The Charm of 12th House Planets

A conversation with Ada Pembroke and Augustus Watkins.

Ada: Hey, I'm Ada Pembroke. I'm an astrologer and a writer, and I'm here with Augustus Watkins.

Augustus: Hi, Ada.

Ada: So we are here today to talk about the 12th house.

Augustus: I think, like a lot of people who are in your orbit, the work you've done in the 12th house has really been formative and informative to a lot of us. I think I'm on record as saying it was your work in the 12th house that made me fall in love with you. That's why I'm here. You've done a lot of work writing about the 12th house on your blog.

Ada: Yeah. It's really interesting, actually, that I've become this, like, 12th house person, because in my natal chart I don't have anything natally in the 12th house. So I actually got into being a 12th house astrologer because there's a bit of a story with this. In 2019, 2020 or so, I had a really good friend who had the sun in the 12th house, and I loved them to pieces, but they were so obnoxious because they had absolutely no idea the impact that they had on people

We ran a Discord server together, and every other day they would go in and completely remake the server, which — you know, during Covid, when everybody was living online — felt a little bit like waking up and suddenly being in Oz. Like, where's the conversation that was happening? Where are my friends? And I knew that it came from this 12th house sun and this belief that nothing they ever did was ever going to impact the world at all.

So I sat down and talked with them, and I was like, look, you really need to understand how this works. And they weren't getting it. And so I was like, can I write you something, without it being passive aggressive? And they were like, okay, okay, okay. And so it turned into this 12th house sun post that I wrote up really fast and put up on my blog. And it ended up bringing me all of these wonderful people, including you. And it was totally not something I sat down and was like, I'm going to do marketing for my astrology practice. I was just like, I am so pissed off about this situation, and I want my friend to understand.

So at the top of the post there's this part that's in italics, and that is literally a copy-paste of what I told my friend. I said:

You are the heart of this community. When you were there, it lives. When you're gone, it dies. Nobody else has that power. I try to revive the community when you're gone, and everybody looks at me like I'm a spleen trying to pump blood. And they're right. Your presence is the light that the community orbits around. You pull things into shape with your gravity. People follow your lead, and the energy in the place goes through the roof when you're around. And you can't see the shadows when you're gone, because you take the light with you.

Augustus: Let's give a brief overview of your version of what the 12th house is. Let's do some housekeeping — just, what is the 12th house, what are its domains, what kinds of topics are associated with it? Let's start with that.

Ada: Yeah. So there's what everybody says about the 12th house, and then there's what I say about the 12th house.

Augustus: Yes. And that's why we're here.

Ada: I am a bit of an astrology heretic. I've got the moon and Jupiter in Aquarius. And so I'm always like, all right, everybody else has this stuff covered. What are people not saying about these placements, and what's the real truth behind it all?

When you hear about 12th house sun stuff, you hear a lot about people being invisible, needing to be spiritual, being in hiding, being deeply introverted. Because people find me through that article, I don't hear from any of those people. If they don't resonate with the article, they're like, yeah, that's not me, and they're literally invisible to me. So if you have a 12th house sun and you're watching this and you're like, what the heck is she saying, that doesn't match my experience at all, this is very much filtered through my subjective experience of putting that article out there and only hearing from the people it resonates with.

But I hear enough from the people who resonate with my point of view that I think there's a legitimate hole in the story of the 12th house, especially the 12th house sun. My perspective is not that you're deeply introverted, or you need to be in hiding, or nobody can see you. I actually go with what's going on physically in the sky with the 12th house.

People talk about the first house as the way that you dawn on people. But the truth is, when you look at the sky and go looking for the first house — the place where the sun actually rises on the horizon in the morning — you can't see it, unless you're in Kansas, because it's hidden behind mountains or buildings or trees or whatever. Most places except Kansas. Sorry to exclude you, Kansas. You aren't actually going to see the sun or any planets until they've gotten to the point of the 12th house. So what the 12th house is, in the sky, is the place where planets are actually first appearing — but the appearance is more like the back of your neck than the front of your face.

Or, using another metaphor: it's like you've just rolled out of bed. You haven't had a chance to brush your hair or your teeth or have coffee, and you're answering the door. You have no idea how you look. You have no idea how you're dawning on people. And yet there you are, shining.

