And I think you've impressed repeatedly that astrology is only a complete and truthful language if it has ways to describe some of the most difficult experiences in life or all of the difficult experiences in life. And the 12th house is definitely that place I happen to be in a 12th house year right now, which is why this. Disabling arm injury that has taken away my ability to enjoy my pleasurable acts of creativity, music-making fifth house topics, the 12th is the eighth from the fifth. We'll unpack that. It's kind of fitting that I can't do my recreational or musical loves during this 12th house year and that there's this experience with pain that is really driving home the lessons of the 12th house. I think that's a good place to start. BT Yeah, I think all of that makes a lot of sense. And like we were talking pre-recording and even yesterday that astrology has a way of inviting us to embody the things that we're learning more about. So I'm sure that will come into what we're going to talk about today as well. CB. Absolutely. It's, I think, interesting given that the 12th house is a house, maybe I won't get too far ahead of myself, but you kind of lead us to start off the structure. But there is something very interesting about the 12th house and its relationship to bringing things into being just as much as it undoes things. BT. Eliminal quality, if you will. CB. Yeah. BT. Do you want to sort of set us up with some of the, I think some of the ways that have been helpful in unpacking these dark houses is sort of just laying a theoretical or even a geometrical conversation about how we're going to be arriving at some of the topics and significations for the houses. Do you mind setting us up with some of these sort of foundational considerations as we move into? CB. Deeper in the conversation. CB. Absolutely. I will try to, as we spoke about before, try to do justice to this conversation. Michael J. Morris really just laid out the entire fundamental rationale of astrology in such a beautiful, concise, articulate way. I would really just implore your listeners to check out that episode with them if they haven't yet. But essentially, the 12th house, if we think about the motion of the Sun, the 12th house is the place where the Sun crests the horizon or the hills in your local environment if they're not too tall. And so, the 12th house is the place that is just above the horizon. It rises before the Ascendant, which is really important for some of the significations, especially the ones that have to do with the time before birth or the experience of labor. The 12th house also pulls some of its significations from some astronomical or some observational astronomy phenomena that occur in the 12th house. By night, stars that rise in the 12th house don't appear to be their true color or magnitude. And so, there's these qualities of things aren't as they seem, there's distortions. But probably the example that most people would be. Familiar with in their regular lives is seeing the Moon rise over something when the Moon is really close to the eastern horizon or the western as well. But when the Moon is rising, and since. That's what we're talking about with the 12th house, when the Moon rises into the 12th house. The Moon appears so much bigger than it actually is. And then once the Moon moves about into the 11th, you're like, oh, cool, true size, true color. Everything is as it is once again. And so I think, for me at least, seeing that visually night after night. That underlying basis for the 12th house being a place where we can't see things accurately, particularly as somebody who grew up on the West Coast and grew up in the foothills of the Cascades, really big mountains. Most of my childhood, I couldn't see anything in the 12th house to begin with. And anybody who's been really, really far north, like close to the Arctic Circle, then you will have noticed this phenomenon when the Sun is in the second or the first house and has yet to rise, the entire 12th house looks all sorts of colors. And we get it down here in, quote, more temperate latitudes with any sunrise, but it's not quite the same as when you're in those more extreme latitudes. So I think that starts us off. There's some other interesting things that happen when we consider the geometry, which if we think geometry and aspects, they're really pointing to the same fundamental things. So, when we talk about a six-sided shape, which is. Most of us won't say hexagon, but trine and triangles are the ones that are probably going to be most familiar to people. If we're thinking about, well, what triangle does the 12th house make. The 12th house has a relationship with the 8th and the 4th where they form a trine. If you think about the Thema Mundi, it might be a little bit easier for visual folks where we've got Cancer rising and we're talking about the air trigon or the air triangle. We've got Gemini in the 12th house in that instance in the Thema Mundi, and then we would have Libra in the fourth and Aquarius in the eighth. So that triangular relationship with the lower angle. The underground pivot and the succedent of the setting angular triad. Maybe this is a bit of a complicated way to explain it, but thinking about the fact that the 12th house is related to two different houses that are associated with darkness or death or the loss of power or loss of light in different ways with the place that represents midnight, the place where the sun has the least amount of light. And then the eighth house, the place where the sun is beginning to set, anybody who grew up in the olden days where there weren't devices to keep you entertained might remember being told, you come home by such and such a time. And it was basically when the sun hit the eighth house, that's when it's time to be home or be able to hear someone yell your name. BT. I love that there when you're supposed to be home, I was like, oh, yeah, that was the thing when you couldn't just text your parents that we may be the last generation to remember what that But, um, I think that's a really good framing and also just, you know, a way of connecting them intrinsically to some of these other topics and other houses that are sort of affiliated with or adjacent to some of the things that we're going to talk about with the 12th. And you know, in the eighth house episode and the sixth house episode, we did talk a little bit about, you know, with so listeners who've already listened to that will be familiar with just like, you know, the reason we're calling it a dark house is related to some things that you're talking about here, just the way that how we're perceiving the light and how our relationship to light at that time is going to give us some sort of distorted sense of how close or how far we are to things, or it's messing with our perspective. And then also. The darkness is just from the way that they're related to the Ascendant as well and how it's not necessarily receiving the light or the life from that. Do you want to say anything else about that sort of positionality before we dive any more in. CB Yeah. So the aversion to the Ascendant is quite important. There's essentially three things we can stack on top of each other. There's being cadent, and we'll get to that. That's the 12th, 3rd, 6th, and 9th. All of them are cadent houses. But being averse to the Ascendant is what makes the 12th house dark. So it's dark and cadent. The 6th house is the other house that's both dark and Caden, and we'll get to why they're both the ones that we're generally most afraid of topically speaking. Being in aversion to the Ascendant, the best way that I can think of it that doesn't. Is that it's something that is just beyond our perception or awareness. If we think with a visual metaphor, then it's something, and I'm using my hands for people who are listening, and one of my hands is just behind my ear where it's beyond peripheral vision. I actually have to turn my head to be able to see it. Another way of thinking about that is something that's just beyond being able to hear if we want to use an auditory metaphor. I like the thought of something that's just on the tip of the tongue, can't quite bring it into being able to be spoken, which really gets to this idea that the 12th house is part of the angular triad of the East where the Sun rises and that holds the Ascendant. And so, we'd think of that as being very us. But it's the part of us that we have the least amount of access to in some ways. Although you also can't get to the second house. But that's a different story that you've got somebody else talking about. In the 12th house, because we've got that quality of not being able to see the Ascendant, there's a lot of ways in which the significations of the 12th house have this way of referring to undoing either the body, the physical representation or the physical signification of the Ascendant or undoing some aspects of the self. And already I said one of the key ways that a lot of people learn the 12th house is a place of self-undoing. And that's part of the basic fundamental metaphor of the cadent places that it's the undoing of that triad or the place where that triad starts to dissolve. BT. Yeah, and I feel like the way that. You know, there's ways that the overculture is a little uncomfortable with dissolution in general as a conversation, but then also just the way that that transformatively or alchemically, that's a super important process. And to think also of Saturn rejoicing in this house that is sort of, I guess, like positioned really well to help us with those things, I find to be really, pertinent and really, yeah, that Saturn is here to really like sort of help us position ourselves in such a way to undergo a process of dissolution or transformation or. However you want to call it. Yeah, because we were prepping before we started recording. We're talking a little bit about the time that I worked for Chani and her encouraging me to find, the most everyday mundane way of describing the 12th house. What do you say to somebody who's having a 12th house transit that isn't going to invite or instill unnecessary fear, that's honest, that's not ableist, and that doesn't presume a certain spiritual practice. To your point, not everybody