The Twelfth House People

Twelfth house people discover how the world works early in life – mapping it out and knowing all the rules. It’s just not the world everyone else lives in. Paranormality is their norm. They move through life as if it were a shamanic journey, and they’re sleeping somewhere else. Their cosmic consciousness is innate, an organic awareness that others go crazy trying to attain.

One person’s “and then I spent a year at a retreat/did Ayuahuasca again/took up sacred chanting” is the 12th house person’s peak spiritual experience at the supermarket/saw Buddha in the bathroom at the club/astral-traveled-by-mistake-last-night experience. They assume everyone sees ghosts or visions and then stop talking about it once they realize it gets them in trouble. Twelfth house people often get more camaraderie from animals and deities than they do from fellow humans.

Supernatural things occur to and around them all the time, and no, they can’t place it in a religious context. Nor do they need to join a magical group, memorize chants and start summoning things up. The 12th house in astrology is your esoteric roots. It is the soul sector. Classically, it’s also the domain of concealed enemies instead of the open ones of the 7th house. It can sound terrifying, as if people with a concentration here will be stalked night and day by mysterious foes.

Paranormality Is Their Norm

But let’s break this down a tad. Certain characters envy the 12th house person’s aplomb with magic and astral realms but they’ll never admit it. They’ll behave perfectly – even obsequiously – to someone’s face and let rip with the slander when they’re out of range. 12th housers are not usually brash or confrontational, so they’re unlikely to have overt enemies. Hence the importance of trusting vibe over words.

If you want to go full throttle with this, say the person with a loaded 12th house has a strong spiritual lineage, cosmic guidance, and subliminal recall of occult powers/supernatural experiences from other times. If you’re all that, then, of course, you’d have a few grubby low-life entities lurking around still stinging from a spat in another era. Twelfth house people naturally gravitate to aura and space protection, but excessive use of drugs, including alcohol, leaves them energetically unguarded.

Leaving aside the fact that they don’t really need mind-altering substances as their mind is already alt-dimensional, some 12th house people see themselves as psychonauts, exploring the edges of consciousness or narco-philosophers: Terence McKenna, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg had huge soul sectors,  a massive capacity for drugs and agreed on something they called “the syntactical nature of reality.” Too intensive to go into here, it drew in chaos magic, synchronicity, hallucinogens, and hieroglyphics.

Post-Saturn Return, Frank Ocean seems to be embodying his 12th house Mercury, Sun, and Pluto conjunction more by the day. This is from the Rolling Stone review of Blonde.

“dreaming a thought that could dream about a thought that could think of the dreamer that thought,” he half-raps — then eats some mushrooms and, in a lovely poetic flash, watches “light hang-glide off the moon.” (Ocean’s dealer should put this verse on his business card: His product is clearly phenomenal.)

As I said in The Truth About 12th House Transits, this sector of the birth chart has a bad reputation because of how alt-consciousness and magic were punished in the past 2000 years or so. It’s not so much that the 12th is associated with ‘confinement and prisons’ etc, as that people were routinely exiled, imprisoned, or executed for awareness of other realms.  Deep in their bones, the 12th House person interprets that “you’re weird” glance as a danger alert.

When free, they’re philosophers, shamans, healers, artists, and visionaries – regardless of their official identity or vocation.

“The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe. Beyond the vibrations with which we are familiar, the rainbow-like range of its colours is still in full growth. But, for all the fascination that the lower shades have for us, it is only towards the “ultra” that the creation of light advances. It is in these invisible and, we might almost say, immaterial zones that we can look for true initiation into unity. The depths we attribute to matter are no more than the reflection of the peaks of spirit.”

Pierre de Teilhard Chardin, the Jesuit priest-philosopher-scientist who wrote the words above, was a rarity. Naturally, the Vatican condemned and banned him, but he would have fared far worse in any previous century. He had the Sun, Moon, Venus, Neptune, and Pluto in the 12th.

Artists with prominent 12th houses don’t simply do work that ‘lives on’ – their movies, music, and literature haunt people. It is as if they wove a beautiful ghost into it that would keep operating after they transferred dimensions. Watching, listening, or reading feels like a spell. This is the realm of Iris Murdoch, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Agnes Varda, and Leonard Cohen.

Even allowing for the fact that many well-known people don’t have their birth time on public record, there is a shortage of 12th house-dominant celebrities. Think about it: they’re reclusive by temperament and have a refined, poetic psyche that shrinks away from publicity junkets and their coarse interrogations. LED lighting fries their aura. They’re also scarily attuned to frequencies, find solitude rewarding, and guard a multitude of secrets. It’s not the innate profile of a publicity-hustler.

Bad Lighting Fries Their Aura

The ones who are mega-famous – Charlize Theron, Keanu Reeves, and Joe Biden spring to mind – are stringent with privacy, regardless of media exposure. As GQ magazine observed, “Keanu Reeves has managed to pull off the nearly impossible feat of remaining an enigmatic cult figure despite having been an A-list actor for decades.”

When Twelfth house people are involved in a scandal, mystery, or leak, it’s ultra bizarre. Examples include Julian Assange, Christine Keeler, the ‘call-girl’ at the center of Britain’s government-quaking Profumo Affair, and the heiress Sunny Von Bulow who died after nearly 30 years spent in a coma that may have been initiated by her husband, who was charged with her murder but never convicted.

In 1967, Harold Holt – then the Prime Minister of Australia – disappeared off a beach, prompting Australian history’s biggest search. His body has never been found and the unsolved mystery has spawned many a conspiracy theory. Holt had the Sun, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter in the 12th house, all in Leo.

Even when they seem ostensibly ‘normal,’ they’re not. The person with the most crowded 12th house in history is Ann Margret, a Swedish born actor best known for her iconic Easy Rider bike scene and starring in Viva Las Vegas alongside Elvis Presley.

Ninety-three percent of her astro is in the 12th: the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Lilith, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. She’s been working non-stop in the entertainment industry for six decades, despite being maligned as a bimbo and written off countless times. Even allowing for her multi-Taurean robustness, that’s hardly the stunt of an overly sensitive empath. What are her 12th house credentials?

Reality Is A Possibility They Cannot Ignore

Well, she was raised in a funeral parlor, her mother having secured them free board in exchange for cleaning. They slept alongside the caskets at night. She was one of the first celebrities to talk openly about her ‘secret battle with booze,’ as well as the psychotherapy that helped her give it up.

Dr. Ruth – Ruth Westheimer, another 12th houser – has a similar knack of bringing taboo topics into popular consciousness. Ann Margret literally never goes to restaurants or events (and never has unless she is under contract to attend something) but still rides her motorbike around the Hollywood hills at night.

She was also the secret lover of Elvis – “we were indeed soul mates, shy on the outside, but unbridled within…that we both possessed the devil, nobody knew.” Ann Margret was later devotedly married for ages, but clandestine love affairs intrigue many 12th house people. They like the built-in privacy, lack of obligatory social events or wifework, and automatic personal space.

They come across as trippy, half in one dimension, half in another, and then stun everyone with their pragmatism.  As Leonard Cohen (Sun, Venus, and Neptune in the 12th) said, “reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore.”

*A Twelfth house person is someone with three or more of the following points in their natal 12th house:  the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Chiron. The ruler of the birth chart counts for two.