Blood Brothers
Two nations, the 8th house, and a death trail
The Nakba in 1948. (Photo: Jim Pringle/Associated Press)
I began writing this essay on the day of the Mercury-Pluto conjunction in February 2024, though the genesis of its thesis occurred while watching the events of the October 28 eclipse unfold. Putting it down and coming back to it several times over, I didn’t think it would take me this long to finish, nor did I plan to release it over Passover, but this timing feels both unintentionally purposeful and personally meaningful. Mitzrayim is not a place we can leave while forcing others to endure it.
Content warning: this article discusses genocide and colonial violence.
This February, I made good on a promise to go somewhere. I came to Costa Rica for some weeks, a country famous for its abundant natural beauty, sprawling biodiversity, and the superlative happiness of its people. The cliche about Costa Rica that you’ve probably heard is that everyone here uses pura vida (“pure life”) as a form of greeting, a form of goodbye, a way of responding to someone who asks how are you, a way of saying things are great, and when things are not great, a way of letting it roll off your shoulders.
It occurred to me at some point that the frequent repetition of this mantra is a kind of collective spell that Ticos cast with their words, a reflex that contributes to a shared reality that is fundamentally in service to life. If you look at the astrological chart of Costa Rica’s inception in 1821, when Central America won its independence from Spanish rule1, the Moon (which represents the people in mundane astrology) is exalted in Taurus. Mars, planet of war, is fallen in Cancer, and Venus is powerful in Libra.
The legacy of that fallen Mars is interesting, for one because Costa Rica didn’t have to go to war to win its independence — it was liberated along with the rest of Central America — and it would eventually go on to disband its armed forces following a civil war, becoming one of only a few nations in the world without a military. Crucially, the decision not to fund the military was part of a deliberate choice to invest more in education, healthcare, and environmental conservation instead. In theory, and certainly a great deal in practice too, Costa Rica has been a model of what pacifism, democracy, and strong social investment can yield in terms of the relative well-being of its people. The Moon exalts in Taurus, the garden of life.
These are both untimed charts, FYI
The chart of its demilitarization is certainly not what you’d expect — exalted Mars conjunct Jupiter, with Venus in detriment conjunct the South Node. Here, the planet of war is empowered, emboldened even. You could make a case for Mars being bonified here, and in its exaltation, better able to conserve its resources for maximum impact. Once you start to dig a little bit beneath the ideal of Costa Rica’s public image as a pacifist nation, though, this part starts to make a little more sense. Some political analysts have identified what is in essence a “covert army,” consisting of both an expansion of its public security forces (a civil guard that replaced its army) and a reliance on the imperial might of the U.S., which had newly emerged as a global superpower from the dust of World War II. This isn’t to say that Costa Rica’s successes over the last 76 years aren’t considerable or worth striving to emulate. Over the decades, the cultural norms around abolition held up when it came to resisting pressure from the U.S. to re-establish a military.2 But the army that was disbanded in 1948 was a historically weak one to begin with, so there’s also that.
“Ultimately, the decision to abolish the military was driven more by political and financial concerns than by pacifist idealism, as political scientist Cristina Eguizábal has demonstrated. As the global Cold War enveloped Latin America, Costa Rican leaders found they could rely on security guarantees provided by U.S.-dominated regional institutions. These institutions included the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, signed in 1947, and the Organization of American States (OAS), founded in 1948, which historian Victor Bulmer-Thomas aptly called “a crude instrument of American empire.” Costa Rica was placed under Washington’s protective umbrella against external threats, from Soviet-backed hemispheric communist encroachments to insurgency in neighboring Nicaragua. In the words of Carlos Cascante Segura, a professor of history of international relations at the University of Costa Rica, ‘It made very little sense to have a large army if you know that, in the end, the one who will solve all problems is the United States.’” — The Myth of Demilitarization in Costa Rica, Markus Hochmüller & Markus-Michael Müller
Meanwhile, across the ocean, a new military power had just been born that same year.
Posing with olive trees, Palestine 1930. (British Mandate Jerusalemites Photo Library)
I come from the United States, a country that’s even more steeped in its own mythos and is much less deserving of its brand. The most commonly used chart for the United States is characterized by its eagle-screech of a Sagittarius rising, which enacts “freedom” and “expansion” as its guiding principle. However, the United States is a fundamentally 8th house nation: it secures its freedom at the expense of what once belonged to someone else. It expands as a matter of Manifest Destiny, leaving trails of tears and bones in its wake. It maintains its own imperative as ideological enforcer to the rest of the world through a tangled web of debt, trade, and dependence that’s roughly 750 military bases wide.