is in a spiritual practice of dissolution. Well, everybody has experiences of seclusion or that Monica song from back in the 90s, just one of them days, I wanna be all alone. That's you know, and you're telling folks don't take it personal or thinking about, you know, whenever you might say to somebody, hey, I'm just gonna go off to insert that your favorite place alone and take some time to myself. You just spoke the 12th house out loud. There's something about the 12th house also that seems to undo a train of thought if you're not careful. So I should be mindful about that. The other ways of getting into the 12th house and especially I think about right now, my experience of not being able to play guitar, not being able to rock climb or do a a lot of the fifth house activities that I normally would. It's also a place where you can experience some of the isolation facilitates the creative process in some ways. And so, practically speaking with clients, I find people who are visual artists, that oftentimes their 12th house experiences look like being isolated in a museum or being alone in their artist studio or with folks who are researchers and academics, it's the time in in the library or in the basement or in the stacks or in the writer's cave is another common one. Granted, in the ancient tradition, there's a flip side to those metaphors and they're usually not very pleasant flip sides, but I think it speaks to what was most pressing and concerning and maybe more challenging to ask to control or mitigate or felt like more outside of a person's control. And that is another, I think, less ominous sounding, although many of us resist things that are beyond our control. It's a less ominous and more accessible way of thinking about some of the qualities of the 12th house. It's things that are just beyond our control, just beyond our perception, but being isolated or secluded or forced to sit with the discomfort of those things rather than being able to easily discharge or divert our attention away does forge a stronger character, even though there's some problems with that. That's a perspective that can be easily problematized, although I think it's also necessary in some ways and that's part of what the Caden houses speak to. BT. Yeah, something that came up when we were talking about the sixth house and it's something that I experience in client sessions when I'm listening to people and we're kind of dealing with these topics or they're on their personal level, it's a sense that this, it's like these topics are sort of taking me away from my life, or they're taking me away from my purpose, or it feels like it's detracting from me. Whatever forward motion feels like for them. And I feel like that can be a really tangible way that the Caden houses sometimes show up. There's like a, it's like a siphoning off or like a pulling away, or like, again, if we're to turn, like you had the, your hand behind your ear, if I'm going to turn and look behind me, then even when we're driving a car, then I can't see where I'm going anymore, which can, there's a sort of competing interest that can be there. And while we can have really like valuable and creative and amazing experiences. That involve the 12th house or relate or coincide with it. It can also just be, it can feel like we're sort of multitasking our vision in a way that can be a challenge. And I think it's something that we get better with potentially as we get older, which could be another Saturn relations, is that we get better at holding the dark and the light. We get better at being like, yeah, life is full of grief and life is full of joy and beauty. It's the beauty and the terror, like those things that we, I think when we're younger, we may have a harder time sort of getting used to holding those sort of dual perspectives or those multitasking vision. I don't know if you agree with that. CB Yeah, yeah. I think, I mean, I'm a person who has six of the seven traditional planets in a dark house. And so, I had some very early childhood experiences with the dark and the unpleasant. And so, to me, it just seems natural and normal and no different than you go to sleep at night. You go to sleep at night and your beloved pet will die eventually. And I say it with that same level of neutrality because that's just life. That said, if we unpack those fundamental building blocks, if we're talking about, cadent houses being places where we toil away with not very much effect or not very much to show for it, they're busy houses. If we shift our focus from natal astrology to electional astrology, some folks might make the connection that in electional astrology, if the malefics are configured to something that you want to be able to make use of in the sky, then you try to stick them in a cadent house because at least they're quote, busy doing something else. And so, thinking of the cadent houses as busy houses where we toil away, where we exert a lot of effort. Relative to our quote, payoff, although that's kind of a capitalistic way of looking at things. That's fundamentally part of the package of the 12th house. We can add into that the darkness, that quality of the places that are dark to the Ascendant. Planets there don't shine their light to the Ascendant, nor do they receive the light from the Ascendant. So there's something about there being a disconnect from the life force or vitality, which potentially in some particular context could be made useful or constructive, but it's still going to typically be at the expense of that person. The 6th house is opposite from the 12th, but the entire picture is part of what builds the set of significations. And if we think about this, and this is something that Michael spoke to in the episode on the 6th, the 6th house is a place where there is a lot of toil, a lot of effort. And we see quite a few different kind of caretaking professions where there's a lot of labor exerted and or we see some folks who work in labor or labor organizing. But one of the big. Chief concerns or things that I'm going to be talking to my clients about with the sixth house is burnout, especially if there's a planet that's strongly dignified in the sixth. Then I'm like, cool, you're doing the sixth really hard and it's going to be at your expense. So how do we manage your propensity to do too much sixth house? Same for the twelfth. Okay, you're going to isolate yourself a lot, so how do we facilitate the high levels of isolation that are built into your chart in a way where that isolation can have the greatest likelihood of being beneficial or pleasurable or at least like a harm reduction strategy for it. Music. I feel like something that comes up a lot when talking about the 12th, and even kind of sort of pinging off some of the things you were talking about in regards to its position is that it has a more marginal position. It's really, it's not, at the very least, it's not mainstream. I feel like in the way that we would say with some of these more like angular or direct or like easily understood or easily positioned things, like, you know, it's easy. One of the top things that people ask you about when you meet them, it's like, what do you do for work? Where'd you come from? You know, all these things. Are you married or whatever the thing is? And no one's being like, are you undergoing a dark night of the soul? What do you think about God? What do you think? Like, these are not the things that sort of like come more forward, right? So they're sort of like more marginal things or marginal experiences. And even you were using the word artists, like a lot of times, like, you know, artists are sort of, they're not, they're orienting more towards like, where are the intersections of things? And we only really know where that is if we're standing on the edges of them, right? We're not trying to be in the center of the room because then you can't really see everything. But if you're on the edge, you can see everything a lot better because you have like more of that perspective. So I feel like in the very least, it's being like, not mainstream, um, being more marginal, being more liminal. And it's, it can be something that we can do really intentionally, right? Like for me anyways, I've noticing, like that's something I tend to do already. I'm always kind of being like, Oh, that's getting normal. We got to go somewhere else. And that can be something that we could start to do, um, intentionally and cultivate value in it. I think, if your goal isn't to be a pop star, maybe. CBT Yeah, definitely. The 12th house is also a verse to the 11th, right? The hopes and dreams for the future. So it's not necessarily somewhere we want to go and overemphasize if we're wanting to be heavily 11th house-oriented. But there's a word you mentioned a couple times now, liminal. And it reminds me that in Ancient Astrology, Volume 2, Demetri George says that one of the words for the 12th house was metakosmos, which could literally be translated as between the worlds. The 12th house does have that liminal quality. And so, one of the important significations if we go way, way back in the tradition, Rhetorius actually start… I mean, we could go back to Serapio also. There's a couple of ancient astrologers we can look at, but I've got Rhetorius here with me. And Rhetorius starts the delineation of the houses with the 12th, not the first, because the 12th is what comes before birth. And anybody who knows some basics. About how babies are made knows that the baby has to be born before a human exists. So you got to make it through the 12th house first. The 12th house is said to be your labor, as in you, the person whose chart we're looking at, not you birthing your progeny. The moment of your birth and the hours before it are indicated by the 12th. But we can also see in Rhetorius when he's talking about the significations for a few different planets in the 12th house, most of them are not great significations, the delineations, because they're undoing the native mostly. But when we see Rhetorius' delineation for the Sun and the Moon in the 12th, Rhetorius says that they indicate the status of the parents, Sun and Moon being two of the quote, natural significators for parents. There'll be different ones for each