When Saturn transits the Eighth House the need for security and achievement influences how you use your power and others’ resources. This can be an extreme and painful transit where the testing of your self-knowledge will work itself out through any or all of these areas: financial, sexual, emotional, psychological, and spiritual.
When Saturn transits the 8th house you’re challenged to transform and redefine yourself down to the most basic levels of identity. This may involve a kind of ritual purging or stripping away of your old identity to make way for the new. It’s about ending old life patterns and letting go of desires and attachments to whatever is holding you back. Once this process is complete, you’ll experience a rebirth, but first you must undergo the death.
Saturn will force you to discipline your desire nature and examine your emotional attachments. This may happen because your desires are frustrated: you can’t get what you need or want, or because you realise that getting what you want isn’t going to make you happy in the long run. You must get rid of anything that gets in the way of you growing into a whole individual.
This is about transformation and self-mastery, and Saturn will encourage you to examine how you use your power on every level. You may experience a lot of suffering during this transit. Your desires and attachments are stripped away and refined until you become more aware of the deeper forces at work in your life and psyche. Saturn won’t tolerate superficial nonsense or avoidance of reality while in this house. It’s not much fun and can feel like going through a kind of personal hell or purgatory, but it’s necessary.
Saturn will force you to confront whatever you’ve been denying or avoiding. You might need to face your darkest fears so you can finally let them go. Issues around the fear of death, control, and the use of power may come up and demand to be dealt with. Your experiences now could bring questions about the meaning of life and death and the reality of your soul into clearer focus, and you may become obsessed by subjects like the afterlife, reincarnation, and the occult. Saturn wants you to face death in a more realistic way and to come to terms with your own mortality and limitations in life.
This house is also about inheritance, which is just another way of saying the past impacting on the present, so you may experience gains through the death of a family member or spouse. The confrontation with death may also encourage you to organise your finances and perhaps draw up a will or take out insurance. There may be lessons around investments and joint assets which could feel restricting at this time.
Not all inheritances are financial and you may be able to free yourself from a long-standing emotional or psychological limitation with roots in the past. This is a good time to dig deep into your unconscious to discover how your conditioning affects your life. You can unearth hidden motivations and perhaps even undo conditioning that’s been in place over many lifetimes, whether your own, if you believe in reincarnation, or an ancestral inheritance. To let go of the past you need to resolve the inner conflicts that hide in the unconscious, so the deeper you go, the more you’ll be able to release.
Possibilities with Saturn transiting the 8th:
- Organising your finances
- Drawing up a will or taking out life insurance
- Exploring the mysteries of life
- Confronting the past
- Achieving self-mastery
Watch out for:
- Loss of essential resources or money
- Trapped in a bad financial deal
- Emotional purgatory
- Facing mortality
The purging and letting go of the past is preparation for when Saturn moves into the 9th house where you’ll incorporate what you learn now into the development of your higher mind. Whatever happens now, you’re seeking to know yourself on a fundamental level and establish soul security. You want to feel at home in the universe and Saturn will take you as deep as you’re willing to go. How far you go with this depends on whether you have a spiritual practice and how much you’re willing to surrender.
The deepest meaning of this house is the importance of the meeting of opposites, and you may explore this through changes to your sex life and by confronting the consequences of how you use your sexual power. You might experience frustration which forces you to be more self-contained, or you may willingly undergo a period of celibacy to explore other ways of using your life force for healing or spiritual work. Taking responsibility like this will help you to explore the transcendent function of sexuality, which is the meeting of the opposites.
Soul security can only be achieved through the alchemy of the union of opposites that produces the divine child, or awakening. Only once you’ve balanced the opposites and integrated the fears of your shadow can you transcend and become whole.
