12th house....the hidden truth

Chin had two sons. He gave all his attention to his first-born, Fu, the promised heir to the throne. Overlooked, the second-born Hu remained ignorant, silly and petulant, in effect never quite growing up. But when Chin died, wicked insiders prevented Fu from taking power and Hu was installed as a puppet leader. An empire that should have lasted a few hundred years died virtually overnight. If planets in the 12th were children, they’d be reared much like the neglected son Hu. Without our conscious attention, they’re neither tested nor trained. They don’t get the same opportunities to grow and mature. Yet in moments of unconsciousness, they will take over, and can cause plenty of damage.

Our 12th house planets and signs are like children with special needs. They’ve suffered a critical deprivation. In some way our early environment didn’t encourage or support their expression. They may be usurped, denied or shamed by our caretakers. Somehow we got the message they're unsafe to express. With Mars or Aries in the 12th, I may fear the expression of my competitive drive or deny my selfishness. With Pluto or Scorpio, I may be too embarrassed to reveal my passion, my sexuality, my power. With Mercury or Gemini in the 12th, I may decide to keep my mouth shut. With Uranus or Aquarius in the 12th, I'll cover up what makes me different, and keep my creative genius under wraps. With Venus there, or Taurus or Libra, I won’t know how beautiful, how sensuous, how artistic or loving I can be.


Paul is a writer and photographer with Neptune in his 12th. I described Neptune to him once, how it speaks through music, art, and poetry. Astrologers associate the 12th house with conception. I suggested that Neptune’s imprint may have been knowledge Paul gained in the womb. His eyes lit up. His mother had played the piano throughout her pregnancy, he said, and he always felt this had made a deep impression on him; his thoughts tend to move in musical patterns. An intensely private man, Paul has a Scorpio Sun squared by a controlling Pluto/Saturn conjunction and, not surprisingly, he is known for bouts of intolerance and rigidity. As one might surmise from his chart, his father was strict. As a child Paul wasn’t allowed to drift and dream or float in Neptune’s sea; that was the early deprivation of this planet. As a young man Paul served in the military and later went to school for a business career. But in the past ten years I've watched him steadily withdraw from worldly concerns to submerge in the Neptunian world of his art. For the past two years he has been so deep in Neptune that he disappears for months at a time. Yet whenever I see him, he is intensely alive. More than anyone I know, Paul lives an artist's life, completely on artist's time. He will spend hours catching just the right light for a photograph. He will go days without sleep, living with the characters in his novel as though they were roommates. His 12th house Neptune has become the center of his life. It is the sunken treasure he has been working his whole life to retrieve. It is something truly divine.

When I look at an individual’s chart and see planets in the 12th, “doom” and “misery” aren’t the first words that come to my mind. I rather think that here lies a great gift, in fact, the true wealth of the chart. But it’s like a trust fund. The 12th house individual must come of age first, spiritual age. Ego might greedily appropriate the rest of the chart for its desires, but this house refuses to give up its goods so easily. There will be sacrifice; there will be immaturity, weakness, and whining; there will be a long journey requiring self-awareness, humility, and spiritual responsibility. However long it takes, the 12th house treasure will not disappear. Won perhaps over many lifetimes, it is deep and instinctive. The potential for a wide appreciation of its gifts is also huge.

I’m not alone in thinking this way. Michel Gauquelin, a psychologist who used statistical models to investigate astrology’s accuracy, discovered that while many astrology factors have no relevance, planets in the 12th house [3] did have a strong correlation with an individual’s career success. Mars in the 12th house was often found in the charts of sports figures. Actors, politicians, and journalists showed Jupiter in the 12th; scientists and doctors, Saturn or Mars; painters and musicians, Venus; and writers, the Moon. This finding surprised even astrologers, who typically locate career indicators in the 10th. Contemporary astrologer Maurice Fernandez makes even stronger claims for 12th house planets. [4] According to Fernandez, people who have positions of influence or fame will more often have an emphasized 12th house than a strong 10th. Since the 12th house rules both the collective unconscious and the masses, planets here indicate the potential to tune in to what’s popular and have an effect on a wide audience. They may also bear the burden of mass projection, sacrificing the personal life to become a product or symbol. Think of the different measures of fame the following 12th house Suns have achieved: Ghandi, Madonna, George Bush, and Rodney King.