person's chart depending on the houses. So, there's like particular parts too, but one of the flavors that will indicate your parents is going to be indicated by the Sun and the Moon. And if they happen to be in the 12th, Rhetorius says that indicates that the parents are of a quote, low-born status exiled in some way or that the patrimony is destroyed, i.e., that the inheritance of your father is destroyed, and same so if it's the Moon. And so, we see this. Both the liminality in terms of we're talking about when… And Rhetorius even says specifically, and I think it's interesting to hear this part, for one of the reasons that the 12th house, has the significations related to the moment before birth, he says, and it is chosen as the house of Saturn inasmuch as through the pouring out of the waters the the fetus is expelled, and because the newborn is placed in the midst of life and death, being beheld by Saturn and Mars in opposition. And that last part is referring to the fact that the 12th is the joy of Saturn and the 6th is the joy of Mars. And so, when you're in the 12th house, if we're thinking about where the planets are rejoicing, you're rejoicing in the gaze of to both of the malefics by a malefic aspect, hence the life and death, that liminal quality. There's something there about the liminality, the danger, the suffering, but also the marginalization, exile. And I see that especially with my clients who inhabit multiple different marginalized identities or have family histories of interruption or disruption to their lineage or to their relationship to ancestral land. BT. There's a few things that sort of popped into my head as you were reading that and also thinking of Saturn, like when you were speaking in the beginning, we could think of the natal chart as an electional chart for our karma and also thinking about how the 12th house is like the moments that we're birthing ourselves into the world, right? Like our soul is kind of transitioning from the unseen world into this world and that being a very Metacosmios 12th house topic and thinking also of this way that I've been thinking about Saturn lately is that Saturn helps us keep our promises to ourselves, and that also feeling really 12th housey in a way. It's like I know that you want your life to be like shiny and perfect all the time and like going in this really clear direction and then Saturn also being like, but what about what your soul wants to become and how that also isn't it isn't always like the prettiest picture and what we can see it also showing things like you're saying like oppression from external sources where we're having you know these like marginalized and oppressed identities and we can see that reflected in 12th house experiences a lot of the time and and 12th house placements. And then also how there can also be like an inner reality at times to the dark houses, and how they're manifesting and those like how our soul is like working to keep promises that we may not always be consciously aware of, but that we're here to do. I know another luminary in the 12th that I've seen sometimes with clients where they're just really, I'm thinking of this one person in particular whose chart I'll never forget, even though I only saw her once, is just she had this son in the 12th and I don't remember, it was just like a really well-placed son. I don't know if it was like son and Leo in the 12th or something, but. It ended up coming out that she just loved spending time in women's prisons. She just loved it. She loved being there. She loved the work. She loved being with the women and like helping. And everyone in her life was like, it's so depressing. Like, why are you there? But it wasn't depressing to her. It was like life-giving and joyful. And she got so much fulfillment from it. And just sometimes how things look from the outside aren't always like our lived experience and how that can sometimes be a contradiction too. CB – Absolutely. That reminds me of a client of mine who had a well-disposed Mars in the 12th, and we were talking about career and. Kind of was like, okay, so there's something about anger or is it men or is it dog or cars? Like these are the most common ones that it's going to be in a 21st century person's life. Or more rarely, it was like, crisis responder? Are you like a first responder or EMT or something like that? And they're like, no, but I am the person. They worked in it with mental health, and specifically, they were the person who was best at responding to folks who were having violent or agitated outbursts because they weren't scared. And so it diffused that person's like trigger and upset. And so, looking at things like that, and there's so many instances, and that was one of the big takeaways from a conversation that I'd had with Chani now a couple of years ago about the 12th house that, especially in a client consultation, and sometimes I'll make the joke if someone's got a packed 12th house and they come in like, oh no, my 12th house. And I'm like, well, you appear to be free and not incarcerated presently. I don't see you zooming from a hospital bed. So it's safe to assume that you're not incarcerated or institutionalized in some way. And so, do you work in those institutions? Or are you combating oppression in some way? Especially if we think about the sixth house as a place where we see. Labor organizers really commonly. Mars in the sixth often will give a surgeon. And so, we're thinking about people who are responding to crisis in some way. Way. Sometimes I'll see teachers have a few placements there in addition to the fifth to pick up the kid part. But if we're thinking about the sixth, it's the site of effort that is a form of care. Then the 12th house kind of makes it, I mean, the 12th is the 7th from the 6th, it's the relational, opposite from the 6th house. And so, we might see people or if you have that signature, you might find yourself with planets in the 12th house, extending that caretaking inside of institutions in a relational capacity in your one-on-one interactions with people in there. So people working on the inside or folks or with or on behalf of folks who are on the inside. If we think about the fact that there's that relationship with the ninth house where we've got lawyers who specifically are working on appeals cases and stuff like that. You can start to see all sorts of nuance as you build the relationships with the other houses there in the way that that 12th house shows up. And so I think as much as there are really challenging experiences and even still working inside an institution of your own volition to do good work is still very challenging. There's the risk of burnout. There's the way that it does still put you in isolation from other people or can be alienating when everyone in your family is like, that's so depressing. I don't want to hear about that, please. BT. Yeah, and you were talking about seclusion and solitude earlier also being a signification and just noting that not everyone is charged up by being in the middle of the crowd. I always think I usually think of like Leonard Cohen like just being like, I'm going to Tibet now. Bye everyone. Or I think Obama has a pretty significant 12th house situation and just always needing to have that sort of separate room that's just his, which I can relate to. And I think a lot of people can. Are there any other things that you feel like Rhetorius is bringing to the table as far as how we can understand the 12th house before we kind of of move through the timeline of the world. CB. Yeah. I mean, fundamentally, it's this like rhetorics. It's like planets in the 12th are going to do some kind of injury. He says even benefics will do injury in the 12th. So the earlier part of the quote, the way that he starts off the chapter on the 12th, which begins all of the houses, is that the 12th house is called Bad Damon or Daimon and quote, rising before the Ascendant and metacosmic, or that metacosmios word we talked about. It signifies things concerning enemies and slaves and quadrupeds and all things that transpire before the hour of birth both to the mother and to the one that is about to be born since the sign rises before the expulsion of the fetus. There is this interesting little note that I thought would be easy to overlook, but point to some of those access points to see the benefit or the bright side or the positive significations or aspect of the 12th without going full Pollyanna and turning it into a mystical place of transcendent bliss because it's not quite what's going on there. So, Rhetorius gives a signification for when you've got either Saturn or Mars found to be the ruler of the 12th house. So he says, and if Saturn or Mars is found to be ruler of the 12th house, and it is in the Ascendant, it prognosticates those who are eaten by dogs or by wild beasts or the–that's not great–the The good part is, or those who were fond of hunting with dogs. And so, he's pointing there, and there's a few other things if you dig into the entire couple pages delineating the 12th house, you'll see that Rhetorius is pointing to derived houses and the relationship that the 12th has to other spaces. And that there's a way of basically saying, okay, we've got Saturn and Mars, so we've got Mars, that's the dogs, and then Saturn, there's the death. The thing that you should be really concerned about and that you won't know, if you hunt with dogs, you know you have dogs and you go hunting with them. So that's not going to come as a surprise to you. You won't have failed your duty as an astrologer to remind that person about that fact in the way that you would if you forgot to tell someone in the olden days, hey, beware of getting eaten by a pack of wild dogs. But we can see that if you choose it, there are ways to engage in the very same significators that it potentially extend the destruction somewhere else at the very least. There is that quality of dignified malefic sometimes gaining at the expense of others that. Saturn rejoicing there can sometimes have if Saturn's also dignified. BT. Yeah, someone I'm really close to in my life who they have a pretty big stellium in the 12th house, which includes Saturn exalted and Libra. And, you know, they had a really