Augustus: That's a really interesting metaphor for the 12th house. Those of us who have had a partner over the years — you see your partner first thing in the morning and you're like, God, you are beautiful first thing in the morning. We've all experienced that moment in love, right? And many of us have been lucky enough to have someone say that to us, and you're like, I am a disgusting troll at the best of times, do not perceive me first thing in the morning. But there's that moment where your eyes open and you're just like, God, I can't believe this magnificent creature is next to me. And that disconnect you're talking about — between how beautiful you actually can be in your natural state versus how unready you can feel to be perceived — might describe that tension really well.

Ada: That's exactly it. Because of that unselfconscious quality you have when you've just woken up — in life, you just are who you are. And if you're surrounded by people who are like, this isn't for me, it's going to drive you to drink. In my opinion, that is why the 12th house is associated with alcoholism: because people are not in the environments they need to be in.

Augustus: This is coming to me as we're recording, and I'm like, oh my God.

Ada: People are not in the environments they need to be in, and they either don't know how to get away, or they think that this is just the way the world is and they have no means of escape.

The flip side of that 12th house unawareness — picking up where you said — is that the people who are the most cool, the most attractive, are the people who have no idea that they're attractive. There's nothing more obnoxious than somebody walking into the room who's like, I am amazing, and you will bow down to me. We all know people like that. And because the 12th house is a part of you that's like the back of your neck, you have a hard time seeing it. It's hard to know how awesome you are, how smart you are if you have Mercury there, how beautiful you are if you have Venus there, how protective of your people you are if you have Mars there, how much you shine if you have the sun there.

I don't want to fall into the narrative on either side of the 12th house — either it being a beautiful cakewalk, because everything, when you get down to it, is complicated and difficult — but also, at the same time, 12th house planets are a real gift to the people around you. And if you understand how they work — at the risk of being super arrogant, because I don't have any natal 12th house placements — I think it could be a gift to you, too. If you can learn to trust it and use it as a filter: finding the people who love you and trusting what they say, even if you can't see it for yourself.

Augustus: There's so much there. To me, as a person with 12th house planets, it seems like there's a lot of acting as if, when it's working correctly — acting as if you shine, acting as if you know how you're dawning on others, because you've gotten that kind of feedback. Moving through the world by feel as opposed to that intuitive sense.

I have a 12th house sun conjunct a 12th house Mars, and my moon is also sitting in the 12th house. So I am just a big old ball of 12th house energy, if we can call it that. And one of the things you've described does resonate with me. One of the things I say to illustrate this — and I may have said this to you when you first looked at my chart, when I first hired you for Tea With an Astrologer — you looked at my 12th house and remarked on it, and I said, as I often do: I am certainly having a spiritual experience in this lifetime, but whatever spiritual experience I'm having is none of my business.

Ada: I'm sure I said that, but I didn't remember — which means I get to experience this brilliance all over again. That is the unselfconscious quality I was just talking about. 

Augustus: How much I shine is none of my business. My spiritual experience is none of my business. Not up to me, man. Whatever's going on. 

And because of that 12th house experience — a lot of people with 12th house placements will have this feeling that the 12th house can be a little bit invisible to you. If you have prominent 12th house placements, wherever they are, that describes it well: you don't see how you shine, for instance, with a 12th house sun. If you have a lot of any 12th house placement, I'd say expect that you're going to be the last person who really understands how it's working. But simultaneously — and this is the paradox of the 12th house — you're the only person who really understands it. And when it finally dawns on you, to use a metaphor, it'll be like coming home. Like, of course it's that way. I didn't change my perspective; it just gave words to a perspective I always had.

Ada: Yeah. You raised such an important point — the difference between what it's like to experience it on the inside and what it's like to be with someone who has that placement, on the outside. I can't speak to the experience of being a person with those placements on the inside. That's one of the reasons I love talking to you: I have this perspective and you have this other perspective, and when we talk, we can try to translate our experiences. Which is important for everybody, but especially for people with 12th house placements.

What I'm saying about not knowing how you dawn on people and not knowing how much you shine, and having these qualities that are none of your business — that might be what the symbols say, but that doesn't necessarily describe how it feels. When you first came on my radar, you really seemed like the kind of person who understood how you dawned on people. I don't know if that's how it felt on the inside, but I was like, wow — at the risk of dating myself badly — this is a person who understands personal branding. Your brand was very loud. It was very clean. I can't say I knew exactly who you were from your profile and your pictures, but I felt like I knew exactly who you were, and everything felt clean and clear and consistent. So — is that what you felt, a year or two ago?

Augustus: Oh, God. No. Oh, God, no.

I pulled some quotes — as I texted you the other day, I'm an expert on Ada's expertise on the 12th house now. I've read everything you've published about the 12th house. I hope we'll put some links to that, and I hope people will check it out if they're interested, because I think you do a lot of really interesting work in the 12th house.

