A Story of Uranus Transiting the Eighth House

Sometimes I think astrology is bullshit. Sometimes it is. And sometimes it is so incredibly spot on that I stare at it open-mouthed wondering how on earth it knows what it knows. That’s what I’m doing right now.

If you have been following astrology recently, you may have spotted that astrologers everywhere are astro-buzzing about the square between transiting Uranus in Aries and transiting Pluto in Capricorn. Radical change on the warpath meets destructive transformation of structure and established order. Chaos rules and it has no intention of being ordered and tidy, things are messy, will get messier, but eventually, once the old has been demolished, that which lies underneath will become fertile ground for the new to grow and be built upon. Or something like that.

Usually I only get to see the work of a transit in retrospect, mainly because while it is doing its thing I am so caught up in what is happening that I don’t have time or focus to see the universal picture. This time though, things are different, perhaps because Uranus and Pluto are involved.

I was born at the tail end of the generation who had Uranus and Pluto conjunct. Natally these two are located in my 1st house of the self, and so their energies, combined and separate are very familiar to me. I embody them. I am very Plutonian and Uranian. I have always struggled with such powerful energies, and have spent much of my life feeling like a freak who crash landed on Earth and then didn’t know how to get back to my planet of origin. However since transiting Pluto and Uranus have formed this square, I have felt more at ease on Earth. The energies affecting the planet right now are my energies. I am finally at home. More than that, I feel as though my time has come… to do what exactly I don’t know… perhaps just to fully embrace what it means to actually be myself, all of me, no holds barred, and to unleash that on the world rather than hide it as I have done for so long. Anyone else of my generation, the Pluto/Uranus conjunction, feel this way?

I am going through a sort of hell at the moment. Pluto and Uranus are not subtle in their effects, although some aspects of how they work are very quiet, silent but deadly… deadly as in they seek to transform, rip off the old skin, to reveal what lies beneath.

Uranus is transiting my 8th house. The House of Scorpio. When I first looked this up, I shuddered a bit, hoped for the best, prepared for the worst, and then forgot about it because nothing happened. Then my father died. The 8th house rules death. I’ve been estranged from my father for many years by my own choice, I found out about his death in a typically Uranian and unusual manner.

Pluto has been plumbing the depths of my 4th house, changing how I view myself from the perspective of family, unearthing childhood hang-ups and beliefs, and challenging me to confront them. It had just crossed over the cusp into my 5th house, stirring up my long abandoned creativity, pushing me to express myself artistically. I resisted for a bit, but you can’t resist Pluto’s energy when he has decided it’s time for you to change, not unless you want to be torn apart painfully, you will be torn apart, but it doesn’t have to be a bad pain, it doesn’t have to be excruciating, it can be experienced as a full body exfoliation rather than a skinning.

I had an idea about incorporating the artistic influences with which I had grown up into some of the photography I was doing. My father was an artist. So I did a Google search looking for inspiration, and found a news article announcing his demise. I was shocked. He had been ill for a long time, but being a Narcissist, he had decided that he was immortal. I saw a great quote on the cover of NME which summed up the Narcissist ethos to me – We don’t have egos, we have superpowers. I had wondered if perhaps, for once, he was right about being immortal. You never know, sometimes one must keep an open mind about such things, life is mysterious. But, anyway… he was dead, it was a surprise, and that was that.

I did not think beyond that, other than to worry a little because I knew his death might cause my mother to resurface in my life, and I had estranged myself from her too out of self preservation. A while passed. Then my mother contacted me through a friend. She had urgent information for me regarding my father’s death and an inheritance. I rolled my eyes, and did nothing. As far as I was concerned I had no intention of being a vulture, swooping in to pick the corpse’s body clean. He had many other people in his life happy to do that sort of thing. Besides, I thought I had an agreement with him to leave me out of his will, because I knew he would leave a mess behind, and enjoy the idea of the chaos which would ensue once he was gone. I ignored my mother’s drama. A while later my father’s live-in lover contacted me, also through a friend, to let me know that although my father had left no will the inheritance was all mine. I groaned, but I was also astounded. I was surprised that my father’s lover would go out of her way to contact me with this information. Then I realised why. She was afraid that if I didn’t claim the inheritance, that my mother would get it. I groaned again. This was exactly what I had feared would happen when my father died. I also imagined him grinning in the after death lounge, smug, very pleased that yet again he had created hell for others with him as the ring leader and master of madness.

The 8th house also represents the resources of others, such as an inheritance, and legal matters. Being that this is all under the auspices of Uranus, none of it is straightforward. There is no wedge of cash, there is a very small amount of money which will cover the legal costs of getting the inheritance that at the moment are eating up my savings. I have Jupiter in the 2nd house of personal finance, and it is not as lucky there as many astrologers seem to think it is, how it works is that sometimes I’m the windshield and sometimes I’m the bug, sometimes I have money and sometimes I don’t, regardless of how hard I work or if I just lie around finding shapes in clouds. There are also a couple of properties which would make excellent settings for a horror movie, dilapidated and neglected. Now I did consider renouncing this inheritance, but Uranus in the 8th also works in another way.