intense. You know, they're just like their whole life really, really attracted to like, um, to drugs always. They just knew from a really young age that they were going to get into it. Like they knew that really clearly. And then of course they did got really strung out, but then also had a really, at one point when they had their Saturn return, a really immediate and sudden sort of turnaround, like didn't go to AA, didn't have, it was just sudden, like read some Gandhi, cried it out, went to Thai boxing, got some cold Turkey. It was just like, I'm done. And it was like a a really strong substance that a lot of people don't get out of. So it was just this way that it was also it was sort of the tendency towards the undoing, but then also the undoing of the undoing, which was just this really strong, sudden repositionality of that, again, that really dignified malefic that could also be like you've seen the darkness of humanity and now you are just also a capacity to be with people who are now in that space that's really incredible. But I thought that was a really interesting way of holding both of those things too. CB Yeah, that's fascinating. I was reading Angela Davis' Prisons Obsolete. So one of the classic significations of the 12th house is prison, confinement, isolation, seclusion. But the modern US institution of the penitentiary is a different thing than the ancient signification of prisons. It still belongs in the 12th house for sure. But if we unpack the word, and it didn't even occur to me till today. And I was like, right, penitent. It's the place of penitence. The modern penitentiary was envisioned as a place that wasn't just about holding somebody. Until there was some form of corporal punishment. It was conceived as a place where people would, undergo some form of rehabilitating penitence. Most of the time, that's not what actually happens in the 12th house. If you've read Malcolm's autobiography, he describes that process. So it's not that it never happens, but it sounds like your friend had a similar experience, but where the the confinement was the substance itself and that relationship with substance. Yeah, I think so. I love that you brought the penitent. What was coming to mind when you were saying that was also, we've been talking about the positionality of the 12th and the 6th, and also thinking about that qualitative difference between the bottom half of the chart, which the 6th house is in, and then also the 12th, which is just in the top half of the chart, and just the matters of spirit or the matter, being penitent is a matter of the spirit, essentially. It's that seclusion could potentially offer us something of the spirit that could help us transform or become, whereas the sixth house being more in that embodied grindy burnout. We're dealing with some qualitatively different things, even though the personality of them might be in the same sphere of life. I don't know if that makes sense the way I'm describing it, but. CBT Totally, totally. At first, it made me think of the way that with the upper or the southern hemisphere or the upper hemisphere, southern half of the chart being associated with the public life and public sphere, the falling away from the body is a falling away that happens where we're subsumed or maybe external and publicly visible forces that maybe we can't notice, but others do. Whereas the sixth house is falling away from the seventh, it's falling away from relationships. And so almost thinking about it literally is undermining our ability to attend to relationships or taking us away from our ability to interact in relationships in some way, but also thinking about the way that. When we're in the 12th house, it's making me think about this quality with all of the cadent houses, right, where they're configured each to each other either by square or by opposition. The 9th house classically being called the house of the God. From the perspective of the 9th, the house of God, the house of the preachers, teachers, lawyers, or higher wisdom, one of my students described it as the house of the authorized tale, which I really like. It shed some cool light on the 8th. So if we start from the vantage of the 9th, the 12th house becomes the fourth. It's the home of that spirit. And there we see the significations of monasteries, convents, there's your yoga retreat, your Vipassana retreat, your insert. Sometimes I think about get thee to a nunnery, as in Yes from Shakespeare, that get thee to a nunnery could be a thing that was a very horrible thing to hear as a young woman. And that meant that you were about to have your freedom taken away from you and that was it. Or if you actually were devout and that was your spiritual practice, get thee to an honoree means you're no longer subject to all of the forces of misogyny in regular society and you're secluded away from that. And so, it really depends. Once again, are you going into the 12th house of your own volition into the very same physical buildings and institutions? It's just a matter of did you choose to go there? If you choose to go there too, we can kind of think about it in the sense of the 12th house, it's third from the 10th. So it's like the local community or the environment. And so I kind of think about it like taking a walk around the office, like if you've ever worked an office job, if you're like, I'm going to go take a walk around the block, that's code for leave me alone. I'm not attending to anything. I am recusing myself of responsibility to my 10th house duties for the duration of this little walk around the block. If you go to a retreat, then it's, oh, no service, sorry, unreachable. There's those qualities of the 12th house there that feel like it's about the relationship to the public sphere, whereas in the sixth house, it's like those qualities of struggle or suffering or burnout are experienced privately. BT Yeah, it's like a noticeable departation from visibility. Like your phone on do not disturb, like they're not taking notifications right now and like it's the really obvious from something that would normally be more available. Music. Moving through time, I know what you had in your notes sort of moving towards William Lilly and. People who've been writing throughout the following centuries about the 12th house. Are there any notable progressions for how you see the 12th house sort of moving from what Pretorius was talking about and how that's been sort of fleshed out or more nuanced added as people have continued writing and assimilating their data about it? Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest changes come a little bit later and I didn't include everyone and anybody who's read Demetrius books, these are a couple of really useful notes here that Demetrius lays out. And because she's surveying all of them, Michael spoke about this too in the sixth episode, Demetrius books, the second volume in particular, which the first half or so goes through each of the houses and follows the set of delineations from the earliest examples to the most recent and kind of tracks those changes. Enemies of the first, we see that consistently enemies never really goes away, even when we get to the super modern, more psychologically oriented evolutionary astrology perspective where we might be looking or any perspective that's really of the mindset that there's no such thing as a malefic, there's just more or less challenging experiences. You might think of that enemy being turned into, oh, in the 12th house, it's the ways that you're your own worst enemy, whether or not the person finds that a constructive way to describe things. I think there's an interesting departure because in the initial tradition, it's basically like, dangers to your body that come from the birth process, actual death, dangers to your freedom and autonomy that come from your parents being lowborn. So it's injuries to the feet because the 12 houses getting associated with the feet. The quadrupeds and slaves, I think that we see less and less of the quadrupeds. We definitely don't see many associations these days with getting eaten by dogs or being a dog person, both of which we see in the ancient tradition. Potentially because we have different ways of looking at mental health. And because for the most part, very few of us are going to be in environments where a literal pack of wild dogs is going to pose a mortal threat. And so, some of those aspects of the 12th house, I think they really have to do with modernity and the changing circumstances around what it is that poses a threat to your body staying alive or being able to be like a fully sovereign participant in consensus reality. Maybe that's one way to say it, especially thinking about. The significations related to the parents being lowborn, it's less and less likely we're going to see somebody literally having their parents be enslaved. But I think in the same way that we could look to the sixth house and go, it's less likely today, although slavery is certainly still alive and well today, it's more likely that a person's experience with slavery is going to be in the form of wage slavery if we're going to use that term. I think we would see a similar type of thing in the 12th house, it's more likely that we're going to see somebody being born from folks who are in poverty or the struggling end of blue-collar working class or folks whose family has recently immigrated, that exile status. People still can be refugees for sure, but I think we see more economic and sociocultural forces or pressures for migration if that makes sense. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that in, and I was thinking about that too, and all that association with far-away-ness, like there's a way, like the ninth house is that sort of like foreign travel, but then the twelfth, it's like the sense of being even more remote or even more inaccessible, which may or may not be geographically farther away if you measured it by metrics, but the sense of like, I'm thinking about friends who are immigrants, for instance. It's like, they're like, but you can't go back across. Now, you have migrated, but there's a way that even though. Geographically it may not be that far, there's a lot of things. The barriers create a sense of aloofness and inaccessibility that would make it almost impossible to return or see people who were there. Yeah. I think one of the things that's important to look at in terms of the change in significations for the 12th, Rhetorius and Lilly both point to this in different ways, is, but Lily is definitely quoted as saying it. The quality of hidden enemies or people who might basically narc on you or snitch on you, neighbors who would turn you in maliciously, that to malevolent witchcraft, all of those things, or powerful things that are done in secret clandestine activities, those are all really coherent. But once we get psychology and Freud, then we get the collective unconsciousness, which not something that we see in the ancient tradition. You could maybe at a stretch try to loop together that the Vedic perspective of the 12th house as a place of moksha or liberation on account of Shani, who is Saturn, having to do with spiritual practices and isolation that are meant to achieve liberation and Saturn's association or Shani's association with karma. And so, there's this quality of toiling away at the karma in order to achieve liberation or maybe indicating. If we put the building blocks together that the 12th indicates a thing that ends or is dissipating, the ending of karma would imply that you were achieving liberation. But that really doesn't point to what collective unconsciousness is. I think maybe today you see some sort of modern connection to the like in the intimaeus when everybody dies and there's the resetting of all of the lots. You could maybe make that same connection, but it seems like that's decidedly a more modern interpolation, the collective unconsciousness and bliss through mystical union and merging. Because of the dissolution of self or reemergence or diving back into the collective unconscious. That seems a little bit different. Same too for the idea of dreams, although you can start to make some arguments that there's derived houses that would point to that and that ancient astrologers would have known it too. It's just not the first thing that you'd bring to mind when interpreting a chart. BT. Yeah, it's something that you could get to, but it may not be the most direct or the first thing you notice. This is sort of non-Sekitr, but it's going back to the the wild dogs thing and thinking about it. I was like, something about the wild dogs is sticking with me. And also just thinking how like culturally that might like, you know, throwing things out to the dogs. Like we don't have dogs we have now are like pets, but that it would be more like there's wild dogs. Even actually in other cultures, we have friends from Ghana and they're like, oh, you have dogs in the house? Like, it's just this really, like it's a strange thing to just be like, oh, you have dogs in your house and you're not terrified to pet them. Like culturally it's a very different association with dogs. it's more like. If you're out with the dogs, you're getting thrown out onto the street, right? You're getting ostracized from your home. You're getting thrown out with the garbage, so to speak. The dogs are going to eat that. And I was even… And also this idea of being… Thinking about Bridget Jones's diary, ironically, where her thing from the beginning is she's worried. She's like, and I will be found two weeks later, half eaten by wild dogs. Her fear was just that I'm not noticed enough or I'm not loved enough that I'm going to be dead for two weeks and no one's even gonna notice this thing of just being thrown out. CB Yeah. I mean, that's a really salient point, I think, especially unpacking the ways that some of our metaphors today point to what might have been very literal concerns in the past, like Saturn and Pisces in polluted waters or water crises. We have a liquidity crisis happening with a few banks in the Bay Area. That's a liquid crisis. So thinking along those lines, much of the dehumanizing language that gets associated with particular groups of people particularly before they become persecuted or systemically oppressed in societies tends to be animal type or animal language equating people to animals. BT Yeah. CB And we see back in the late 90s, early thousands, it was kind of of talked about more the frequency with which women of color are depicted in fashion with animal skins or things like that, that there's these subtle ways in which we dehumanize, we like 12th house fall away, take away, diminish the humanness of that first house ascendant of a person in that way, and that it's usually connected with some sort of marginalized status too. For sure. And it also, especially when coming sort of from like a mainstream perspective. And then I'm also thinking about like the rituals done in private where it's like a great honor to put on this remnant of an animal because this animal is like my teacher, right? And like it's a, and how depending on who, like sort of like you were pointing out earlier, depending on where the initiation is and who's making the decision about what's happening, like determines whether or not that's with reference or with oppression. CB Yeah. So much so. I mean, even thinking about. Something about the literal wild animals makes me think about having been in Thailand and in, a few places where they were like, hey, during the daytime, it's not that big of a deal if you just see one dog, but I noticed that you were walking around at night and did you see that there was a pack of dogs behind you? That's actually a really big concern. You need to not be so oblivious. There's something there that made me think about the way that sect would impact what's going on with the 12th. So, sect is day team, night team. Well, who rejoices in the 12th house? Saturn. Saturn's on team day, big time. So, if you have Saturn in the 12th during the daytime and dignified, then you may still have a lot of isolation. And there's kind of a running joke that like, well, Saturn's rejoicing, but is the native debatable depending on what we're talking about, right? Yeah, every client I've seen who has Saturn in that plexus relates and gets a good chuckle out of that one. But if you have Saturn there by night, then all of a sudden, you've got the malefic that's contrary to sect quite happy and making an overcoming square or. Decimating, it's the ancient language for that, as in killing 10% of the brotherly and sibling love that you have in the third house, of your enjoyment of being in the third house local immediate environment. There's lots of different ways that we could describe that, but depending on depending on which sect you are of that quality of the 12th house may be more or less challenging. It's not quite like pure technique would really be wanting to apply that to delineating Saturn's position there. But I think we can kind of extrapolate from some of those things and see the folks who are in the nocturnal mode may feel more depressed or melancholy and struggle a bit more with the 12th house where diurnal folks tend to be like, yep, I'm alone. I haven't seen a person in three months and maybe that's a problem, but that doesn't seem to be the cause of the melancholy. If there is melancholy, it seems to be something else that causes the sadness or the depression that might be there too. For sure. And then the 12th house isolation could be more of the retreat from that or the alchemical vessel for that in some way. That makes sense. Are there any more significations or even topics or examples from your own practice that you want to bring in before we start talking about? I know you have some chart examples that you'd like to share. CB Oh, yeah. I got a couple light chart examples. We can unpack more. I didn't quite go into the same biographical depths. I have a few folks where I was like, those are great examples and. They might be dated. You might have to be an elder millennial or a Gen Xer to totally relate to all of these. Yeah, there's a few other ones I want to point to to make them make total sense. And there's maybe even a few other quotes that might pull in, but maybe we don't need to fully unpack the prison industrial complex quite yet. It's like, yes, I'm going to totally pull in all of these different things, prison abolitionists, because we do see that. And there even are some figures there that we can see. So, this is kind of a left field one, and this comes from, Money, How to Find It with Astrology by one Lois Rodden, from whom we got the Rodden rating. So, if you've ever seen charts that have the double A rating, that comes from Lois Rodden and all of her work around creating these epic archives of chart data. That's why we have Astro Data Bank. So this book is about how to find money with astrology. And it's an interesting application of essentially some horary techniques or ideas. And so looking at, well, what are the significators of money and how do they link up is going to describe different ways that a person can make money. And she describes when the ruler of the second house is in the 12th, and I think that this points to some really interesting ways of thinking about the 12th house. Sometimes it points to support in retirement where we. Are unable or unwilling to contribute to our own livelihood. In other cases, we work behind the scenes in industry institutions or in private or secluded environments. We value the possession of a nest egg, secret or undeclared funds, or money paid under the table. But particularly that quality of retirement, that has had me thinking about the 12th house as a place where we recuse ourselves of responsibility to the 10th house in particular, but to the outer world, maybe to that whole culminating angular triad, the 11th house of future hopes and dreams. But you'd also see your friends and your work associates and your professional networks and maybe even mentors of some types, and the 10th house of your literal reputation and role in the world, and the ninth house of essentially the elders who are officially sanctioned by the group. They're not your personal familial elders, they're the teachers, the preachers. The accumulated wise people and the astrologers. But I think astrologers might be more eighth house today because of our rejection from the ninth house, but that's a