In "Mercury in the 12th House: You Don't Know How Smart You Are," you said: lack of perspective is a challenge for every planet in the 12th house. They all struggle to see themselves clearly, in different ways. That's my experience. As a Leo rising, I have this odd relationship to the thing you're describing. As a Leo rising with a 12th house sun and moon, I understand intellectually that I have a big presence, that I show up — but I have no concept of it.

I was with family, and one family member and I were talking — not gossiping, but remarking about another family member — and she said something like, well, yeah, that other person is on their best behavior when you're around. And I thought: what? I literally had no idea that my presence would make any difference to how somebody else would behave or act. It floored me. It floored me that that was the case.

I have to remind myself a lot — this sounds kind of silly — that I am a person, that I exist, that my presence... that I'm a volumetric being in three-dimensional space, and that as I walk around, I inhabit space and change things, that my presence actually makes a difference. It's something I have to continually remind myself of.

And conversely — I'd be curious about your perspective on this. One of my gifts, and I think it's the stellium of planets in the 12th house for me, is that I actually am really good at disappearing in a crowd. I can become very small if I want to or need to. At least, that's how it seems to me. And I'd be curious to hear, as a thinker about the 12th house, what your perspective on that would be.

Ada: Well, the way I was going to respond was a very gentle: are you sure? How do you know? What evidence do you have? Because I've never seen you in a crowd, so I don't know — maybe what you're saying is true, but is it that you feel small, or that you're actually small?

Augustus: Great question. I don't know.

Ada: In "Venus in the 12th House: Why It's Time to Find Pleasure in Solitude," you talk about the 12th house being about withdrawing from the world to attend to yourself spiritually. So I wonder if there's a physical embodiment of that that's possible as well.

Augustus: I think with Mars and the sun, I do have a way of physically embodying that, in much the same way you talk about needing to do it, or being able to do it, spiritually. I think you can probably do it — for instance, if you had Neptune in the 12th house, there's probably a way in which your dreams manifest that way. With Saturn — I'd love to hear from people — the way your limits, or the boundaries you place or that are placed around you, manifest that way as well.

Ada: Yeah, absolutely. Something I've noticed with people who have Saturn in the 12th house: they often, especially as they get older, embody this mentor quality, this structural-pillar-of-the-community quality that they don't realize is there. They kind of woke up one day and realized that people come to them for advice, that people look to them as a leader. They're maybe growing a Gandalf beard and didn't really realize it.

But all of the planets I've encountered in the 12th house — and I definitely want to hear from people who resonate with this, or especially if you don't resonate with it, because I'm having the 12th house experience of not being able to see myself clearly, writing about the 12th house, because of the way the internet filters responses — something I've always noticed as I've worked with people who have planets in the 12th house is how much they carry the planets as avatars. There's a sense of responsibility and weight that comes with having a planet in the first house or the 10th house. I have a 10th house sun, compared to your 12th house sun. And I tell you all the time that I kind of see you as a bit of a role model, for different reasons. One of them is the way you carry yourself, at least on the internet. I look at that and I'm like, damn, that's what I'm supposed to be doing. That's my homework assignment. I should be playing with image, being intentional, all of these things. And I show up in front of the camera with a cup of coffee and my — welp. Okay.

Augustus: Well, that strikes me as a very 10th house thing too — and a very Taurus 10th house — just, I'm supposed to be me now, in front of you, now.

Ada: It's definitely not comfortable. And that's one of the things we don't talk about enough in astrology: they're often descriptions of things where you read it and you're like, yeah, that's my homework assignment. Thanks. And then there are other things you read and you're like, this — this is what speaks to me. And that's where choice and agency come in — that recognition of, this is who I am now, and this is who I want to be, and what am I going to do about it? Because, let's be honest, you can find an astrologer who will describe any experience you're having, and you have perfect freedom to cherry-pick: this person makes me feel good, and that person makes me feel good.

One of the reasons the 12th house is the house of retreat centers is because, especially if you're carrying placements like that — and we all go through 12th house times — you need that retreat to step away from the world, from the noise, and actually sit with what you're feeling: all right, this makes me feel good, but it also makes me feel like I'm eating candy. This does not make me feel good — but it's also speaking to something I really deeply want for myself. Can you hear my sun opposite Saturn here? Like, you've got to do the work.