In this respect, the U.S. and Israel are natural bedfellows. Three core significations of the 8th house include death, debt, and other people’s resources. In mundane astrology, this last part relates more to financial entanglements with other nations, but stories of land theft, ethnic cleansing, and genocide fit here too. Both the U.S. and Israel share an origin story such as this. Lesson 1: while trade can be mutually beneficial, death and acquisition are rivers flowing in the same direction because history teaches us, again and again, that those who seek domination, and not exchange, take lives in order to take resources. Israel is an interesting case study, too, because the memory of annihilation looms so large in the national consciousness. It’s a nation founded (at least overtly) in response to genocide that perpetuates the same, driven by a sort of self-consuming logic that the only antidote to extinction is to pay extinction forward. This is one possible permutation of the North Node in the 8th house: kill or be killed, take or be taken, a perpetual motion machine of fear and greed. Lesson 2: the 8th house is a place of transactions; death and trauma are both currencies that seek to remain in circulation.
The U.S. chart has an 8th house stellium consisting of its Ascendant ruler. Like the U.S., Israel has its Sun in the 8th house, as well as its North Node, and Venus rules both the 8th house and the Ascendant as the most angular planet in the chart.
The U.S. and Israel also share this part in common to some extent. The memory of colonization looms large in the national consciousness — we are a nation founded in resistance to imperial might that went on to perpetuate the same. Colonialism itself is a grab bag of 8th house meanings; a conquering of a population in order to consume it. But the U.S.-Israel relationship has evolved into an amalgam of increasingly grotesque proportions: part trade alliance, part military outpost, part research and development grant for weapons that can be sold to other repressive regimes around the world, part death pact motivated by religious fundamentalists yearning for apocalypse.
Coffee shop. (Photo: BMJ Photo Library)
Israel is the only foreign nation for which both U.S. Democrats and Republicans are unanimous in their unyielding support. It has received more financial aid from the U.S. than any other country since its founding: about $300 billion altogether (adjusted for inflation). On paper, there are conditions attached: legally, the U.S. cannot fund foreign security forces that commit gross violations of human rights. There have been instances in the past where the U.S. withheld weapons shipments in response to, or in anticipation of, Israel targeting civilians. For the most part, though, the official line is that Israel only use the aid “in self-defense.” Seven months into a remorseless civilian punishment campaign that has purposely killed journalists, medics, aid workers, tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, and more children than have died in global conflict zones over the last four years combined — raining white phosphorous, the tonnage equivalent of multiple nuclear bombs, and famine onto Gaza — these guardrails have proved weak indeed. “Something something international law,” says Biden before rubber-stamping another cool couple of billion in aid to Israel.
Here’s a fundraiser you can donate to to help food, water, medications, diapers, and other essential supplies reach families in Gaza.
This wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t until after the Six-Day War in 1967, during Israel’s first nodal return3, that the U.S. went all-in on its benefactor role to Israel. Israel’s victory in that war arrived amidst a climate of revolt against imperial Western powers in that region. At the time, a number of nations in the Middle East were cozying up to the Soviet Union too. The U.S. saw in Israel a strategic partner that was capable of taking on its neighbors, and capable of maintaining its regional dominance by proxy.
The first full-circle completion of Israel’s nodal journey came with a land grab consisting of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, and it opened the door to billions in foreign aid that would be received over the next few decades.
Coincidentally, this was also the turning point in the Jewish-American conception of Israel as a cornerstone of Jewish identity, and namely an existential one. It was also after this point that the Holocaust — and specifically the phrase “Never Again” — was leveraged by militant Zionist groups to justify and promote pro-Israel U.S. policy and attitudes. Though the Holocaust meant what it meant to survivors and affected families, the realization of its political utility was a new development at that time — and its centrality in the consciousness of the wider Jewish diaspora was too. And so a new national mythology was born, arising from the excesses of the only dark house4 in astrology that is also named “the idle place5” — the 8th house is a place where animation is suspended, the pause at the top before the rollercoaster plummets, not just death and horror itself but also the anticipation of it. The specter of the Shoah, the shadow that it cast and the implicit threat in its suggestion, continues to prove an effective rallying cry. It is telling that actual Holocaust survivors were treated with contempt when they arrived in Israel, and to this day are still not receiving all of the money Germany earmarked for reparations, with a third currently living below the poverty line.
Jaffa, 1944. (Photo: BMJ)
Over the years, the U.S.-Israel alliance solidified in opposition to Iran post-1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the so-called War on Terror. U.S. support for Israel became even more unqualified under the Reagan administration, which defended Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank. It was actually Obama who oversaw the biggest ever transfer of wealth to Israel in the form of military aid worth $38 billion over a decade.