different story. Does that make sense though? though that like that. I mean, I think it brings in a lot because behind the scenes isn't something that we've really mentioned yet, but I think that can be a super 12th housey showing up like people who are really sort of comfortable and excel behind the scenes and find a lot of fulfillment there, which is something that's really counter-cultural again kind of going back to earlier being like not mainstream where you know, at least in American culture, it's like hyper individual and if you're not shiny and if you're not up front, you're not in the spotlight, we tend to deem it as less valid, but that also there's this behind the scenes work that's super effective and real. And even just thinking about retirement and what we were talking before recording about, you know, just like dealing with people who are growing old, right? And how there's also that sort of like falling away from what is normal, like you're out of, at least where I live in the United States, like falling away from visibility in such a big way, falling away from the daily rhythms of care getting increasingly sort of like isolated and immobile and also Saturn's associated with that which is with old and with aging and things like that. Yeah, I mean, even thinking about for any of the theater children, if you've ever tried to pretend to be old, what are the two things a person's most likely to do? They're going to grab their back, bones, right? They're going to bend over and clutch, oh, my knees, my knees. Saturn rolls the knees. So we're probably going to think about those types of things. The behind-the-scenes quality is such a big one. And I think that's an interesting segue into some comment that Demetra makes about the Gokulen sectors. And for folks who don't know, there's a very, very small amount of statistically valid research that has gone into validating any principles or tenets in astrology, and it kind of undermines some of our ideas, maybe possibly. One of them being, and I'll quote from from Demetria George's Ancient Astrology here. She says, a compelling argument against the traditional doctrine that the 12th house is a cadent place signifying weakness is presented by the studies on the Gokulen sectors. Research studies have found that planets in a zone approximately 10 to 20 degrees above the Ascendant, which in quadrant house systems places them in the 12th house, are statistically significant as indicators of professional achievement in. In accordance with the nature of that planet. In terms of timing, these planets would have risen over the Ascendant approximately one to two hours prior to birth, which is the general interval marking the beginning of the transition stage of labor. This has led me to wonder if a planet crossing the Ascendant when the fetus begins its journey from the uterus into the birth canal also leaves an indelible mark upon the character of the native, which is depicted in the birth chart as a 12th house planet. There's a few kind of notable examples that come to mind that I think illustrate both Demetrius' point and maybe this idea that perhaps the Gokulen sectors still. Testify on behalf of the 12th house being this place that falls away and could in most circumstances be a weakness. And it's this, if we think about folks who have Mars, there tend to be professional athletes. And I went, well, what about Mars in the 12th would lend one to be a professional athlete if Mars is our will and our get up and drive and our blood and our power and our muscles? Oh, well, I was a bodybuilder and a personal trainer. Do you have to tolerate a fair amount of discomfort? And you've also got to be able to kind of like, at least with bodybuilding or weightlifting, you've got to be able to visualize yourself moving through space and sometimes be able to visualize like your back which you can't see. So, you've got to be able to, be physically deep in Mars stuff but out of your body while you do it in some ways. And so, I think there's this quality where... It's almost like by inhabiting that planet sphere, we undo our association with the first house. And so, we're able to excel with those 12 house planets. And sometimes that's not necessarily great for the native. If we're excelling at Saturn, that could be really melancholy and temperament in the sense of drying to the body and shriveling up of the life force. If we're thinking about Mars, I've seen this with somebody who was a really talented boxer, who then got jumped in a fight and defended themselves so vigorously that it wound them up in a lot of legal trouble. They didn't initiate the fight. It wasn't their aggression that got them in trouble. It was their skill in fighting in a moment where they needed to defend themselves. And so, seeing both of those things happen. But I think it's an important thing to consider this quality with the Gokulan sectors. There are some instances too where that, will still hold true in a whole sign house formation. And you could even have the ruler of the Ascendant in the 12th by whole sign. And there's a few examples I found where depending on which house system you use, you may say, yes, this person does or doesn't have the ruler of the Ascendant in the 12th. And a few examples where either house system, you would say the same thing. But I think it's important because some of those examples are examples where you might, if you went, the 12th house is bad for that planet, you'd go, oh, how is this person Queen Latifah and somebody who's super famous? But I think to the behind-the-scenes quality, we see this with politicians who often have the Sun in the 12th. And I can't remember which astrologer was who remarked on this. I want to say that maybe it was Maurice Fernandez, But it's lost to time. Someone in the past said, oh, politicians often have a prominent planet or the Sun and the 12th because they have to be super relatable. And if they're too specifically identifiable as their own personality, then the populace at large can't project onto them. So their own personal identity is behind the scenes in addition to the type of work they do being really behind the scenes in the institution. Campaigning isn't ostensibly not what politicians do for work, at least at one point. Maybe if we think of our local civil servants, it's a little bit more obvious. That makes sense. And even just thinking about, you know, talking about Queen Latifah, or like the athletes, like the kind of sort of focus and isolation it takes. And dedication to training it takes to become that good. It's like you don't have a life, really. Like you're not like hanging out with your friends after hours in high school. You're like not with your family a lot of the time. Like the kind of, you know, you're going off to like like bootcamp essentially, like, you know, training for the, and how also that peaks so young too, and seeing a lot of professional athletes have to deal with that all identity change that can be really challenging after, you know, big there's in Chinese medicine, there's this idea, you know, we're born with a certain amount of life force and. Like you don't get more, right. So how we spend it as we go. So it's like, you know, when we do these really like hard things, these extreme things, and we're exerting all this, like extra, always pulling up this energy and it up. We're spending it really fast. We're spending it really hard." And that also was something that I was thinking about when you were saying that. That made me remember playing rugby and being told, if you're good at this sport and you play it long enough, it is not a question of if you break a bone, it's a question of when and which bone. Or thinking about American football players in particular, in part because of the pads and helmet and the way that they sit on each other. But this is true for most athletes. Most athletes who play at a high enough level who can enter into college sports will experience a career-ending injury by that time. And if you do make it to professional sports, then you'll experience a career. Most people experience a career-ending injury and that's why they leave the sport or the physical toll on the body becomes too much and they're not capable of keeping up with the demands of the sport anymore. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Speaking of Queen Latifah, do you feel ready to look at some chart examples? Music. Yeah, let's see here. I've got like a whole bunch of different charts that I pulled up that kind of show different and maybe I'll just run through a few of the names that I'm not going to dwell upon. And if folks feel particularly inspired to check out any of these folks for their own reasons, then they can. So, along the lines of Lewis Rodden indicating. That sometimes you'll see the 12th house implicated when people retire or are so wealthy they don't have to work. One could look at the chart of John Jacob Astor VI, born August 14th, 1912. We do see revolutionary fighters and folks who fight in clandestine ways or in hidden ways. You could look at Jose Isabel Robles, born December 26th, 1891, fought in the Mexican Revolution. In terms of the quality of people who work away in isolation, not quite behind the scenes, but just hidden from view, Robert Graves is a quote, man of letters. He's got his his fingers in many different lines of thinking. But in particular, he wrote the work, The White Goddess that is of interest to a lot of young astro mages. He's one of those people where you've got to use a quadrant house to get the ruler of the Ascendant in the 12th, but you still get some prominent 12th house placements for him, July 24th, 1895. These These are all on Astro Data Bank, by the way, so it's pretty easy to find some good information there. Heath Ledger, Joseph Gordon-Levitt also, if you want to look at folks like there. So we've got Queen La, the 18th of March, 1970, 802 AM. And that is double A data, which means that somebody actually saw the birth certificate or the birth record. So that's 100% the correct birth time. So she's got Taurus rising, 13 degrees Taurus rising, which makes Venus the ruler of the Ascendant. Venus is in Aries in the 12th house. And here, whether you're looking at Placidus or whole