Augustus: You said in "Venus in the 12th House": even if you read the 12th house as positively as you can, it's a difficult area of life to work with. Doing it right requires the self-discipline to spend a lot of time alone, and a willingness to look in the mirror without flinching. And I think that's what you're talking about, right — that's one of the things you'd do in a retreat: get perspective.

So I have a theory on the 12th house I want to run by you. Obviously I spend a lot of time living in and working with the 12th house, because I have so many prominent placements there. As I was reading all your published work on the 12th house and reflecting on it — which is one of the things I do, as a 12th houser — I wrote some things down, and I want to pitch them to you and see how they land.

The 12th house seems to be about fundamental disconnect. It's the waiting, the lacking, the wanting, the yearning, the reaching, the hoping. And not that optimistic hope, the everything-is-going-to-get-better, Pollyanna-ish hope, but dogged hope. Not the hope that everything's getting better, but the hope that it can't get worse forever. That kind of hope. Working with the 12th house seems to be a lot about what isn't — what is not, what is gone, what is lacking, what didn't happen. Which is why I think 12th house people are so sensitive to what remains unsaid, or what others are unaware of — because one of the things we haven't touched on is the intuition that 12th house people bring to the world. The 12th house being one of the places not only for retreats but for psychotherapy.

Just to put a bow on this: in art, we have a concept of negative space. In Gestalt, it's the negative space that's the shapes in between other shapes — the shape you extract from looking outside the boundaries of what you're actually meant to be looking at. A classic example, which is pretty memey at this point, is the arrow in the FedEx logo. In the FedEx logo, between the E and the X, there's an arrow pointing from left to right, and that arrow is created by the negative space — what's between the shapes. It's interesting because you can tell the arrow is there. The arrow is a hundred percent there. You can perceive the arrow, but you perceive it by looking at what is not there. And to me, this is the fundamental paradox of the 12th house.

Ada: I love negative space. Love negative space. My experience with it is as a poet — studying poetry in school and writing on my own. When I was in school, we called it white space, which means something completely different now. I love negative space. So much better.

There's a mystic named Thomas Merton — and I'm almost certain I studied his chart a long time ago, and he had a lot of 12th house stuff, so I'm going to say this: I haven't looked up his chart, I might be totally wrong, but whether he actually has 12th house planets or not, he was really speaking to the 12th house. One of the things he wrote about was writing the silences.

His story was that he was an academic in New York. He was really big in the literary scene, a contemporary of T.S. Eliot's, if I'm remembering correctly. He was really in that modernism; he was a literature professor. And he just got sick of the sound of his own voice. So he was like, I am going to go become a monk. At first he thought he'd be a Franciscan — very gentle, still out in the world. And the Franciscans were like, nah, dude, you have more work to do, we can't handle you. And so he was like, oh, I have more work to do, okay. So he found the most austere Catholic order he could find. He ended up with the Cistercians, where they work hard and they pray and they sleep on straw mats. His desire was to serve, and to get as far away from writing as he possibly could, because he was done with his voice, done with that world. He just wanted to be outside in the fields with the flowers and the trees and the birds and the rain.

So he signed up, and they were like, yeah, this is our order. And then, as soon as he signed the frickin' contract, the abbot was like, all right, your first assignment is to write your autobiography. Stuck him in front of a typewriter for most of the rest of his life. And so he had this inner conflict that came out in all his work: I want nothing more than silence, but I have to sit here in front of this typewriter, and I have to have something to show for myself, or else I'm not working. So how do I use words, use my voice, to enter into the silence I want so badly?

And the answer, as much as I can distill it into something we can work with, is what you were talking about with negative space. As somebody who studied this in school — we talked a lot about, don't just write the words on the page, write the margins, write the empty spaces. Create that negative space. Don't fill up the whole page. And I think that's one of the lessons of the 12th house that shows up for people who have it in their chart, or who are going through 12th house times.

People get really afraid of it, because it's often a time of loss, a time of endings. People tell stories about, I entered the 12th house year and my life fell apart. I always think of that video that went around about ten years ago — Alan Rickman spending four minutes flipping a table. There are times in life where you just have to sweep away everything, without regard for anything else. And I think — tell me if this resonates, as a person who experiences this from the inside — people with 12th house planets are living the paradox of needing to do that over and over again, needing to live with an empty desk, while also, unless you're Thomas Merton running away to the most austere order you can find, needing to live life in this world. So how do you live at a full working desk that's also an empty, cleared-off desk?

Augustus: What a wonderful thing to chew on. And I think it's such a 12th house question, because the answers only lead you to other questions, which only lead you to new answers, which only lead you to better questions. This isn't the only place that cycle happens, but the 12th house is one of the places where it does.

