Profection Prep, a Diary of a Practical/Magical Practice: Prologue
“If you have, let’s say, a life-giving planet— the Ruler of the 1st, as an example, or the Sun— in the 8th, then it is not configured by classical aspect to the 1st. You can’t see it, from the Rising, and so people who have their Sun in the 8th have a hard time being seen, which is a psychological challenge. It’s hard to get the light to the surface so that other people can reflect it.”
- Austin Coppock, on The Astrology Podcast, Episode 233: “Significations of the Twelve Houses — Part 2; Houses 7-12”; December 6th, 2019
“The more you express your emotional truth in public the more vulnerable you are likely to feel and yet, this will also ultimately earn you other people’s heartfelt respect. … If your Moon is in an Air Sign (Gemini, LIbra or Aquarius) then ideas, communication, writing and teaching may appeal.”
- From the description for The Moon in 10th House on the Astrogold astrology app for iOS
When I was a little girl, I had two recurring nightmares. The first started when I was around 3 or 4-years-old, I’m not exactly sure, but it was about being in a swamp, as an explorer, searching for a bug from which could be harvested the Mosquito Needle, a huge needle used to give the most painful shots. It wasn’t the scariest nightmare, maybe a 3 on a 10 point scale. I was uncomfortable in the dream because the area was dangerous, there were alligators and snakes and huge mosquitos with huge probosces, after all, but our party never actually saw any of them. We just knew they could be nearby. By the time the new dream came, I’d come to be fairly comfortable on the hunt for the Mosquito Needle, and while the dream still held an uncomfortable atmosphere, it had stopped being a real nightmare.
I don’t remember exactly when the second nightmare replaced the first, but once it did, it was sudden, brutal, and complete. I never returned to that swamp that was always lit in the sulfurous, hot sickly yellow of an almost-sunset, the light arrested just before the clouds became ribbons of pink or burst into flame. For a long time, I felt immense regret that, in the end, I’d never found the Mosquito Needle.
But I’m vamping for time. I’m describing the first dream in finer and greater detail because I don’t want to talk about the second dream. But it is the second dream that gets to the heart of what Austin Coppock said on that episode of The Astrology Podcast, which was to me a revelation the kind one only has so many times in one’s life, the kind that feels as if time has stopped and your heart doesn’t beat and your lungs don’t work for a moment as long as eternity. It is the second dream that has haunted me my entire life, like the ghost that you can only see out of the corner of your eye, but as soon as you turn your head to look at it straight, there’s nothing there. The way my 8th House Sun and Mercury have haunted me through three previous 8th House profections and now into the last few months before my fourth. What Austin said let me finally turn and face the ghost, froze it in place so I could see it, at last, staring back at me.
“People who have their Sun in the 8th have a hard time being seen, which is a psychological challenge.”
I don’t remember when the second nightmare replaced the first, but I know I was having it at 7-years-old, in my first 8th House profection year. Whether it started that year or not, I cannot say, but for the sake of narrative (and the way that more and more I believe things really do work in the universe), let’s say that it did.
In the dream, I am in the back of an old, but perfectly maintained classic car. A convertible, with the top down, let’s say something like a 1955 T-Bird, like the one my stepfather inherited from his dad, only that one is brown, and this one is the color of French vanilla ice cream, with whipped cream, extra stuffed leather interior. The colors are all impossibly concentrated, the saturation turned up high enough to hurt your eyes, and yet there is no distortion of forms. Everything is comic book clear.
The car rolls slowly down the street, flanked on each side by cheering crowds. Confetti and streamers drift down onto the crowd and the car and me. Pieces of an exploded rainbow, floating slow and heavy like the ashes of a house fire, from a sky brighter than a robin’s egg. It is the blue of an October sky, but the sun is bright and relentless as the Summer Solstice. I know, because I will look toward the sky in desperate petition more than once before terror yanks me out of sleep by the nape of my neck.
No one is driving the car. I rush from side to side in the back seat, screaming, desperate, waving my arms in distress for someone to please, anyone, help me. The crowd cheers louder and waves back, smiling. Smiling at the pretty little girl in the pretty pink dress, sun-colored hair tied in a pretty pink ribbon, screaming, “Someone help me, please, please, no one is driving, please someone help me!”
Surely they can see my face isn’t pretty at all, distorted as it is by sobs? Surely they can see all the tears and snot in this bright summer sun? Surely someone, please, god, someone will see that something is wrong and come and save me…?
The more I signal for help, the louder they cheer, the higher they throw their hands in celebration.
The greater my panic, the greater their joy.
They aren’t cruel. They just can’t see that I am in danger.
And then I wake up.
Like the Mosquito Needle dream, I never achieve my understood objective. Unlike that first nightmare, though, I’ve never really stopped having it. It’s not as often, anymore, but every year or so, I’ll jerk awake from what I’ve come to call the Back of the Car Nightmare.
Unlike the Mosquito Needle dream, I haven’t come to kind of like the world in the new dream, and I certainly wouldn’t miss it if it was gone.