Sun, you're going to have that Venus in the 12th house. So this is one of the kind of interesting ones. And I think that her chart is interesting because it illustrates multiple iterations of some of these 12th house significations, particularly if you add Mercury into the mix, which you can if you use the quote porch rule. So this idea that planets haven't truly moved in, to the next house by diurnal motion until they've done so by more than five degrees. So in Queen Latifah's chart, we could say that Mercury is only on the porch of the 12th house and has not yet left. And so, we would give Mercury, the Sun, and Venus all to the 12th. We could also give Mars and Saturn to the 12th because they're on the 12th house side of the Ascendant. Although, obviously, they're going to say that they're first house in the whole sign. So, why is this interesting? Queen Latifah is amazing. And some younger folks may know her from some more recent movies. I honestly have, I'm more familiar with old school Queen Latifah. So depending on where you came into history, you may be like, yeah, Queen Latifah of UNITY and remember when she was a rapper who won a Grammy and that was a big deal. So we've got music being her first big breakout success, Venus ruling the chart, Venus in Aries. So we see that Queen Latifah, she's a black woman. So she's a woman who is inhabiting a. At least one marginalized identity. Here we could say that that's both Venus being placed in the 12th and Venus also being placed in detriment. She's also known for being really pioneering. She was a solo rapper, she was considered successful in her own right. Her name was not necessarily attached behind some man's name. So we see that musical success, we also see those accolades. It's a bit beyond that 20 degrees above the Ascendant, which is interesting, but we still get this quality of her being able to make success there many, many, many years later in her career. Some musical theater nerds may remember her role in Chicago. I was that musical theater nerd. Watch it again. When you're good to mama, mama's good to you. And even that role, right? She's playing a prison warden, 12th house. Saturn rejoices in the 12th. If we look in a quadrant chart, Queen Latifah did run into a couple of different legal issues, legal instances, arrests, one of which involved alcohol, and that would be Saturn or Venus also. In Rhetorius. Venus and the 12th can be associated with troubles with women or drunkenness. So we see that quality. One of the charges had to do with a video store, ancient thing, some young people have never seen one of those, a video store that after she sold it, there were a couple hundred illegally copied tapes that were found in that video store. And so, there we see Mars, which can often be associated with theft or robbery or some type of highway robbery way, way in the tradition. And that's why I said if we give Mercury to the 12th house by that porch rule, then we can pull in Mercury's being associated with criminal activity, especially forgery and stuff like that, particularly the combination of Mercury and Mars. So, we see a couple different things. I also noted in her biography that she was a successful basketball player up through later part of high school. So again, we see that potential for the athletic performance than anybody who's ever done musical theater knows that that is an athletic performance to sing and dance, especially with a vocally demanding part. And then we see that mutual, well, it's not technically a a mutual reception because Venus and Mars can't see each other, but we see that exchange of domicile that's oriented in the 12th house. And so, we can start to pull together all of these pieces where even many of her roles have to do with somebody who's involved with law or crime. Both sides sometimes. So there's some very, very interesting ways where both her personal life and the roles that she's chosen, and some of her music. Her initial work as a rapper was very much in that Black pride, red, black, and green medallions, go back to Africa. The very specific period of Afrocentric hip-hop and revolutionary hip-hop that maybe before you might think about some more contemporary, like Jurassic Five or The Coup or Blackalicious type of revolutionary hip-hop. One of the first big breakout ones with commercial success. BTS Yeah, that's awesome. So many good ways that that's played out in so many different ways. I was like, please talk about Chicago. I really need it. So glad that you brought that in. CBT Oh, yes. I mean, that's like my own young, when I was in musical theater, that was the time period. And there's so many different ways where that specific role speaks to some of those issues. Maybe less so with her work in Living Single, which was great, worth watching, although it doesn't totally stand the test of time and always be forewarned, but still lots of chuckles, lots of laughter there. If we think about the fact that Mars rules comedy, you've got Venus and a Mars ruled sign. And that women fronted, women focused, definitely the ladies were the driving characters in that show and the dudes were just sidekicks for comedic foil purposes. BT. Right, for dates. CB. And the dates. BT. Yeah. CB. I think too you can see her as a queer person, although from my understanding, she hasn't. Officially come out until very, very recently and maybe not at all depending on which sources you look at. And the last time that they looked at some articles, but that kind of keeping romantic and private life quiet and hidden behind the scenes has been true for a very long time. BT Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Is there anyone else that you feel like sharing or talking about? CB Yeah, there's a few folks that I don't know particularly well, but I know listeners are likely to know. So I feel like it's important to mention them and maybe you'll know more. The last one that I thought of, and I just have a very short thing to say is is Frank Black, aka Black Francis, aka Charles Michael Kittredge Thompson IV, the lead singer of the Pixies. So birthdate, April 6th, 1965, 1029 AM. That's also AA data. Pixies, arguably most famous for the song, Where Is My Mind? The lyrics are very brief and short, but I feel like it describes so beautifully his own 12th house. So he's 16 degrees Cancer rising with the moon in Gemini. 12 Degrees Gemini. So the lyrics to the song are basically just. With your feet in the air, the 12th house represents the feet and the Moon rules the chart and the 12th house in an air sign. So with your feet in the air and your head on the ground. The head and the Ascendant are associated and the Ascendant's the horizon. So it was like, oh, cool. That's like super literal. Try this trick and spin it. That's pretty much all the lyrics, right? But it's basically just, where is my mind? The little part about swimming in the Caribbean and a little fish chasing him around, that's the whole song. But that refrain is so relatable. It's come in big pop culture moments. In Fight Club, the song plays at a really prominent moment. There's an interesting interview with Joey Santiago, who's one of the guitar players of the pixies talking about the way that that song is now used in cinema. It so immediately and quickly conveys so much meaning, and you only have to hear a little tiny part of that song for that meaning to be there. So just that quality of like, where is my mind seems so very fitting for somebody who's got the Moon ruling the chart from the 12th house. Okay, so a couple other figures that people might know a little bit better or might be more noticeable in pop culture, but we don't have to totally dwell on them. And I don't know enough about their personal lives to do full biography. Jennifer Garner? So, Jennifer Garner is best known for her role in Alias, which is like a spy drama and that's really the only thing I actually know her for. Her birthday is April 17th, 1972. It's C-rated data, so it's a little bit questionable. It's possible that we're looking at somebody who's got Cancer rising with the Moon and Gemini in the 12th again, but then co-present with Mars and Venus and Saturn. She was born during the daytime. If we trust the rising sign degree, then you've got the triplicity Lord of the Moon, triplicity Lord of the Moon there, triplicity Lord of the chart ruler hanging out and rejoicing in the 12th. You've got Mars in the 12th. So this like, oh, being able to do a spy drama, it's really long occurring role. She got a lot of awards and nominations for that role too. And that just happens to meet the Gokulin sector criteria too. So we can kind of see like. One of the things that I think is interesting and a little tricky with the dark houses, especially the ones that are like the 12th house, it can be hard to find a lot of diverse types of examples because we're going to mostly collect data about people who've become famous for some reason. And most people are going to become famous for things like being actors or politicians or winning awards and stuff. So there's an abundance of those types of things. Jane Lynch, Heath Ledger, Winona Ryder. Winona Ryder is an interesting one. I do know a bit more about her roles in private life. We also have double-A data. She's born October 29th, 1971 at 11am. And she's one of the interesting ones where by quadrant, so she's a Sagittarius rising with Jupiter in Sagittarius just above the Ascendant. And so, in a quadrant system, Jupiter is just like barely five degrees away from the Ascendant. So it's like real debatable, but she definitely has Mercury in the 12th. And Mercury in the 12th is known for. Criminal activity and theft, and she's been in the headlines for that off and on. But if we think about the roles that she's played, she's got the Sun in Scorpio, Mercury in Scorpio, Venus in Scorpio, all in the 12th there. She's also got Neptune in Sagittarius on the 12th house side. That's relevant just because Neptune near the Ascendant shows up sometimes for actors, that ability to become anyone to literally dissolve their personality and their persona and take on a new one really lends itself to that career. But just thinking about the Scorpio vibe and the 12th and some of the roles that she's been famous for