Which — you brushed on it, and it might be a good place to steer toward — is 12th house transits. You've written pretty extensively about your own 12th house transits: "12th House Profection Year: It's Time to Let Go and Start a New Life," "5 Lessons From My 12th House Profection Year," and "My 12th House Profection Year: 3 Years Later." And — I don't think you'll mind me outing you about this — you're also going through a 12th house transit now, right?

Ada: Yeah. So, my 12th house experience personally — and one of the reasons I love working with 12th house people — is that, using the technique called secondary progressions, which models the evolution, the growth and development, the opportunities to change of the soul: all of my personal planets are converging on 12th house Cancer. I wasn't born with anything in 12th house Cancer, but over the last ten years or so, Mercury has progressed into 12th house Cancer. Mars has progressed into Cancer. The sun is progressing into 12th house Cancer in 2027.

One of the things I love about being a professional astrologer and getting to work with people is that everything you have in your natal chart is something you're embodying. It's like you are the 12th house sun walking around. You are the 12th house moon walking around. There's this part of the Iliad where Homer says that Aphrodite walked before Helen — what he meant was that Helen was an avatar of Aphrodite. Aphrodite was riding her, possessing her. And so we possess all of the planets in our chart, and we're acting out their relationships with the planets of the chart of the moment, which is what transits really are.

So, as somebody whose life is converging on the 12th house, and who in certain ways has a longing for the 12th house — at the risk of tempting the gods way too much — I love 12th house people, because you sit down, and — yeah, I'm the astrologer, I have a chart open, I know what the stars are doing, and I have lots of opinions about you from looking at your chart — but I get to listen, and I get to hear what things are like from the inside. And hearing your story, I'm bringing my story. We get to have that dialogue, that experience of translating what I see into your experience in a way that, hopefully, if I do my job correctly, resonates for you.

The articles you pointed out, where I was writing about 12th house profection years — because I don't have anything natally in the 12th house, 12th house transits tend to hit me really hard. Or at least they did. When I lived through my 12th house profection year, in my late 30s, it was one of those Alan Rickman flipping-the-table moments in my life. Everything is different. It was a before-and-after experience. And I say that to people, especially if they're approaching their 12th house year, and they have a tendency to look at me like a deer in headlights, like, oh no, you're not a truck coming for me, are you? Please, no.

At the time, I was just like: I am such a failure. Everything I've built is falling apart. What is wrong with me? I saw this coming — I'm an astrologer, I'm supposed to do this, right? I'm supposed to preempt the transits. And, if anybody needs to hear this: no, you're not supposed to preempt the transits, because the transits are about living the thing, and you can't live the thing in advance, even if you know it's coming.

But in retrospect — I'm in a 6th house year now, so I'm as far away from the 12th house as I can possibly be, and I have a little bit of perspective — I look back at it and I'm like, I wasn't happy. I didn't like the life that I had. Everything that's gone — there are some people who are going to be really pained to hear this — but I'm glad it's gone. I needed an utterly clear life, and empty space, and room to ask those questions, and room to be like, okay, what am I going to build now, from this?

At the time — do not want, zero out of ten — I had all kinds of feelings, and I was very, very angry to suddenly have to build everything over from scratch. It was ridiculous. A decades-long relationship. I lost my home. I lost my career. It was an utter bankruptcy event in my life. And six years later, I'm like: thank the gods. Don't you ever do it again.

Augustus: You'd written, in "12th House Profection Year: It's Time to Let Go and Start a New Life," quote: "For now I feel like a butterfly in my final moments in a cocoon, waiting for the chance to vibe with the new me."

Ada: Lies. Utter lies. I lied on the internet, you caught me. No — I tell stories about what I want to be true, and then I try to make it true. I'm not lying now. But I was lying then.

Augustus: I didn't mean to call you out. I thought that was a really nice bookend — or, not bookend. I think the cocoon is a really common metaphor for 12th house stuff. I don't think you were the first person to use it, nor will you be the last. But the 12th house can be a little bit gooey, in the metamorphosis sense.

I wanted to talk about some of these — we won't get into all of them in great detail, but I took your "5 Lessons From My 12th House Profection Year," and I thought we could go through the five points. Because if somebody is going through it — whether they're grappling, struggling, or maybe just gently curious, like a newborn bunny encountering clover for the first time — about the 12th house, and either a transit they're having or have had, or a 12th house placement they're learning to contend with...

