8th House Aquarius Sun-Saturn-Mercury, It’s effects and how to counter act.

House 8 was considered a negative house, because it does not aspect the ascendent. The ascendant and house 1 represent the eastern horizon, which is the place where the sun rises and where the light symbolically enters the chart. The places without an aspect to this point where seen as unconnected to the energy of the sun and the self, which made them weak or negative. Planets in house 8 will have some difficulty manifesting their meanings. The strongest planet in your stellium is Saturn, who is in his own sign. Saturn signifies limits, time, delays, fears, distance and cold. He is a difficult planet in a difficult house.

I was thinking about Saturn, when a collection of zen-stories called “the gateless gate” came to mind. Saturn represents limits, but some limits do not have to be problems. If your are walking down the street and the road is somehow blocked, you can generally take another route. If a certain option doesn’t work out, you can try something else. You can work around a lot of limits, but the most Saturnian limits are like “the gateless gate.” Meaning: you have to pass some obstacle, but you can not. There are no other options. Or there seem to be at first, but you discover – after trying them – that they do not really solve the dilemma. You somehow keep ending up in the same place, facing a gateless gate. At that moment you might think the solution is to wait.

Saturn signifies patience, because one way of dealing with limits is having patience. In a way, this is a safe option, because if you can not work around the problem, having patience can be a realistic approach to the situation. The problem with doing nothing is that most things in life are moving. You have to go to work, pay the bills, interact with people and respond to all kinds of things that are happening around you. Even within yourself, thoughts, feelings and motivations are generally changing from day to day or even faster. So trying to beat the gateless gate by being an unmovable object is sort of an illusion. A lot of problems – not paying the bills for example – only become more pressing if you do nothing.

So you can not do something and can not do nothing. I think this is where Saturn’s meaning of loneliness comes in. In the end, all the good advice from others and your own attempts at avoiding the problem, working around the problem and waiting for the problem to go away, do not get you beyond the Saturnian limit. You are stuck with yourself and there is no quick fix. You are forced to act and are forced to have patience. Something has to change, but you do not know what or how. A lot of times, you can only see clearly what actually happened, long after the situation has passed. In some sense, working with Saturn symbolizes the process of becoming an individual by being confronted with personal limits in a way that – radically – throws us back on ourselves.