What's in *your* subconscious?

There's ten planets. There's 12 houses. Nine houses are pretty easy to talk about and point to and say "tenth house stuff is career! Or social standing if you don't have a career!" Easy. Accessible. But then we come to the water houses: 4, 8, and 12. No one except the chart holder can know for sure what's going on with them, and even then, it can be confusing. Especially the 12th house, because it's the one house that's extremely subconscious. I'd argue that the 8th house is pretty freaking subconscious as well, but today I'm talking about the 12th. (This image highlights where the 12th house is so you can check your own chart to see if there’s anything in there. Or you can ask me.)

Maybe 50% of people have one or more 12th house planet, so if you're not in that population, you might not resonate with what I'm writing today, but you may know and love someone with 12th house planets, so it might help you to become familiar with them. Basically, if *you* have conscious access to a planetary function, it's hard to fathom how someone else wouldn't be consciously aware of what you're extremely aware of.

There's a really, really good book about 12th house planets: Your Secret Self: Illuminating the Mysteries of the Twelfth House by Tracy Marks. If you have 12th house planets, get that book. I personally refer to it often. But here's an overgeneralization inspired by her work to get you started (again, there are entire sections devoted to each in the book):

In the 12th house:

Sun: highly sensitive person who struggles to share inner experience with others.Moon: private person who struggles to share inner feelings and needs.Mercury: introspective and easily overstimulated.Venus: desire and relating to others are inconsistent and confusing.Mars: constant states of internal excitement and restlessness are hard to translate to outer action.Jupiter: inconsistent access to faith, optimism, perspective.Saturn: inconsistent access to ability to structure reality. Sometimes acts as a guilt vacuum, absorbing other peoples' despair at their own inadequacies and compounding yours, other times no access to a sense of personal responsibility at all.Uranus: Good luck sleeping if you have this one. The awakener of the cosmos in the house of sleep. Hides nonconformist tendencies.Neptune: Deep compassion but deep vulnerability. Sometimes feels unable or unwilling to effect change (a "what's the point, everything falls apart anyway" outlook).Pluto: intermittent access to a feeling of empowerment. Can manifest as absolutely crazy dreams or psychic abilities. The south node: accustomed to being overwhelmed by forces beyond your control/in your environment. Similar to Neptune there, can give up easily, wondering what the point of trying is.The north node: needing to learn to seek respite by unplugging from being hyper-fixated on detail and order (6th house matters, as the 6th house/south node opposes this).

Basically, having planets natally or by transit in your 12th house connects you to the collective unconscious that we all exist in, and sensitizes you to that energy. If it's in your natal chart, you have this connection for life, and if it's by transit, it's temporary. The planet in question has something to say about HOW you connect. The problem is that you can't disconnect from the collective unconscious, as much as you might want to sometimes. A 12th house Saturn might be aware of everyone else's sense of their shortcomings or inadequacies. A 12th house moon can pick up other peoples' feelings without realizing that's what they're doing. I knew a 12th house Mercury who was CONSTANTLY quoting other people, books, movies, etc. as situationally appropriate, but it was as though he had an internal mental web of reference material that was organized by emotion. If that last sentence didn't make any sense to you, it's at least partially because I'm still confused about exactly how his mind works.

The 12th house is the house Neptune rules, so if you have a planet in hard aspect to Neptune (conjunct, square, opposite), the definitions in the section about that planet will also resonate with you, and, in fact, might be a more concentrated version, because pure Neptune is a lot, regardless of where it's found.

The reason I'm (really) big on encouraging people to learn about their 12th house planet(s) is because the self-understanding that comes from it is SO valuable. I have two planets in the 12th house and a moon-Neptune conjunction, and as I learned astrology, I had all of these a-ha moments of "oh THAT'S why I'm like this? That's why I get overwhelmed by stuff that other people seem to be able to handle easily? That's why I have trouble sleeping?" etc. Once you understand that you need more alone time to process than most people (true of anyone with a 12th house something, but again, what that something is is indicative of what needs to be processed) it's so much easier to achieve self-acceptance and stop fighting your inherent needs.

The 12th house or Neptune influence confers inconsistent access to whatever planetary function you've got going on there. Sometimes (usually when you're alone or quiet or in a meditative state) you have easy access to it, and other times it seems to have abandoned you. Moon is feelings, so most "normal" people know how they feel about stuff. I need alone time and usually about a day to digest how I feel about some new development, and when I'm out in the world, living my life, I have almost no access to my feelings: I pick up what everyone else is feeling, instead. That sounds insane, right? But unless I get some quiet time to sort out who I've been around that day (which is detective work to figure out whose feelings belong to whom) I'm a mess. Only after I filter out other peoples' feelings can I begin to know how I feel.

Finally, something fascinating: as you know, the 12th house is connected to the first house by the ascendant. If someone has a planet in the 12th house but close to the ascendant (less than 10 degrees, but the closer it is, the stronger it is), they will seem to embody that planet and function, but will not have self-awareness about it or conscious access to it, especially when they're younger. Easiest example: Mars. A Mars close to the ascendant will seem combative, but the 12th house Mars person will not know or recognize themselves as combative and wonder why they're always getting into fights. Their impulse will always have something to do with a me vs. them orientation, but again, the awareness won't be there unless they learn to recognize their own patterns. Our 45th president has this aspect, incidentally. Put that Mars on the other side of the line but in the 1st house, and a person with that aspect will know full well that they're combative and why. As with most astrological phenomena, it's weird that it works like this.

Seriously, though, if you have one or more 12th house planets, get that book. You will have more than one OMG moment. Tracy Marks isn't paying me to say this.

XO,J

P.S. Credit where it’s due: I did not violently disagree with The Cut’s Mars retrograde article.