Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I’m your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I’m an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I’m going to give you your weekly horoscope and no bullshit, mystical advice for living your very best life.

I’m finally offering transcriptions of Ghost of a Podcast, not once but twice weekly—yeah, that’s right, transcriptions twice weekly over at ghostofapodcast.com. Very slowly but surely, I will also transcribe past episodes, so be patient, be excited, and keep on keeping on, Darlings.

I’ve got an Astrology Hot Take for you that is a little bit of a dovetail from the Sunday episode that I just dropped a couple days ago. I want to talk to you about the eighth house and the twelfth house. I got just flooded with questions about these two houses, and I think it's really important for us to talk about them. 

When any of us approach astrology in general or our birth charts or the birth charts of our children or loved ones specifically, looking for a tidy answer, looking for a straight line story where it’s like there’s a beginning and a middle and an end, we are not going to like what we see. When you want your meaning in life or your value in life to be a commodity or a product, you’re going to have problems. Because if all you are is a product, if all you are is something material that can be seen by others and evaluated by others, then you’re not living a whole life—you’re just not. 

And when we are looking to understand the birth chart in a way of being like, well, it says x, and it also says y; how could these two different things exist at the same time? Or I have all these sensitivities because I have all these planets in the twelfth and eighth houses; how can I live? I’m destined for struggle or whatever. Whenever we see these things, there’s been a fundamental misunderstanding of what astrology is doing, what it’s good for. It’s also a fundamental misunderstanding of what we are, of what we are meant to be. We are full of contradictions. We are all full of contradictions. We are all full of just a ton of stuff. 

I mean, just think about your physiological body, your body—think of it. It’s just this gross mass of guts and blood and tendons. You got fascia. You got bones. You got outside bones—teeth, right. You got—our bodies are weird, and our bodies are just one small part of ourselves. 

So when we are talking about the twelfth house and the eighth house, we are not talking about the physical form—although planets in these houses can impact our physical bodies, but it’s not really about that. When we’re talking about the eighth house and the twelfth house in astrology, what we are talking about is our inner most psychic world, our spiritual world, even for people who don’t resonate with spirituality in any way. 

So I want you to notice that the eighth and twelfth houses are two out of the three water houses in astrology. When we talk about the water houses—the fourth house is the house that I’m not mentioning, although I have done recently an episode very much about it. The thing about the fourth house that is very different than the eighth and twelfth is that even though it is a very private place in the birth chart—very private—it is impossible to separate it from our family of origin, so our early developmental experiences and also our home life at the moment. 

So what’s really important for me to just acknowledge about the fourth house and then move on to the eighth and twelfth is that when we are looking at a part of ourselves that is really private but is interwoven with others, there’s a way that we can see interconnection, whether it’s codependency or interdependency, we see interconnection in the fourth house. And it’s really hard to look at the fourth house in general or planets in the fourth house as completely solitary. 

Not so much for the eighth and twelfth houses. So if I’m going to give you CliffsNotes, the twelfth house in astrology is the last house. It is kind of like a basement apartment: it doesn’t get a lot of direct sunlight. It’s a little subterranean. It’s private. It is a place of our subconscious, our spiritual health. It is related very much to the mental health, but at core it’s the spiritual health. 

What we find in the twelfth house is our access to past generations. It’s our access to clairvoyance, and when I say clairvoyance, I am including within that clairsentience, clairaudience, all of the kind of perceptions that are in that family. There’s a lot of different ways that clairvoyance can manifest and play itself out. 

Now, the eighth house in astrology, it’s a little grittier—hey, Scorpio, you know it—it’s a little grittier. So while the twelfth house is related to the zodiac sign of Pieces, so it’s very tender; it's very devotional; it can be very idealistic—Scorpio not so much. Scorpio is a little bit like fuck your rules. So Scorpio on the psychic tip is associated with psychic ability. It is mediumship. It is a little bit more closely related to mental health, in my view, as opposed to spiritual mental health. So the twelfth is where we’re going to find more of that spiritual foundation to the mental health. 

The thing about the eighth house is it governs that which is taboo, that which is intense and emotionally complicated. And so a lot of times when we see planets in the eighth house or when we’re looking at the eighth house, we’re looking at trauma; we’re looking at tumultuous, emotional, and psychic response. Now, before you start panicking because you have planets in these houses, I want to remind you that every human, every damn human that is alive has a twelfth house and has an eighth house. And if you think to yourself, yeah, but some people’s don’t have planets in it, then listen to my podcast episode about this very topic about empty houses. That’s episode 105 if you’re curious. 