(Personal note: when Saturn was in my 8th house I experienced a wake-up call from hell when my entire life disintegrated. It absolutely felt like purgatory, but it did end. Read about it here: Shadow Attack)
References:
- Planets in Transit – Robert Hand
- Saturn in Transit – Erin Sullivan
- Astrology, Karma, & Transformation – Stephen Arroyo
More Transits: 1st house – 2nd house – 3rd house – 4th house – 5th house – 6th house – 7th house – 8th house – 9th house – 10th house – 11th house – 12th house
Browse: Saturn Transits to Planets
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Jessica Davidson 
i dug this up cause sat in 8, any minute is all i can think of re horrendous eczema/allergy outbreak on face. + council sending me letter re all sorts of upheavals with heating system and what not. i feel violated already, or is that pluto con mars/venus. anyways, my face. itchy/painful and looks terrible. surely none of this can go on the whole time?! i’m expecting the beginning to be worst, if this is what it is. omg!
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Sounds nasty – sorry you’re experiencing that. It won’t necessarily go on the whole time of the transit – it depends on how you respond. It could be Pluto conjunct Mars and Venus too.
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which lasts just as long, or longer, lol! it’s really one thing after another. i am grateful that it’s nothing like what you describe/d.
then again, i’ve spend most of my life in anxious anticipation of such. OCD , fun, and mostly useless.
except maybe, a remote possibility, in a ”owen meany ” way. jeez louise! just a few weeks ago i was dancing and singing ” i’m finally freee” re my leper past life thing, lolll
i can never believe it’ll be better again when i’m in the midst of something.
anyways, your virgoness, or something sure makes me ramble, 😉
i know you understand, and rest assured that i got an idea of what you’re going through.
dem bones 🙂
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i just dug this up again, i’d forgotten about it, because of chiron sq sat, and sat can sun [ in my 8th ] and op op pluto. lol.
omg, i sure hope it’s not another 2 years. sat op pluto is exact for the last time next week and it’s fun again! can’t be worse than wen it was retro.
celibacy, that makes me laugh!
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Next year I have transit Saturn in the 8th house for 2 years. I looked up the last time I had this. I was sexually assaulted and the person kept telling me that when they were done raping me, that they were going to kill me. They did not kill me, but it was a long ordeal and he supposedly got 18 years in prison but likely 18 months in reality. Also for four years before this I had paid a psychic thousands of dollars on a relationship issue that was nothing more than limerence; not love at all. They pulled the plug on the potential relationship, saying that nothing is going on. Then I finally met my now ex husband, whom I had my 2 great kids with and mostly a happy life up until 2013. I will be going on 61 this time, so I anticipate financial hardship, more celibacy (for two years already now) and probably a health scare that changes my appearance or even just takes me out. At this point, I don’t really care anymore. Thanks.
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Thanks for sharing your experience, Diane – my heart goes out to you and I hope things will be different this time around.
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excellent post, what does transitting saturn conjunct natal vertex in 8th house bring about?
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Sorry, but I’ve never used it. It’s used a lot in synastry, as I understand it, but I’ve never observed the effects of transits over that point. They say it’s a fated point in the chart so perhaps something will happen that’s out of your control – not necessarily bad.
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I’ve enjoyed your articles, you put a lot of thought into them.
As someone who has been enduring Pluto transiting my 8th house since 2015; do you have any plans for a write up on that?
Kind regards,
Linnéa
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Hi Linnea – glad you’re enjoying the posts. I do plan to write the Pluto transits at some point – it’s on my list. But next up will be Uranus transits – coming possibly later this year or next, not sure!
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Thank you so much for the response! I think “possibly later, possibly next” is the absolutely right attitude for Uranus – you just can’t predict where he’ll take you 🙂
I very much look forward to reading.
Take care ★
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I find your website very helpful, and refer to it often! I came here just now to check a few things, as I’m very concerned about the upcoming solstice 2020 Jupiter/Saturn conjunction. I have my Moon conjunct my North Node (at 0 degrees and 1 degree respectively) in Aquarius, in the 8th house – yikes! I’m trying to stay positive, but it feels like alot to get through. Thank you for all that you offer here!!!
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I am going through this now and am feeling such agony and despair. It is in my 8th house on my relocation chart and is due to end in about 9 days. I considered moving back home to ease pressures here but I see saturn would just be moving into the 8th house there on my original natal chart! The other transit I’m struggling with is Neptune conjunct my sun and Neptune is in my 6th house on the relocation chart and I cannot get a job. Interviews are so ambiguous. I feel like the tide is washing everything away and saturn in 8th house is aiding in the destruction.