these dark, loner, weird, isolated characters or characters who are melancholy, lonery. Especially thinking about her role in Beetlejuice, the best movie that's ever been made in the history of movies, in my opinion. We can definitely see that. And so again, we've seen somebody who's got this combination of private and personal life qualities that speak to their 12th house. BT. Yeah, and it brings us, it's like a lot of the people whose charts we get interested in are people who are very visible, which is interesting when we're looking for qualities of people who might be at times less visible or drawn towards less visibility, which is something I think about a lot. CB. Are you very familiar with Sarah Silverman? BT. I know of her and I've listened to some of her things, but I'm not the pro on all things Sarah Silverman. I did binge-watch Alias, though, like 10 years too late, which would be more of the Jennifer Garner. CBT Yeah. I mean, it is a compelling little crime drama if you want to get into that one. I also am not super familiar with Sarah Silverman, but as I was going through the epically long list that you can generate, if you look at Astro Data Bank and search for. People who have the ruler of the first and the 12th, which should give you people who really typify and exemplify 12th house qualities. Her name came up and I recognized that name. And reading a bit about her biography, I guess she wrote a book called The Bedwetter and has been a bedwetter into her teens and even in a contemporary interview spoke about like, yeah, I wet the bed recently. She's a Sagittarius rising. So December 1st, 1970, 6.30 AM. It's A-rated data, so we can actually trust this Ascendant. Sagittarius rising with Jupiter in Scorpio in the 12th house. And so, Jupiter, Scorpio, water sign. The 12th house has been in more contemporary times associated with sleep. If we look at the Rexy Bills, the rulership book, Lee Lemon's book is more rigorous. This book is just a list. From what an elder astrologer told me that this was just compiled by survey. And since there's no indication of how many respondents there are, even what the cutoff is, it's hard to know when you see those really weird ones if it was just some rando, like one single rando astrologer who happened to respond to the survey or if they're really well-attested in the tradition. Sleep, somnambulance, sleep disturbances, sleepwalking all fall in there. Dreams fall in there. Nightmares fall in there. You can kind of make an argument that as the fourth from the ninth that sleep would be there. If dreams live in the ninth, then what is the home of dreams but sleep, I guess. It's a bit of a stretch, but it seems like it makes sense here that that sleeping time period and bedwetting being prominent. Jupiter is also related to humor and publishing and so writing a book and being a funny person and making comedy around those would all track. Be curious if there's some astrologer out there who knows more Sarah Silverman stories. Who I guess in the comments on the YouTube video, maybe share some things you know if you've got some ideas about other ways that her life or her work fit that mold. BT. Yeah, that idea of making light of something feels very Jupiterian. CB. Yeah, and or, I mean, even Saturn rejoicing there. Saturn is often slept on for their relationship to humor, thinking of that really, really dry humor where you're like, wow, you just made jokes about death. That's kind of disturbing, but it's also funny. Saturn's got that. Saturn's also associated with clowning and clowns, which some people may be terrified of, and so that feels very 12th house. Or we can think about that quality of satire, liminality, speaking truth to power in some ways. Maybe you can see that maybe in a derived house way or even just the way that people with prominent 12th house stuff sometimes are working inside institutions and agitating or working against them, working dismantle institutions of oppression. That's certainly where I tend to see like... In my practice, folks, when there's a lot of 12th house activity with my clients, most of the time I tend to see folks who are engaged in working with marginalized populations or working to combat the systems of oppression themselves, sometimes a combination of those two. Often that person also inhabits some marginalized identity or has some sort of relationship or history there. The thought that I put a pin in came back to me. Thank you. I've been having some interesting conversations with Alex Michenak recently of Ishpeming Astro about indigenous astrology. And one of the things I've noticed with the 12th house showing up, yes, the 12th house definitely shows up when people's parents immigrated or were refugees or were, exiled from the family, even if they didn't have to leave their country of origin. They're just like, we're the black sheeps. But I also see the 12th house show up with indigenous folks who have interrupted lineages or who are disconnected from their ancestral homelands. Even if it's not a particularly prominent planet, sometimes it's the ruler of the 12th house is closely configured to the luminaries or to the ruler of the chart. Sometimes I've seen it with Chiron in the 12th, it's like the wound is the disconnect from ancestry. And it may seem a bit odd to keep talking about ancestry with the 12th house. You're like, yeah, the person who birthed you is in the 12th house. How do you get all the way back to all ancestors? But if we think about the way that from the perspective of the 12th house, the 12th house is the fourth from the ninth. And it's the ninth from the fourth. And so, if we think about it being ninth from the fourth, the fourth being our history, our family of origin. And maybe we can think about it being, the traditions, the sanctioned teachings, the wisdom of our family of origin or their history or the gods of the land or the spirit of the land or the spirits of our family history. And so, from there, I think you kind of get like, oh, talking to the dead spirits of my family. BT I think that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for bringing that in. Well, is there anything else that you feel like you need to share before we find out more about where we can stay in touch with your work and hear more about anything that you have coming up? CB Yeah, I think maybe the last thing I'll say, one thought that occurred to me as I was thinking about that quality of inversion, the 12th house is a dark house and it can't see the Ascendant, but what else can't the 12th house see? And when you put them all in a list, it's very telling. 12th house can't see the 11th house of the good diamond, or I sometimes call it our fairy god, Godmother, the 12th house can't see us. The 12th house can't see the fifth house of our pleasures, our children, the things that give us joy, and the 12th house can't see the seventh house of relationships. Or another way of saying that is that the 12th house can't see the places of the benefics or the places of our most important relationships, whether it's to ourselves and our body or to the people that are close to us. So there's something about that that I think whether it's your own personal flavor of experiencing those houses or it's conceptually what it means to be in a place that can't connect with Jupiter or Venus or you or your loved ones. I think that can provide so much access into. What's challenging about the 12th and maybe also folks like parents who are desperate to have a moment of alone time and to be called something other than mom or dad can relate to the ways that but sometimes that's a good thing. And sometimes even that's necessary to maintain like a holistic, healthy equilibrium. I think that's a very relatable share for sure. I feel like we could keep going for like three more hours, like easily. But I think for the sake of our time today, I feel like we've done a really good job. Lark, you've done a really good job really, like just laying everything out and kind of taking us through a tour of different stained glass windows of the 12th house. And do you wanna share with our listeners where they can follow you, where they can find out more about your work, and if you have anything coming up that you'd like people to know about? You can find me on the interwebs with my name, bear, like the animal, river, like the water, but with a Y, bear, river. If you throw an at or a dot com behind that, you'll get to me. Same thing on YouTube even. couple of things that are coming up and wrapping up. By May, I'll likely be moved and I'll be making some announcements about the… Right now, I'm teaching a practice with the planets, eight-week series, deep diving into building a one-on-one devotional and relational practice with each of the planets. And I have plans to launch an online version of that this year. By May, I should have some announcements about that. So definitely be on my newsletter. I will be doing a pilot class that will be close to just newsletter folks and members on my website. So if that's something that you do want to get in on, sign up for that newsletter. Otherwise, most of the announcements will be later in the year. I'm working on a book and some things, but talking long-term Saturn timelines, because I too, I'm in a 12th house year. So mostly behind the scenes stuff this year. LS Yeah, the writer's cape. CB Yes, indeed. Thank you so much for having me. This has been such a pleasurable retreat into the 12th house. BT Thank you so much. And I know our listeners will really appreciate it. And it's been a pleasure just being with you and seeing all the things that you've been sharing. So, thank you. Thank you for participating in this conversation with us. If you enjoyed the episode, please Please take a few moments to subscribe to the show, leave us a review, and share the episode. These tiny tasks help our independent podcast so much. Be sure to also check out the links below to learn more about any free resources, guests, or things we talked about today. Our intro and outro music was created by artists Aaron Palovic and Jared Kelly, our podcast logo was created by Elaine Stevenson, and this show is produced by Softer Sound Studio. Thank you for being here. Be well. Peace. Music.