Obama frequently used the phrase “unbreakable bond” to describe the connection between Israel and the U.S. This is an interesting choice of words when you consider that the most striking aspect of their synastry (their astrological relationship) is their close Venus conjunction in the first decan of Cancer.6 Austin Coppock calls this the “Mother and Child” decan, which describes a close connection, a sort of enmeshment, the kind that’s established via umbilical cord. A mother will do anything for her children, including make their crimes go away.
Edward Said has remarked upon the way this increasingly iron-clad covenant between the two nations has all but ensured that when Arab nations appeal to the U.S. “by ‘good’ behaviour, by willingness to make peace with Israel,” it can yield little except “occasional words of approbation for leaders who appear 'moderate'“ and “escalating demands and a constant refusal by the U.S. to exert any meaningful pressure on Israel.” Writes Said, “The more extreme Israeli policy becomes, the more likely the U.S. has been to support it, and the less respect it has for the large mass of Arab peoples whose future and well-being are mortgaged to illusory hopes embodied, for instance, in the Oslo accords.”
An abundant watermelon harvest. (Photo: BMJ)
There’s nothing remarkable about a financial or military alliance. What makes this one unusual is the way nothing feels capable of disrupting it — the way power brokers on both sides of it allude to apocalyptic scenarios and Biblical prophecy, as though bound in a suicide pact that was written before time itself began. Pompeo has cited the Rapture, Trump indulged in Messianic visions of himself as the “King of Israel.” Nancy Pelosi stated to Israeli-American megadonor Haim Saban, “If the Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it our aid, our cooperation with Israel.”7 Biden has said, more than once, “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.”
On October 28th of 2023, on the day of the last North Node Taurus eclipse constituting Israel’s fourth nodal return, Netanyahu issued a televised press conference as Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza. “You must remember what Amalek has done to you,” he said. “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” Meanwhile, groups of Israelis were circulating memes showing a bulldozer razing all of Gaza into the sea, and memes depicting Gaza as a waterfront resort town. Giving the lie to the conceit that war was being waged on behalf of the Israeli hostages, Smotrich said, “We have to be cruel now and not think too much about the hostages.” The U.S. sent Israel another big check.
The reference to Amalek was not new, or without precedent. Far-right Israelis have often cited the biblical narrative of God’s command to the Israelites to “wipe out the memory” of their enemy when justifying their killing of Palestinians. It’s been invoked against Native Americans by European colonists, against Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda, against many other ethnic and religious groups who were resisting colonial might and ethnic cleansing. It is also consistent with the spirit of Israel’s ongoing occupation and destruction of Palestine: the systematic uprooting of Palestinian olive trees, the literal scorched-earth ecocide and flooding of the land with seawater, ensuring that nothing more can grow. The bombardment of universities and murder of journalists, poets, and scholars. Point-blank executions at schools and hospitals, where a few remaining doctors cared for who they could, with what they could.
It is consistent with the way intactness and cohesion itself have been assailed, and slogans censured more than murder. The other week, as more mass graves were being uncovered near the remains of Gaza’s hospitals, the House approved a resolution condemning the phrase, “from the river to the sea.”
“‘From the river to the sea’ is a rejoinder to the fragmentation of Palestinian land and people by Israeli occupation and discrimination. Palestinians have been divided in a myriad of ways by Israeli policy. There are Palestinian refugees denied repatriation because of discriminatory Israeli laws. There are Palestinians denied equal rights living within Israel’s internationally recognized territory as second-class citizens. There are Palestinians living with no citizenship rights under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank. There are Palestinians in legal limbo in occupied Jerusalem and facing expulsion. There are Palestinians in Gaza living under an Israeli siege.
… But it is precisely because Zionist settler colonialism has benefitted from and pursued Palestinian fragmentation that it seeks to mischaracterize and destroy inclusive and unifying rhetorical frameworks.” — Yousef Munayyer
In Facing Amalek, Maya Rosen presents an alternative analysis. There is no unanimous agreement in the rabbinic tradition over what God was referring to in referring to Amalek. Amalek’s sin, after all, was committing violence against the vulnerable.
I was especially arrested by the connection Rosen draws between the notable absence of God in the Book of Esther, and the way that this concealment obscures God’s will in the story of the Megillah. “Not only is God concealed, but the fact of that concealment is itself concealed.” The danger here is one of confusing one’s own desire for vengeance with divine commandment, of forgetting the Talmud’s directive that Judaism requires us to grapple with our free will in this way.
“As Israeli leaders continue to invoke Amalek while killing and injuring tens of thousands of people in Gaza, and starving millions, we are reminded that the confrontation with Amalek requires not the triumphalist logic of clarity but the existential humility of knowing how far we are from God,” writes Rosen.
That last sentence is a gut punch, and it also makes me think of how hiddenness, and concealment, are both qualities of the dark houses (see footnote 4 if you don’t know what this means). The 8th house is also averse to the 9th, meaning it doesn’t see, or make an aspect to, the 9th, which is the House of God, the place where divinity speaks directly to us.
