CADENT HOUSES: THE HORROR OF INHABITATION
In my last post about the cadent houses, I briefly explained their uncontrollable nature and inherent “futility.” Their open-ended energy, while brimming with opportunity, can be deeply disconcerting to us. The cadent houses are liminal; liminality is at the core of everything that humanity fears. The “thresholds” of reality, and the “unknown” that lies between or beyond, are key elements of all that is frightening, shocking, or disgusting to the structure of our hyper-focused consciousness. We seek to understand and to control, but in the cadent houses, we are at a loss of power and a great disadvantage because those realms don’t belong to us… yet we’re irreversibly intertwined with them. They’re inescapable, largely because they define the very perimeters of existence. We feel threatened by these perimeters because the truth about our lives comes into question, and we are fundamentally incapable of settling on an answer.
3 & 9: the horror of inhabiting one’s environment
OBJECTIVE PHYSICALITY: Themes of Motion & Presence
In the 3rd house, you are one small being amidst a chaotic hive of other small beings, all moving and reacting to one another. When you speak, you cannot control how your words are received by others or the impact they have on them; you cannot take your words back after they’re uttered. When you travel, even short distances, you cannot control the trajectories of objects in your orbit, and you cannot reverse collisions when they happen. You don’t control the elements outside of your body or personal actions, and you can’t anticipate the random events that occur around you. You are at the mercy of the passage and the permanence of time, and of the collective “living” of everything surrounding you.
In the 9th house, you are adrift in the stream of your culture, and you have very little power against the course of nature you’re caught in; no single person can change the world, certainly not just you. You are unable to control humanity as a whole – you can only be responsible for yourself. Your life will largely be determined by your circumstances, which you didn’t choose, and by decisions that were made far, far above you. When you take part in society, it becomes clear how inconsequential your beliefs & desires may be; everybody is wrestling their insignificance, clamoring to speak over one another as we seek to decide our own fates rather than succumb to the fate selected by collective chance. Happiness, freedom, and fulfillment may be entirely in the hands of luck.
6 & 12: the horror of inhabiting one’s own body
SUBJECTIVE PHYSICALITY: Themes of Consciousness & Self-Awareness
In the 6th house, you are a strange mind trapped inside a fragile form that dominates you. You did not choose any of this: you did not choose the way you look or the way you feel. You are a product of your body and you answer to it in all things. You do not choose to have a rash, to get hungry, to get tired; you do not choose to contract a disease or to deteriorate. It happens to you and you are forced to cope. This is an experience you inherited from the chaos that birthed you and now it’s entirely your responsibility to survive, to function properly, to give back what you “owe” to the forces that allowed you to exist simply because they allowed you to exist. In many ways, you are in perpetual service (arguably slavery) to your body and to the circumstance in which your body came to be.
In the 12th house, “you” are only a fraction of your whole self. There is an immeasurable unknown inside of you that you may never reach, understand, hone or control. Your consciousness is not fully within your grasp; you are having thoughts and enduring experiences under the surface which you cannot even perceive or interpret or claim to be yours. You’re living without your own permission; many of your traits, your affinities and aversions, your desires and fears, are determined by responses you had to things in your life that you were never aware of or can no longer remember. You are alive & growing & changing even in your sleep, when anything can happen and you do not have your hands on the steering wheel. Your mind is largely unattainable to you. There is always a monumental portion of your being and your existence that will be far away.
The horrors of the cadent houses are not typically experienced in a direct, frequent, or totally-cognizant way, because we don’t spend much time dwelling in their realms to the fullest extent. That is their nature, being liminal – we pass through, leaving before we get too uncomfortable. They are our “borders.” We do not like to linger at borders for long. Planets in these houses take special attention in order to even feel seen (let alone healthy or valued) because they are often glossed over and left in the dust while we concentrate on what we can grasp comfortably, what we feel stable standing on. People with heavy cadent influence tend not to feel very stable, because the entities of their being (planets) are swept away into a vast, vague mindscape and trapped “in-between.” They are often drawn to aspects of life or personal vocations which call them into contact with these spheres so that they can come into truer, fuller contact with themselves – fiction, exploration, and innovation in mysterious, impressionistic, often terrifying fields may become prized hobbies or careers for them, and they often become the unacknowledged pioneers who push the envelope in society.