So if you have an empty house—just a very brief word about that—there’s still a ruling planet to the zodiac sign that is on the house cusp, so there’s no such thing really as an empty house. Nothing is truly empty in astrology. So we all have a spiritual center. Now, some of us don’t identify it that way; we don’t experience it that way. That’s cool. But my point of reference is we all have a spiritual center. We all have psychic ability. Now does that mean I think everyone can chat with their cat or connect with dead people or know what’s coming next? No, probably not. 

I really resent it when people tell me that I would be a good dancer. I am a terrible fucking dancer, and I probably could take classes and learn how to dance. Yes, I could. I could, but the amount of effort it would take for me versus for someone else—it just doesn’t seem worth it to me. And I think it’s very similar when it comes to psychic ability. 

At the end of the day, it is part of our capacity as humans to be connected and to receive connection, to be open to so much content that is outside of linear thought. However, if it’s not in your nature, if it’s not a big part of your goals, if it takes a massive amount of effort, and it’s not your calling, then eh; it’s not a big deal. It’s okay that there are different strokes for different folks.

Coming back to the eighth and twelfth houses. The part of our nature that is interconnected and that we really can feel our interconnection, so it’s not in the context of let’s say the eleventh house , which is about social interconnection or the sixth house which is about how what we do day to day over the course of time really adds up on us both physically and in terms of our lives in general. This is about the more internal and private side of interconnection. 

That’s why these houses are so important and so tender, and also why a lot of old school astrology texts—and I don’t want to freak you out when I say—most of which was written by dudes, will say these are the houses of undoing, these are bad houses. If we live in a society where we are able to have freedom of thought, freedom of expression, if we live in a world in which we are able to say I don’t want to choose, let’s say, to be married. I don’t want to choose, let’s say, to work in a conventional job. If we live in a world where we can kind of adjust our lives to best suit our natures, then these houses aren’t bad; these houses are simply part of our nature. And if we make choices to support our nature, then they can actually be really wonderful. 

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So let me give you some 411 on the eighth house. The eighth house is one that is associated with lots of maybe seemingly different kinds of themes. It’s taxes, inheritances, and other people’s money. It’s sex and sexuality. So it’s not procreative sex. It’s not we’re in love, and we shall make love, and our love shall make a baby. Not that all sex can or should relate to babies or produce babies, obvi. But it’s not that kind of sex—that sex is in the fifth house. This kind of sex is your kinks. It’s really—it’s cuming. It’s letting go. It’s about kind of intense and driving passion. 

The eighth house is associated with merging, okay. It’s losing yourself. The eighth house is associated with resentments and compulsions. So it’s a house that is governed by both the planet Pluto and the zodiac sign of Scorpio. It’s fucking intense, basically. And the thing that all of these weird little themes have in common is that you need to let go without letting go of yourself. 

So inheriting money let’s say or having the responsibility of dealing with taxes, paying your taxes or whatever; how is that spiritual? Well, it’s how you respond to what you have inherited, the debts you have accrued or the assets you have accrued, right. It’s the way in which you honor those things. That’s actually really spiritual. But it’s not spiritual when you think about it in the context of capitalism, when you think about it conventionally. When you go deeper, and you think about how money is meant to reflect values—it is about our values. So what you spend your money on, whether or not you think it is, is a reflection of what you value. And that is probably some pretty bad news to a lot of people. But, real talk—that’s what it is. 

When we look at finances from the perspective of understanding that they are related to our value in the world, in a capitalistic society, and our values in terms of what we hold dear, what we prioritize, then what you do with a gift horse or what you do with a debt is a reflection of what you value and how you care for your values, how you hold those values. And that is also related to whether or not or however you do abandon yourself around your own pain and fear and passion and drive. That stuff is deeply personal. 

You may understand a lot of things. You may cognitively be able to dance circles around concepts, but the eighth house is where you do the deeply personal and uncomfortable work of being in the feelings, of transforming and transmuting your felt experience, so that you can come up with something else. If there is a house that personifies the process of shit to compost to fertilizer, it’s the damn eighth house. It takes time. If you’ve ever had a composting machine in your back yard or at the back of your building or whatever, you got to turn it. You got to turn it; it can’t just sit there stagnant. There has to be movement. And that’s the eighth house for you. 

When we get stagnant with planets or energies in the eighth house, it doesn’t yield growth. There needs to be movement. Not frenetic, quick movement. That’s not the eighth house for you. Seek a fire house or an air house for that shit. For a water house, it needs to be slow enough movement, like some sort of a churning, some sort of an ebb and flow style in order for us to actually be present for all the stages of evolution that is part of the human condition. It’s part of the human experience. 

When you have planets in the eighth house, those planets indicate the kind of nature of, the energy of, the pacing of these themes. So if you end up having let’s say Saturn in the eighth house, regardless of the zodiac sign that Saturn is in, you’re going to need a lot of privacy. You’re going to need to give yourself permission to take responsibility for yourself by yourself from time to time. It’s going to incline you to be more introverted than any other part of your chart might indicate, and that’s okay. 

