9th and 12th Houses - How Far is Foreign?
An insight, that adds to depth of understanding of Astrology through diving into Vedic resources is the change in perception between the 12th and the 9th house.
In popular Astrology circles, both of these houses are commonly associated with foreign lands. However, as you explore the meaning of these houses more, you begin to understand them deeper in polarity with their opposite.
The actual house of foreign, far away travel (or relocation, depending on the chart) is the 9th house. That is because the 9th house is the opposite of the 3rd house.
Say you are European, and you lived your whole life in Europe, and you travelled around different European countries to explore the continent. This is the 3rd house. It is the expansion beyond your local home country into exploring its nearest cultural environment, and at the end of such a pilgrimage, you end up with a personal understanding of your individual, cultural identity, which moves you to its emotional interpretation in the 4th house.
But then lets say you travel or move from Europe to Asia, either of the American continents, Australia…take your pick. This is the activation of the 9th house. Because you are no longer exploring just the back yard of a culture with a certain degree of similarity, you are entering a completely new physical world.
This is why houses 9, 10 and 11, and 12th to an extent, are found in charts of famous people. You need to be able to participate in an energy, an idea, that is going to spread into foreign lands to truly be famous. This applies even if we’re talking about online success, which is the way people get recognition nowadays. Otherwise, you are at best a local singer on your continent or your country’s music festival. There is nothing wrong with that of course, as many people love to contribute to their community and they’re happy doing so, but it’s still an accurate observation. You need to be able to go far away, not strictly physically but energetically, to touch a variety of people from many cultures.
You might wonder, how does the 12th house fit into this? Clearly, it’s part of the whole 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th house group, so it should also rule foreign lands. But the 12th house is actually more than that. The 12th house rules a fantastical, foreign idea, that might not necessarily be grounded in the immediate physical, but is nevertheless energetically real and can be accessed from anywhere. It’s the idea of the collective emotional consciousness, that may not have the most quick and obvious material manifestation but is nevertheless a very real thing existing within this Universe.
Up until the 11th house, through 9th and 10th, we are dealing with more or less tangible ideas regarding foreign lands. Let’s say in the 9th house you relocated to a completely foreign culture, in the 10th house you found a way to tangibly join the most prominent physical environment of the world through that culture, in the 11th house you met some of the most prominent, affluent people in the world. I don’t have any 11th house planets, but to give you an idea of how it works, my husband has Venus conjunct Mars in the 11th house, we live in the Las Vegas area, and he plays sports and is casually friendly with some of the wealthiest people in the world, who own successful businesses, own several properties across the world, and spend a lot of their time either making a lot of money or travelling the world, or both. We are not one of those people, but it should give you an idea of what the 11th house is. It’s the creme de la creme of the physical world. I don’t personally interact much with these people, as they are my husband’s friends, not mine, and I don’t play sports with them, but I have a deep awareness of how advanced socially and financially this particular group is, having travelled to many poorer parts of the world. There are people in this world, starving, so in comparison to them, the 11th house society is the top 1% of 1%.
You might think, well, the 11th house is everything, so how can the 12th house be more? The 12th house is more because it sells something even the 11th house people can’t resist, it sells the ultimate fantasy.
In the 12th house we move on to people so wealthy, they barely even interact with others. We move to intangible concepts, physical areas and objects, that provoke people to spend obscene amounts of money simply due to some idea. The 12th house is not just real foreign travel like the 9th house, it is the embodiment of the realisation of all fantasies. That is why Venus is so happy in the 12th house, because it enjoys the ultimate idea of fantastical luxury.
The foreign area that we travel to in the 12th house is not this globe, it is deep inside us. By the time we realise all our fantasies in the 11th house we can feel tired, or even jaded. But in the 12th house we are stimulated to all of our secret, hidden desires being provoked and coming true. This can be done not only within our home, within our room, but completely within our minds. Those, who are successful in the 12th house are those, who made those fantasies concrete enough to realise them and live within them.
What if you could taste and smell the finest perfume created on this planet from purely natural oils? What if you could touch the finest fabrics, created in corners of the world you never even dreamed of? What if you could live this dream, every day, surrounded by an infinite kaleidoscope of the pinnacle of perfection achieved by our planet until this time? “What if?” is the exotic, “foreign”, “far away” dream of the 12th house, and a well realised 12th house is a dream come true.
To offer up an example, in the last few years, youtubers living in rural areas from all over the world have popped up on the internet, offering videos from their seemingly idyllic life. That is the definition of the 12th house fantasy, devoid of the actually reality of having to take the 9th house physical pilgrimage of travelling to rural China and enduring all the difficulties involved with facing the reality of such a location. It may seem idealised, yet the source material for filming is real, so while it may be distant from the viewers geographically, while it may cost the locals a lot of work, it is nevertheless part of an actual, existing reality.
This dream, that can seem excessive to a mundane mind, becomes even clearer in the context of the 12th house’s polarity, the 6th house. The 6th house is the tough battle of dealing with the ugliness and conflict of this world. That is the reality of this physical world for most of us, we get up every day and deal with conflicts, that we have in front of us. It is exhausting, and so the 12th house is everything that heals and soothes the pain of any conflict that ravaged us in the 6th house. It’s the world offering no resistance, it’s all boundaries being breached. After all, in our dreams, or fantasies, we want everything to be perfect and smooth.
Ironically enough, the karaka of the 12th house is Saturn. As someone with significant 12th house influence, it is pretty clear to me why. In order to have only the finest dream come true, to really live in a beautiful fantasy, one actually needs to do a lot of research, be picky, critical and have background expertise and know-how. Otherwise, even as just a consumer, you would be easily fooled, hoodwinked into a fake product, or end up overpaying on something, that is not worth the money you invest into it. Scrutiny of Saturn is necessary for our fantasies to be smooth. It is not something, that is given to us that easily. Saturn also rules isolation, and if the 9th house is foreign, the 12th house is the pinnacle of remote. The 9th house is what is foreign and exciting to us, mentally and physically, but the 12th house represents the most remote corners of both the physical world, and our minds.
This is why the 12th house is the furthest away from the 1st house, our basic, natural, physical life. Because the furthest thing on this planet is not just a foreign continent, it’s a journey inside our minds and emotions, the ability to blend discernment and internal surrender to divine perfection, that leads to manifestation. It is the full depth of untapped potential on the very bottom of our subconscious, a research and response to all collective energetic resources available on the planet, a gold mine waiting to be explored, exploited, and enjoyed. And it is tapping into this gold mine, that has the power to tempt, seduce, and attract people from all around the world into directing their energy towards us, even if we’re physically just sitting in our room, far away from them.
