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by Victoria Schneider
The twelfth house is so full, so awesome, so complex that reading or writing about it can have you scattered in many, many directions. It has been called “the garbage dump of the zodiac” Now – that is NOT a name or description that I would personally give the twelfth house, however, knowing the twelfth house as I do and having some significant activity there, I can certainly understand why that “less-than-honorable” title was given to it.
The twelfth house is the last house on the zodiacal wheel. It is ruled or governed by Pisces which is ruled by Neptune, so whenever you hear, 12th house-Pisces-Neptune, you’re getting a sense of the same type of energy. As Aries and the first house bring fresh initiative to each experience, Pisces and the twelfth house bring life’s experiences full circle and can sometimes feel that endings are near in order to make room for new beginnings. There are successful and unsuccessful ways to function in this area of life. The successful behaviors can open up worlds beyond the physical and help one live with a divine outlook. The unsuccessful ways can open up a path of disillusionment and victimhood, where the SELF loses sight of the soul.
At the end of the article is a fabulous passage from one of the late Dane Rudhyar’s books. It sums up, in a very twelfth house way, how we can’t avoid our twelfth house – how very important it is to evolution itself and how the cycles of life give us the opportunity to get closer and closer to the God within. Many of us avoid twelfth house issues, some of us embrace this area of life and most people navigate between avoiding and embracing. Where do you place yourself in this particular “area of life” around the zodiacal wheel?
How conscious are you of your consciousness? How about your unconsciousness? These two questions are the realm of the twelfth house. And they are very important questions for every single act we commit throughout life is affected by or affecting both our conscious and unconscious self. Our CONSCIOUS self knows yesterday from now from tomorrow. Our UNCONSCIOUSNESS self does not. Everything is NOW! Given just that much information, it would behoove all of us to “be here now” as Ram Dass stated years ago, and be attentive to our now by thought, word and deed.
The twelfth house is known for being the area of life of “hidden things”: hospitals, prisons, cloisters, the unconscious. It is known to be the house of illusion/delusion under which the following can fall: the under-water-world, the dream state, drugs, alcohol, addictions, illusions/delusions, being in exile, the occult or “hidden” side of life. It can be the house of the victim/martyr – the “poor me” complex where it’s always “everyone else’s fault that I am the way I am.” It can be a house with no boundaries. It’s ruled by Pisces – a water sign – feeling body. Water takes the shape of whatever container it flows into. If there are no boundaries, the water - feelings – can be all over the place.
The twelfth house is also the house of the Divine – the all-encompassing Divine; the Divine within yourself and the Divine outside of yourself. I am always reminded of this when I pick up the book, “Behaving As If the God in All Life Mattered,” by Machaelle Small Wright. (Check out her website – it’s AMAZING!!) If you feel that you are surrounded by an all-encompassing benevolent spirit, you are grounded in navigating your twelfth house. If you are aware of your barriers and work on dissolving those barriers, you’re navigating the 12th house well.
This is the area of life where one will consciously look to transcend this dimension; it’s bigger than any one culture or society. It’s bigger than the planet on which we live and it totally encompasses everything on this planet. It’s were we have the desire to wrap our arms around the world and give it an enormous hug.
No one lives in isolation in only one house (one area of life) that would be absurd! What goes on here in the 12th house, (unlike Las Vegas) DOES NOT stay here. Our consciousness is always imprinting our unconscious – the old adage “garbage in, garbage out” can get a little scary when you realize that what you THINK about and take in consciously goes MUCH deeper than we realize and…in the long run…affects us so deeply that we have no clue WHY we feel and act the way we do….therefore, what’s going on in our UNCONSCIOUS affects each and every one of the other eleven houses.
Think about this next paragraph written by the late astrologer, Dane Rudhyar, one of the most brilliant astrologers on the planet. Perhaps the “house of endings” is where we should look first to see how we deal with the “hidden” and “transcendent” within us. It would certainly provide many answers to why we are the way we are.
“The twelfth house closes the cycle of human experience. It is the last stage in a process which may be repeated during the lifetime of an individual, or terminated by what we call death. In the twelfth house the individual either consolidates his successes into the seed of a new cycle or growth, or he meets the accumulated results of his failures. Indeed, there is practically no man who has not achieved some kind of success and experienced personal or social defeats. In the last house of the cycle, man is unavoidably confronted by his successes and failures. His memories of the past, conscious or unconscious, crowd over the threshold in front of the new cycle. They are Angels of Light beckoning to the beyond, or they are dark Guardians of the Threshold, whose features are shaped by his frustrations, his denials of life, his fears, his sins of omission as well as commission. The individual must face this compound entity which he himself has created. He must go through it, whatever the cost—if there is to be for him a new cycle.”
References for this article: (Quotation by Dane Rudhyar)
“The Astrological Houses: The Spectrum of the Individual Experience”
by Dane Rudhyar
Copyright © July 2009. All Rights Reserved.
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