When we have planets in the eighth house, what we have is that particular planet or those particular planets saying hey, I need to really sync into this environment because this is where I live. So a way to think about the houses—and I think I explained it this way in my book, Astrology For Real Relationships: Understanding You, Me, and How We All Get Along—if you think of the zodiac wheel in Western astrology, it looks like a big pizza pie, and if you think of each of those slices, aka each house, as kind of like a set design for a big ass play, which is your nature and your inner world and outer world. So if you think of each house as a big ass set design and that set design will be influenced by the zodiac sign on the house cusp, and, then, if there is a planet in that house, that’s an actor activating that house all the time. And that actor is in that set, and it’s wearing the clothes or the costuming of the zodiac sign. If you think of it that way, it gets a little easier to start to handle it. 

Inevitably, in my little metaphor and also in astrology and in life, planets transit. Planets move through the sky real time, and so they essentially are moving through your birth chart. So you may have—let’s say you have Saturn in the eighth house, well, that’s where Saturn lives. But transiting Saturn is going to move through every single one of your houses over the course of your lifetime a couple few times depending on how long you live. Whereas something like Mars will go through every house very frequently. 

So a planet in the eighth wants your depth, needs some privacy, and is highly sensitive. But you have decisions to make around how you embody and share that sensitivity or those sensitivities. You don’t have decisions to make about whether or not you’re sensitive; you’re fucking sensitive. And when we have planets in the eighth and the twelfth, honestly, there is a tendency to want to numb out because your sensitivities are so kind of advanced that there is a way that it’s hard to stay present within them, and it’s hard to function in the world. And so this is why these two houses can be associated with addiction. 

Addiction, from my perspective, is not just about—although it certainly encompasses substance abuse—substance abuse is a symptom of having an addictive nature. It’s not the only way to have an addictive nature. A lot of us are workaholics or shopaholics or just compulsive controlling weirdos, and those are all different ways of an addictive nature expressing themselves. It’s really important if you find that you do have an addictive nature or you do have a lot of eighth house planets, to really care for yourself by making sure that whatever your compulsive around is not destructive—so that it’s neutral or positive, not destructive. 

Now, to the twelfth house. So the twelfth house is I would say the most misunderstood house in astrology, and the reason why is for many, many reasons, the most of which is that it is really—doesn’t fit into society. It doesn’t fit into capitalism. It doesn’t fit into any of the kind of structures that we have. 

The twelfth house is really—if it could, it would have you living on an ashram. The twelfth house is the place of the subconscious. It is where we are intricately connected to our ancestors. It is where we are a part of a legacy through our familial lines. And, so, in this way, it is not a conscious place. It’s not really possible for us to be fully conscious of what exists in the twelfth house, and that’s not a bad thing. I would say it’s a wonderful thing. But, then again, I have three planets in the twelfth house, so I’m inclined to like it. 

When we have planets in the twelfth house what, from my perspective, they indicate is the energies, so the planets themselves are the energies that our parents or guardians could not embody or experience fully themselves, anywhere from a year before we were born until we’re about seven years old. So there’s something that has been passed down to us which is ambiguous or frightened or submerged, and that’s signified by those planets. Now this is not a bad thing. 

So I know from all the questions I have gotten that many of you will hear this and freak out. You do not need to freak out. We are connected to each other. We are part of a legacy of ancestors. We are somebody’s ancestor, and we are intimately connected to those before us. We are connected, and planets in the twelfth house will articulate that connection. They will articulate what it is that was too painful or difficult or not quite accessible to the people before us. And the opportunity here is for us to bring self-acceptance to those planets so that we can work with them. 

But the key here is we are not like everyone. If you have a strong twelfth house or eighth house, honestly—but especially that twelfth house—you need to make allowances for your sensitivities, whether it’s your physical sensitivities, your mental sensitivities, or your spiritual sensitivities. And those allowances may feel—especially in your twenties or early thirties—like a total boner. They may feel like oh, shit. I can’t do all these things that other people get to do. I am so deeply impacted by things people say to me or the world around me, and everyone else seems to keep on moving, and I keep on feeling like no matter what I do, I’m not making the material progress I want. It’s just a part of being a strong twelfth house person. 

And, again, this house is associated with the sign of Pieces and the planet Neptune. This is not about material development. It is about spiritual development. We must have a strong spiritual life with the twelfth house. And I want to really clearly articulate that this is not about religion. This is about spirituality—very different topic. So for some people spirituality and religion are interconnected, and for many of us they are not. 