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So sorry for your troubles, Starfish. I hope you can find a way through it – at least Saturn’s stay in your 8th house will be over soon. Neptune hitting the sun can be really difficult to deal with too – so confusing. But it will come to an end. Hang in there and try to focus on developing your faith and spiritual practice – that should help to get you through.
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Hey, do you mind expanding on what happened during your 8th house transit of saturn? I’m moving later this year and it will be on my 8th house cusp in the relocation chart. Your comment sort of confirms my fears… the only thing is that I currently have saturn squares to my inner planet stellium that’s activating my 6th house, and wreaking HAVOC to my health. Anything seems better than this, but I kind of want to avoid more chaos and strife if saturn through the 8th is really that awful.
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Saturn in the 8th house points to a death/rebirth experience but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a terrible experience. It’s the end of an old way of living, so moving to a new location will represent the opportunity for a rebirth. What if moving to this new place helps you to deal with your health challenges?
My experience of Saturn going through the 8th was pretty awful but I got through it! It showed me things about myself and life that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. It’s easy to say this in retrospect, obviously. You can read about it here: https://jessicadavidson.co.uk/2015/05/11/shadow-attack-instant-karma-wake-up-call/
Best of luck, andi.
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Thank you for sharing, I suspect it’s a lesson in fear as well as liberation (saturn and uranus currently forming tight conjunctions and squares). Your other post really helped frame the reasoning behind my current struggles as well: maybe a way to test my ability to fully take care of myself and any obstacle before I move to the other side of the world without a support system. Truly, thank you for your insight – I feel very relieved – and enlightened:)
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Oh wow. Thank you.🙏 Very informative.
I hope the dear Jupiter which will conjunct Saturn (transit in my 8th) will soften the blow.
I am Sun, Venus, Uranus, Mercury Scorpio; all in the 5th house. In Placidus system I have in the 5th house Pluto as well.
I have read your additional story when this transit happened to you, and now I am tiny bit scared. I used to have out of body experiences and was very tuned to all ‘beyond’ but cut it off. I am sensing it will bring me straight back into it. The thing is I never knew what to do with all of these “abilities/sensitivities”, how to constructively use it for something more.
I am gonna read more of your stuff now.☺️🙏☀️✨
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Btw Saturn and Jupiter will both be squaring my Sun.
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Glad you found it helpful, Marci – but don’t be scared! I’m sure Jupiter will help you out while he’s in the 8th. Best of luck! ❤️
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I have question, I have Saturn transiting my 8th house next year but it only makes good transit aspects – sextile to Venus and sextile to Sun. I am thinking to divorce my narcissistic husband, I realize I will have to re-organize shared finances which 8th house is about but will it be so brutal that I will lose all resources and will suffer even if I have only good aspects and my Natal Saturn is positive, it is in Capricorn and only with positive aspects
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When making big decisions like this it’s best to take the whole horoscope into a account and look at all the other transits you’ve got going on at the same time. Nothing happens in isolation so you need to check the wider context of your decision. However, it does sound like you’re ready to leave. It may be hard work to sort it all out, depending on other transits and progressions, but it might work out for the best in the long run. My advice would be to get a full horoscope reading done by a professional astrologer so you can get the whole picture before you do anything drastic. Best of luck and I hope it works out for you.
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Excellent post. Saturn is in my 8th house at the moment (until about Dec 2018) and it is been really painful. Almost lost my job, wife filed for divorce, mum diagnosed with cancer and in hospital. And may become very hard to pay mortgage next year if I can’t get wife to collaborate to refinance it. I really not sure what lessons I need to learn but probably to do with dissolution of ego.
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Saturn in the 8th can be brutal, but it does come to an end – eventually…
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Yes, looks like going into 2019 it will have moved out of 8th and into 9th. So another 5 months to go. I hope I can find the wisdom to navigate through this painful time. Can’t recall being that hard last time Saturn was in the 8th.
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Good write up
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Reblogged this on Lost Dudeist Astrology.
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