The eighth house asks us to enlarge or sacrifice our ego boundaries in order to enter into relationship or union with another or others. To do so, some aspect of our personality or ego must die. Usually it is some thing, not some one, that dies, and with the passing away of that limiting aspect of our personality we experience a releasing freedom.

Herein is the second aspect of this house: resurrection and rebirth. The eighth house rules personal evolution, growth, transformation and change, death, rebirth, sex, possessions of a relationship, legacies, inheritance, taxes, rituals, initiations and the occult, the astral body and reincarnation, and the severing of ties to that to which we are attached. A planet in the eighth indicates that a personal facet of your psyche is under pressure to work more cooperatively or jointly with others. Many planets here signify a person whose life can be characterized by change. Such individuals may find continuous states of affairs monotonous, and periodically bring about changes or crises to feel truly alive.

The eighth house is that one-twelfth sector of the local sky midway between the Midheaven and the western horizon (see above picture) occupied by planets in the two to four hours before they set.

Your sexual energy is very strong with Mars in your eighth house, but it needs constructive channeling for its release. You tend to depend on other people's emotional or material resources to reach your goals, and may need to be careful of not sponging off of others. You may have conflicts over your partner's money and difficulties receiving inheritance (emphasized by hard aspects and diminished by trines and sextiles to Mars; see pages 97 and 98 in your personalized, fine art astrology book, "You and the Universe"). Death may come suddenly with Mars in the eighth House, and through accident or violence if Mars is in hard aspect to Uranus (cf., pgs. 97 and 98). If Neptune is in hard or quincunx aspect to Mars (cf., pgs. 97 and 98) its best to avoid psychic work of all kinds.