There is something to this notion that loss can leave us bereft, feeling abandoned by God. But even moreso, that the 8th house is a web. Where it gets tangled by greed, avarice, and a bloodlust for domination, a spider always waits nearby, eager to complete the enmeshment of the Faustian bargain. Here, we exchange material gain for the surrender of our morality and our meaning-making capacities. Here, we idle in the idle place. Here, we feed the industry of death.
Oh rascal children of Gaza.
You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window.
You who filled every morning with rush and chaos.
You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony.
Come back, and scream as you want and break all the vases.
Steal all the flowers.
Come back . . . just come back . . .
– Khaled Juma, 2014
Though September 15 is celebrated as Costa Rica’s Independence Day, this chart technically represents the independence of all of Central America from Spain, and its incorporation into the newly independent Mexican Empire. Costa Rica’s statehood has gone through a couple more iterations since then, all the way through the formation of its most recent constitution following the end of the civil war in 1948 (of which the demilitarization was a result, and a part, as pictured in the Dec 1 1948 chart). That said, this original root chart seems extremely resonant when it comes to reflecting the national values, image, and distinguishing traits of Costa Rica. I admittedly don’t know enough about Central American history to understand the ways this chart might reflect/not reflect El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. I’m interested in your thoughts if you do.
“The norm of demilitarization is strongly embedded among most actors in the system. As one observer has noted, Abolition of the army was largely a symbolic act, since it was tiny and ineffectual in any event; it was replaced by a larger civil guard. However, the symbolic gesture was important in establishing civilianism in a region where armies are used primarily for domestic repression. The widely-held myth of demilitarization thus has practical implications in that it reinforces and strengthens the reality of demilitarization by inhibiting civilian misuse of security forces.” — The Competitive Effects of Political Homogeneity in International Relations: Social Identity Theory and Systemic Analysis, Robert B. Andersen
In the November 2023 forecast episode of The Astrology Podcast, Austin Coppock notes that Israel’s nodal returns consistently involve violent disputes over borders, and often changing borders as a result.
A “dark house” is a house that doesn’t make a Ptolemaic aspect to the Ascendant. This includes the 2nd, 6th, 8th, and 12th houses. Because there’s no direct sightline to the Ascendant (or 1st house), these houses do not “see” or “witness” the house that gives life to, or animates, the rest of the chart. They are thought to be places where planets are less effective at supporting the subject of the chart, or supporting life itself.
The 8th house is also known as “the idle place” because in the daily rotation of planets and objects through the sky, it’s the last house planets visit before they set in the West. Zodiacally, planets move in the opposite direction, so it appears as though they’re resisting their fall, seen as a kind of “death.” Thus the “idle place” represents not just death, but the fear and anticipation of death and loss, and the experience of being consumed by those emotional states when you have no other distractions. It’s a place where anxiety, trauma, anguish, and grief are dwelled on, at times dealt with and processed, and at times fed and encouraged.
So much more could be said about this shared Venus placement, but that’s a whole other side tangent. This speaks on one hand to the “foundation of shared values” that is frequently invoked in televised addresses, but the decanic imagery also quite literally describes the fluid bonding between a nursing infant and its mother. The U.S. Venus is placed in the 8th house, and the Israel Venus rules the 8th. One nation suckles at the teat of the other.
While Venus in Cancer has a benefic presentation, it can also represent ethnonationalism on a national scale — the clannishness of Cancer protects who belongs in the “family.” On J.M. Hamade’s podcast starnightdwell, there are two episodes on the astrology of Palestine (one with Sam Reynolds, and one with Majd H Sayed) where the supposed “benefic” qualities of the official Israel chart are discussed (and in the episode with Majd, they present an alternate Ascendant degree that conjoins Neptune, rather than the fixed star Spica, based on a testimony from a Palestinian elder who remembers what time it was when Israel had fully taken over the land during the Nakba on May 15). There are some good discussions in these episodes about both the legitimacy of national charts themselves and how much these charts describe the national image/mythology versus their actual impact in the world. I am personally leaning on the side of national charts describing some of the conceits that underlie their formation: Israel’s Libra Rising describes the national brand of being a lone island of democracy and equal rights, and its use of the peace process as a cover for its actual intentions. The Venus in Cancer, and even the Sun in Taurus, reflect the ideal of Israel as “the land of milk and honey.” In the Mars-Saturn-Pluto conjunction, we see quite clearly where it is also the land of blood.
All of these examples (minus the Biden quote) were collected by Sarah Kendzior in her essay Bearing witness to the disappearing world.
This article was originally published on Substack on 4/29/2024.