“Uranus Transiting the Eighth House – Our egos’ pointy little ears may stand jauntily above the waves, but the rest of the Self’s iceberg lies low, down in the deep waters of the unconscious mind. When Uranus transits through the Eighth House, those psychic depths are ready to emerge. In fact, there is no stopping them. Suddenly, our greatest fears, our frustrated desires, our unowned hungers—all the unintegrated dimensions of our psyches—begin to press upward. The wild woman and the wild man inside us all gather force. They come crashing out of the primordial wilderness and bash against the garden walls of Ego City. We’re “officially” very happy—but our secret grief leaps out. Maybe there’s a joy we crave—but which our civilized ego has forbidden. That joy starts making choices for us, grabbing the steering wheel. Right on schedule, people who represent or facilitate these drives appear.

We are invited to do some deep Shadow work, to integrate parts of ourselves which have been shamed by our societies or families, making our own moral judgements—and living, for the honest good or the destructive ill of it, with the consequences. For most of us, this transit represents a “coming of age”—even if we are ninety! “ ©Steven Forrest via Forrest Astrology

Something in me would not let me run away from this mess, as I have done in the past when dealing with the world according to my nutcase Narcissistic parents. This time I have to stand my ground – Aries – and fight for my right to exist and be counted – something which my parents tried very hard to take away from me. My deepest fears are asking me to face them and understand that within them lies a treasure that will be worth ten thousand inheritances. The true inheritance is not a material one, but one which lies within, but I can only access that by accepting the material one, fighting for it, and claiming it.

Easier said than done thanks to Uranus. The first problem is Italian inheritance law (my father’s Italian). It is so bloody complex even Italian lawyers don’t know how to deal with it. I speak and understand Italian, but I am not fluent, and even if I was… I still need lawyers to deal with legal mumbo jumbo. The first lawyers I hired, well, I had a hard time distinguishing between whether they were incompetent and inefficient or just being Italian. I eventually realised, after the hundredth time they got my name wrong, said they were doing things and didn’t, put me in a position where I had to quadruple check everything they did when they actually got their asses in gear and did something very sloppily, and pissed off people who have relevant documents and need to be kept sweet, that it was the former. On a day my astrology told me not to make any important decisions, I fired my lawyers. Best decision ever made. But it did leave me in legal limbo. My father’s lover wants me to do everything myself without lawyers, and she keeps pressuring me to do things her way… but transiting Saturn is sitting right on top of my natal Mars in the 3rd house, making my natural impatience suddenly very cautious. I am playing chess, looking ahead, and realising that if I act impatiently now to make this situation move forward and go away, further down the line it will be so much worse and harder to sort out than it is now.

There is an added astrological element. Saturn in Scorpio forming a mutual reception with Pluto. Apparently issues which surfaced the last time Saturn was in Scorpio, during the 80’s, will be revisited. In the 80’s, when I was in my early teens, my father cut me off without a penny. He didn’t tell me or warn me about it, he just did it. I found out when my mother tried to pay my school fees and had no funds to do so. My father, when confronted, pretended he didn’t know anything about it for a while, then admitted he’d decided it was time for me to make my own way in life. My parents were addicted to lying, so the truth is anyone’s guess. Mind you, that situation had more to do with the endless battles between my parents than with me personally, I was just hit by shrapnel as per usual. I did make my own way, as I had no option but to do so… albeit dragging my mother around like a lead weight. It’s interesting to note that, according to my father’s lover, my father wanted me to have everything when he died, to make up for things between us… but mostly because he didn’t want my mother to get her hands on anything, which is why he refused to write a will. So it goes.

Transiting Uranus is opposing my natal Uranus in the 1st and my natal Jupiter in the 2nd (which also represents personal values). So… what I have realised thus far is that I am being challenged to stand my ground. To do things my way. Trust myself and stand by myself through thick and thin. Which is not easy. I doubt myself a lot. When you grow up and spend most of your life thinking you’re a freak and don’t belong on Earth, you doubt your ability to deal with life on Earth, the inhabitants here, and all the customs and cultural quirks of society. You adapt your style to suit the environment even if it goes against every instinct and intuition. You learn to have an ego which can when need be pretend that it does not exist. An egoless ego.

I have spent many years giving in to the will of others, pushing my ego, my needs, my feelings and thoughts to one side. Mainly because most of the others whom I met were not willing to give an inch, they were entrenched in their egos, desirous of having their needs met their way, their feelings and thoughts being all important. They wanted control, especially of other people because sharing control frightened them. I hate being trapped in a stand-off. So I give way, but that does not mean I cede control. Yet that is what people think when you give way, they don’t see you as being reasonable, as moving towards them to meet them on neutral ground, they see you as a pushover. This time I am doing things very differently. No compromise. No pushing my ego aside, time to let my ego enjoy being an ego, with all the perks and stuff that includes. Not sure if this is right, but I’m going to go with it, doubting my doubts rather than doubting myself because of them. So far, this journey through hell feels awesome.

Thank you Uranus in Aries for accepting my crazy freak self and encouraging me to let it out and watch it flourish. I’m going out in a blaze of gory glory!

*Link to my astrological chart (without transits) in case you want to see it.