The Back of the Car Nightmare has never stopped being terrifying.
I was listening to that podcast episode because I wanted to understand the 8th House better to prepare for my upcoming 8th House profection year in December of this year, 2023.
It’s going to be rather potent, as my Sun, Mercury, and Neptune are all in my 8th House.
“People who have their Sun in the 8th have a hard time being seen, which is a psychological challenge.” Add Mercury and Neptune, and it can be an outright horror show.
My 8th House is in Sagittarius. The Sun isn’t super comfortable in Sagittarius, nestled in the middle of Scorpio and Capricorn, between the Sun’s Fall in Libra, and its Detriment in Aquarius.
But Mercury, the planet of communication, of language, of writing, of speaking, of learning, of defining, of understanding… Mercury finds itself exiled in Sagittarius. And my Mercury is as far from home as it can be, not even conjunct the burning underground Sun and hazy, reality-melting Neptune, but co-present only by sign. Separated by more than 10º and the better part of two bounds. Exiled even within its exile.
Mercury doesn’t even have any planets to weakly support in the Houses it rules in my chart, not even any asteroids like Chiron or points in space like the Nodes. All it gets is three Trans-Neptunian planets: Kronos in Gemini, and Vesta and Zeus in Virgo. My poor afflicted, exiled Mercury, friendless in the foreign land of Sagittarius, in the Haunted House of Death, Addiction, Debt, and Darkness, doesn’t even have any friends back home.
And yet every description I’d ever read of Mercury in Sagittarius was absurdly upbeat. A born philosopher! A seeker of knowledge! A big picture thinker! An interest in the spiritual! The descriptions of Mercury in the 8th were even more confounding, even gaslighting. “You have a gift for communicating [A HA HA HA HA HA] about the deeper, more penetrating mysteries of life.” “You want to get to the bottom of things, to understand the meaning of life.” “You may be fascinated by sex and death.” (OK, that one is true, but that’s my Venus in Scorpio— afflicted, yes, but not nearly as isolated and alone as my poor Mercury.)
In many ways, I am already better prepared to enter the Haunted House this coming year than I was at 7, 19, or 31. I am in therapy, where I have cried so many, many times in despair of ever feeling understood. I want to, I even think I am being transparent, communicating clearly and directly, in relationships, with friends, with partners, with bosses, with family. And yet again and again, throughout my life, I have heard the same accusations. Even when I thought I was way too old for anyone to say things like, “You want to be misunderstood.” “You go out of your way to be incomprehensible.” “You try so hard not to be like anyone else.”
I needed someone to tell me the truth. I needed someone to say, “You are most misunderstood by the people closest to you, because they can’t see you when they get to that angle. Because the closer someone gets to you, the more obscured your communication becomes. Your words, your ideas, your thoughts are bound, exiled, and buried in the dark.”
I went searching for the meaning of the 8th House and came out realizing that the foolishness of these popular “No placements are bad placements, they’re just challenges, and that’s just another word for opportunities!” I’d read and heard for years had set me up. I was about to go into this profection year like Lucy Westenra sleep-walking straight into an unquiet grave.
Well. FUCK. THAT.
As of tonight, I have 3 cycles of the Moon to prepare. It’s not as many as I’d like, but it’s more than I’ve ever had before. To strengthen my relationship with Mercury. To make a little pinhole in the wall of the 8th House through which the Sun can shine. To find ways to guide the floods of Neptune so that they hydrate and nourish, rather than drown and destroy. And we’re going to shore up the various practical, physical-rather-than-metaphysical concerns that the 8th House rules as much as we can. No, we can’t stand against death, but we can make plans to tackle debt, prepare for inheritances, and be wary of heading down dark paths… or at least well armed if we choose to do so.
Step one begins with a kind of Mercury courting bootcamp, while the planet is in Virgo, the sign of its Domicile and Exaltation (Mercury is the only one who plays favorites with its domiciles).
First this written piece tonight, with the New Moon also in Virgo. With the beginnings of “speaking my emotional truth” in a way that makes my Aquarius Moon in the 10th House feel vulnerable as hell, but which may finally let me be understood.
Tomorrow, as Mercury stations direct: a ritual cleansing and consecration of myself as an acolyte to Mercury.
Sunday, as Mercury trines Jupiter, the planet of abundance, in Taurus in my 1st House: a ritual feast of foods and flavors ruled by Mercury.
As I go, I will learn how to do everything else. Yes, this is the Sagittarius way, building the plane in the air… but the benefit of this approach is that studying astrology is in itself a way to improve one’s relationship to Mercury. And writing about it, documenting it, and doing so publicly(ish), is me forcing myself into the spotlight of the Sun.
See, we can find a way to actually join the strengths of Centaur and the Messenger while mediating their differences. Together, we can find a way to let light into and out of the Haunted House. I hope you’ll join me on this journey. I hope you’ll make recommendations and teach me things that will help me leading into this year and as I navigate through it.
Welcome to Profection Prep.