So, number one: it's not just about you. What's happening in the rest of the world matters. That one really stuck out to me, and I was hoping you could speak to it a little.

Ada: The reason I wrote that, and the reason it hit me so hard, is because I went through my 12th house year during Covid. So I ran into so many people going through major transits during Covid. It's ridiculous. I open up any of my techniques for just about anybody, and it's like, oh, well, of course you went through that in 2020.

And one of the reasons I wasn't prepared is because I was not one of the astrologers who predicted a worldwide pandemic for 2020. I was there, listening, as all the mundane astrologers who specialize in world events were saying, oh, 2020 looks really interesting — March, what's going to go on in March? And I was like, oh, okay, yeah, this is going to be a big thing. And then I ignored it, because I'm a little person, not somebody who lives in the White House or is some kind of international superstar. I was really used to being like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet — not on the stage, not saying the lines everybody remembers. My progressed 12th house planets coming out, I think. So I heard all those forecasts and I was just like, yeah, that's going to be interesting, I can't wait to sit there with my bucket of popcorn. But no — my life lurched, like everybody else's did.

Experiencing that within the context of the 12th house year took these things everybody was experiencing and gave them a profound 12th house flavor. You can see it in the different ways people responded to the pandemic. Everybody was going through a time that had a distinctly 12th house flavor. Even essential workers were going through this sense of sacrifice, these moments of sitting on an empty train going to work. Even the people on the front lines had these moments where they were alone, and they were writing the silences.

Augustus: To your point — I want to jump in, because one of the things about the 12th house is that it's also the house of institutions. And it was the institutions that needed to keep going. So the frontline workers were the people doing institutional jobs, which is probably worth mentioning as we think about what the 12th house might mean for someone.

Ada: Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up. If you work in an institution, the 12th house is a career house for you. So 12th house transits often manifest at work for people who work in institutions — especially hospitals, religious institutions, prisons, things like that.

But I was filtering through a 12th house lens, and we also heard stories about people who spent that time writing a book or creating art — and then you look at their charts and transits, and it's like, oh, you were in a 5th house time. Or the people who were learning how to broadcast on Zoom and publish might have been in a 9th house time. So we have all of those experiences represented within a time that was largely 12th house. One of the things I learned personally, and have accounted for in my practice since then, is to recognize the flavor of the time in the story my client is telling, and understand the relationship between those two things. We don't live in a vacuum.

Augustus: I was going to ask if the word "zeitgeist" is important when we're talking about a 12th house time.

Ada: I love the word zeitgeist.

Augustus: The second thing you wrote — and I'm obsessed with this — is: it is amazing the things you can do behind your own back. I do want to say — I told you in advance that I was boning up on all your 12th house work, but I didn't prepare you for this, I am putting you on the spot. I wonder if you could speak to that, because as a 12th house person, it's such a succinct way of describing what it is to have a 12th house experience.

Ada: The experience behind it — the inner world that created that sentence — was the experience of being profoundly humbled. A few minutes ago, you asked me about something I'd written, and I was just like, I lied. And there was no triggering, no nervous system activation. It was just, I lied, and we're on camera, and this is going to go out to people. The internet is brutal. And I'm just like — it's not that I don't care, it's not that I don't want to be a person with integrity, but my last 12th house year was so humbling that I cannot present myself to the world. I can't even try. I can't even imagine presenting myself to the world as a person without faults.

Because that experience — I learned, and this might sound more fatalistic than I really believe — but seeing all of the unconscious behaviors I was doing, all of the things I didn't realize I was doing until I had to confront them, in the marriage that was falling apart, in the way I responded to my living situation — all of these things made me realize that I can try really hard to be a good person, and I can try really hard to present myself in a certain way, but there's only so much I can control. Not just about the world, but about myself.

There was this profound letting go that happened when I went through that year, where I was just like: I'm going to go toward the thing, but I am a fallible human being, and so is everybody else. And it's in that knowing, in that context, that I have to move through the world. I can be defensive, and I can scramble to delete certain things to make myself feel better — or I can use it as a filter. People who need me to be a guru, people who need me to be a rock star, people who need me to be perfect and always show up the way they want me to, are going to be profoundly disappointed. And I want them to find the door before they're disappointed, because I'm human, just like everybody else.