If you want to look at religion, you want to look at the ninth house or the planet Jupiter. You want to look at Saturn or the tenth house because that’s like the morality and the community values and the sense of connection. Those things delineate, in my view, a religion. But spirituality, not being fearing of God or Spirit, but being connected to, having a sense of presence with Spirit or God or whatever you call it, that is the twelfth house. And the potential for people with strong twelfth houses is to learn how to identify your own instincts and to follow them. 

And the downside is it can be really hard to parse through your instincts and to trust yourself. And because this house is really not materialistic at all, it can make it so that your ambitions don’t really translate to much in the material world. They can, but a lot of times with the twelfth house they don’t so much. And, so, this doesn’t mean throw away your atm, break your mobile phone, and move to an ashram. What it means is it’s on you to choose a life that works for you. And you need to determine, based on your own experience of your own inner world, what is healthy for you. What you can do proportionately to other things and to choose yourself. 

The twelfth house is a place where we tend to be secretive, and honestly, the eighth house as well. And it’s okay to have secrets. It’s okay to have a private life. You don’t have to react in public about every Goddamned thing. You don’t need to share all your feelings and all your experiences with all the people. But what you want to make sure you’re doing is honoring your inner world instead of hiding yourself from others. And with the twelfth house as well as the eighth, we have a tendency to be a little bit of both, if you know what I’m saying—a little bit of both.

So when you find that you have twelfth house planets, and you read about it on a blog that has a two line delineation, you’re probably going to be pretty freaked out; I’m not going to lie to you. A lot of people have a very negative view of the twelfth house. 

For me, it’s my favorite house in astrology. I really think it is a place where we can choose ourselves. And it’s a place where we can choose ourselves on a really fundamental and spiritual level. And, honestly, when you do that, there is no downside. There just is no downside. 

When we look at planets in the twelfth, what we see is how we’re not alone—we’re just not. We are deeply connected to our lineage. And, so, generally, when I’m working with a client, and I look at planets in the twelfth, I will have a sense of whether I’m looking at the matrilineage or the patrilineage. And that doesn’t mean mom or dad, right. Often, of course, there are mom/mom, dad/dad or whatever genders are parenting.

I want to just take a quick moment to bookmark that to say if you are gender queer, if you are trans or non-binary and you have children, this is not about—you know a lot of astrology is really going to be like mom/dad, male/female—it’s not about that; it’s about the energetics, so don’t let header normativity get you down. It’s about the dynamics. So that’s an aside, but worth naming because where we get into nuance and subtlety is the twelfth house. 

The twelfth house is essentially non-binary in its energies. The potential for healing with both of these houses, but certainly with the twelfth—it’s really beautiful. So being able to see the ways in which your chart is articulating a lesson through let’s say your patrilineage or your matrilineage, it’s something that can stress you out if you want it to. It certainly can be a source of stress or come from trauma and pain—often it does, TBH. But it’s also really fucking gorgeous because it really shows you that you are not here alone in this body, in this life. You are not here alone. Your Soul is in this life at this time in many ways to come to healing and embodiment around the planets in your twelfth house. 

So if you see that your child or your partner or you or your parent or whatever it is has twelfth house planets, do not fear for them, support them, embrace them. Because the lesson of the twelfth house is really the lesson of belonging to yourself. And this is a phrase that I’m using a lot on the podcast lately. As Mars is Retrograde in Aries at this time, this theme of possession and ownership is really—it’s in the collective. It’s in the air. 

And, so, if you are a deeply emo person, a super spiritual person, if you’ve got a strong twelfth house or eighth house, if you’ve got strong Pluto or Neptune, if you’ve got a bunch of Scorpio or Pieces in your chart, or if you’re going through transits by Neptune or Pluto—there’s a lot of ways this shit can break down—then learning how to belong to yourself, centering and prioritizing those things—that doesn’t mean at the expense of civic engagement; it doesn’t mean at the expense of being a responsible and responsive friend or lover or business partner or whatever the fuck it is; it just means not doing those things with others and for the world at your own expense. Because that’s not sustainable. 

And, in particular, with the twelfth house when we do things at our own expense, what we tend to do is get sick one way or another. So we get physically sick, or we get mentally sick. That’s just kind of how the twelfth house works. It’s kind of like the twelfth house works like a sieve, and if what you’re doing is inauthentic, you become exhausted one way or another. A lot of people are great at running on fumes; lots of us do it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not slowly making us unwell. 

So, My Loves, I hope this has done some work to demystify these two houses. If you’re really curious, and, like I said, if you haven’t picked up my book, please do because I break down every planet in those houses, of course, in the context of friendship and of long-term committed relationships and also early stages romances. So you can get great data there. Use astrology as a way to cultivate greater self-acceptance, not as a way to freak yourself out about what you are or are not.