Augustus: I want to tie this into something you wrote in your 12th house sun piece. You're talking about the 12th house sun, but I think — mutatis mutandis, change what needs to be changed — for whoever's viewing or listening, whatever kind of 12th house experience you're having, apply it to your situation. You wrote:

"People are drawn to people with the 12th house sun because they are unselfconscious. One of the defining qualities of cool people" — and you mentioned this earlier — "is that they don't know how cool they are. And the unselfawareness of people with a 12th house sun" — again, change what needs to be changed — "tends to come across as a casual disregard for what other people think of them. The lack of posturing and display of ego gives others the chance to have a day in the sun," endearing the 12th house sun people to them. They give others the chance to shine.

And I think that unselfconsciousness — aiming to tie it into the cocoon thing that you rejected, but that I actually don't reject for you — I'm giving it back.

Ada: I'll take it.

Augustus: The 12th house will force you to contend with your self-consciousness. And I think at the end of a 12th house transit — and I swear to you who are listening or watching, you cannot predict how it's going to get there — but at the end of it, you'll find yourself, I think, humbled, as you said, and also stripped of a lot of artifice. And that self-consciousness speaks to that. You'll be so much less self-conscious about the things that come up at the end of a 12th house time.

Ada: I love what you said. You used the word "artifice," and it's so perfect, because — at the risk of getting overly technical — maybe that's the difference between the first house and the 12th. The first house is the artifice you create that's going to allow you to be happiest. It's your user interface between your whole personality and the rest of reality. And the 12th house is that mask off.

Augustus: As a Cancerian, I might say the 12th house is like the bones of the building, where the first house is more about the facade. And we say "facade" sometimes in our culture as kind of denigrating, but I don't mean it that way — the first house is the presentation of the building, the siding and the gutters and the beautiful front door, and the 12th house is the guts, the bones of the building. We talk about a building having good bones.

Ada: Yeah. There's this practice spiritual people have — I don't remember the culture, but not mine, thank goodness — where they spend a lot of time, while they're in training, trying to get down to an understanding of their skulls. I'm not going to go into details about how they do it, but there's this stripping process, this understanding that I am a skeleton walking around. And I feel like that boiling down to the bones is a very 12th house practice.

Augustus: Yeah — or strip to the soul, in some other ways.

There are three more here that we did — these are more technical astrology things, so I think we can put them together. Number three is: don't just focus on the profected house; the ruler and its house are important as well. And number four: look at all the significations of the profected sign and its ruler.

The deeper I get into astrology — and this is thanks to you, as somebody who's been learning from you — the more I understand that to be true. So I'd love to hear you talk about what that means to you, maybe at a basic technical level, but then specifically why it was your 12th house profection year that taught you that.

Ada: Oh, that's such a good question. Given the conversation we've had so far, I don't want to use this as an opportunity to lose 90% of our audience — which is probably where people scroll off of that article, to be honest. But I can tell the story of what I was learning, and give some sources if you want to dive into this more deeply.

I was studying Demetra George's Astrology and the Authentic Self at that point — an absolutely wonderful book that goes in and out of publication. So if you find it for sale, grab a copy, because I've tried to buy it for other people and found it's not available. She's a traditional astrologer who specializes in ancient astrology. One of the things I love about that branch of the astrology world is that they get incredibly technical. My original training was not incredibly technical, so I was pretty far along in my astrology career at that point — I will laugh when I watch this interview in ten years, if it's still available, saying that I was fairly far along in my astrology career at that point — but I didn't really know what to do with the rulers. I was like, okay, that's a thing that figures out dignity, and that's not something that has anything to do with me.

But in my 12th house year, one of the things that was so humbling is that I was directly confronted with the fact that I disregarded those technical techniques. I was pretty proud of myself that I knew what I was doing. I was giving readings that resonated for people and made people cry, and that made me feel powerful. And one of the things I came away with from that 12th house year was the realization that what I didn't know could absolutely bite me in the butt — but also the realization that you can't know everything.

There are thousands, tens of thousands, of named asteroids and bits of space dust flying around our sun. Every single one of them is astrologically significant. If you disagree with me, don't @ me, because you're not going to convince me otherwise. I have done meaningful readings for people about asteroid Potato. After you've done that, you're done. You're done.

So the only way to realistically approach this material that you can never possibly memorize — who can count the stars — is to say: this is territory I've explored personally, because it's territory of my chart and transits. This is territory I've explored vicariously through other people who have allowed me to come onto their spaceships and eat popcorn while they're going through transits. But there's just so much I'm never going to know or understand.

So there's this strange posture I have to take as a professional astrologer, where I need to know the difference between things I know, things I've studied, and things I could be confident about even if people are pushing back — while also being humble about the fact that there's a lot I haven't explored, a lot I'm not going to explore, and a lot of assumptions I'm making about the way the universe works that are going to be wrong. And, as somebody with a 10th house sun and Mercury on the Midheaven, I really don't have the luxury of hiding my wrongness from the world.

What I said earlier about doing things behind your own back — I'd made peace at that point with the fact that I do things in public. My 12th house year taught me to have peace with making errors in public. With being wrong, with being corrected, with having to say I'm sorry. It's a necessary part of being a person who thinks in public and works in a field that nobody alive today can ever really master.

Augustus: Wow. I think that's such a wonderful place to leave it. That really sums up this conversation well.

Ada: Sums up the conversation: Ada was wrong.

Augustus: In conclusion, for those of you who've made it this far — I think if there's one thing you could take away from this, it's that Ada was wrong. And that's the 12th house, everyone. Thank you, goodbye.

Ada: And yet we're laughing. And that is the posture of the 4th house. I'm bankrupt, I'm divorced, I've lost everything, I have no job, I have no hope for the future — and yeah, I'm laughing.

Augustus: There we go.

Ada: And I will be again. And at least if I'm not laughing, at least I have some awareness that laughter exists and it's looking for me too.

Augustus: Yes. I think this has been a really cool conversation. Thank you for indulging me. As a person who sits in the Narrative Astrology Lab — to plug your work — and gets to hear you do this: you're such a wonderful host, and you do a really good job facilitating. It was fun to read your work and reflect it back to you, and put you on the hot seat a little bit, the way you do to us so many times. Put the mirror back on you a little bit. I don't know if there's anything we should say to end it — otherwise I'll turn the channel back to you and let you close us out.

Ada: Thank you so much for this, Augustus. We've been talking about doing this for what feels like ages — which is maybe just a commentary on the time we're living in. But I love talking with you. Something I probably annoy you with is that I love the fact that you tell me I'm wrong, that you push back and hold my feet to the fire on things. Yeah — that's probably making you sound terrifying, which is probably the last thing I want people to know.

Augustus: Well, because I don't think of myself as really telling you that you're wrong. I think of myself as your student, who sits and learns from you. So that's very interesting. But I have to learn from you. It's a conversation — which segues into the obligatory part of, if you enjoyed this conversation, where do you go from here? Not leaving people going, well, that was great, now what?

So if you want to be a part of conversations like this — this is a pretty good picture of what we do in the Narrative Astrology Lab, which is a community of astrology students and astrologers. It's not a community where you sit at my feet, even though I'm the one driving the bus. It's very much a roundtable, circle kind of conversation, where you bring your life, and you bring your perspective, and you bring the astrology knowledge you've gained so far. I'm much more of a moderator than a teacher most of the time — though I'm happy to geek out and wax philosophical on a more than regular basis. So if you're looking for community, and you're listening to this and you're like, wow, I want to be a part of this — that's what the Narrative Astrology Lab is.

If you're listening and you're like, oh my God, I need to talk about the 12th house with these people — I don't know what you're doing right now, Augustus, but the best way to have a one-on-one conversation with me about this stuff is a Tea With an Astrologer reading. Just sign up on my website, and tell me, hey, I heard the podcast and I want to have a conversation with you about it.

And — no, I am going to put you on the spot, because it's only fair. Do you have a way for people to talk with you about this stuff? If they're like, yep, screw Ada, she's wrong, I want to talk to Augustus.

Augustus: No, actually, I don't. If you want to come talk to me about this, the best place to do it, honestly, is the Narrative Astrology Lab. I am online, I can be found, you can find me, and of course I'm happy to nerd out about it. But no — I think at this point I'm happy to point my efforts back to you, Ada.

Ada: Oh, I love that. Well, I hope that this is a part of the conversation that you look back on and go, I should have said, come get a reading from me — because you are an amazing astrologer in your own right, and you don't see how awesome you are.

And if you're listening to this and you're like, yeah, the 12th house thing is cool, I feel like I understand it pretty well — what other heretical things does Ada have to say about my chart? That is a narrative astrology reading. I have a trio of readings where we can look at your life as a story and talk about what kind of character you are, what kind of story you're living in, and what your relationship with your setting, your place, is. That's my way of taking all of this heresy, all of this way of approaching astrology that I call narrative astrology, and really giving it the time and energy and complexity it deserves — which is in short supply on the internet, in my opinion. Because it does take time, it does take energy, and it is complex.

Augustus: Yeah. No kidding.

Ada: Thank you so much for this, Augustus.

Augustus: Thank you.