I’m going to use my Birth Chart as an example for today’s lesson. What I’m looking at in the chart is Interceptions, which is when you have a sign in your chart not ruling a house. Instead it will be passing through the middle of one, happening twice on opposite sides of the chart. Another thing I’m looking at is the 8th house. This house is about transformation; it’s about growing out of our old skin and emerging. Its symbolism is a scorpion because it’s ruled by Scorpio, but the evolved Scorpio in Astrology is known as the phoenix. I’d rather use snake symbolism, so if you wouldn’t mind humouring me, I’d appreciate it. The eighth house is all about our Power; our judging system, our crime and punishment system, our trap and release system. It rules genitalia and the head because it’s co-rulers are Mars and Pluto. So it’s all about, to me, Karma. If our life was a story, our biggest character arches and our climax would be in this house. If the character had faced the consequences of their actions, they are faced with Pluto to determine their power over the situation and the truth of the matter. And alongside Mars to determine what they’re going to do about it: How are they going to assert their power?
This system is very important, and inescapable, because it makes us the people we are. When life gets real, we go to the eighth house to handle it. This house then has the potential to unlock unconditional love, or banish love all together. A heavy responsibility, but we all have it and so we can all help each other face it.
So, our interceptions show us what areas of life were not developed in our early years. I show mine below as an example:
I have Aquarius intercepting my third house which means it gave up it’s reign to Capricorn. Secondly, I have Leo intercepting my ninth house, allowing Cancer to take charge. It’s important to know that, just because these signs never took rulership of their houses, it doesn’t mean they disappeared. They are still there and they are still being called to rule. For some reason, they just won’t. This means that when I want their rule, I have to go through either Capricorn or Cancer first for permission.
Now there are two philosophies by astrologers for this:
1) In a past life or in our early lives, we over-developed these signs and so we do not need any more of that. Subsequently, we need to have more of their “Step Ruler’s” influences to counter balance them.
2) We were born in the wrong place or time for our natural purpose to be able to develop.
What’s good to know is that, when we do learn to develop these signs properly, the pay off will be great. We may have been late bloomers with no direction in life, but when those signs reclaim their thrones, they will rule those houses better than any other natural house rulers could.
However, I want to introduce another theory, specific to my experience:
3) We repressed them ourselves. When we were younger, or in a past life (which our early years carry on in my belief) we used these signs to an unhealthy extreme. So instead of developing them properly to be balanced and healthy, we lost trust in ourselves and ignored them all together before we could regain confidence.
So how do you know which reason it is for having an interception?
I can only give you theories, but my current favourite is: why can’t it be all of them?
To look at your life journey, you need to look at your north node and south node to see what your soul wants to move away from in this life, order to better yourself; the south node is known as our past life, and our north node is known as our goal. Again, our early years will reflect our south node too.
To show you how the interception could stem from a past life, then you should look at these nodes and discern what you want to achieve.
E.g. I have my south node in Gemini and my north node in Sagittarius. Below are their placements in my chart:
This placement means that I’ve come from past behaviour of blending into others. I’ve communicated indirectly or not completely truthfully. Seemingly a chameleon, or a passenger in my own life, not taking the lead of what I really want. This can mean a number of things depending on it’s shades and degrees. We know it’s about my relations with others because it’s in the 7th house. This is very personal so it’s best to respect people’s privacy in the chart. I only bring mine forward to teach so please be delicate with me. My life goal then is to be more direct and honest about myself. It’s about my relationship with myself because that is what the 1st house is all about. One of my biggest issues in life is boundaries; I have had poor boundaries up until now because I didn’t want to upset people, didn’t think my feelings were important enough to be “dramatic about” or wanted to rush ahead and catch up later. As a consequence, I never felt safe with others so I preferred to be alone. Perhaps I had trouble setting boundaries because I didn’t put enough merit into honouring myself in my efforts not to be hurtful, selfish, inconsiderate or unrealistic.
So does this relate at all to my interceptions? What do you think before I have a look? Write down your thoughts on a piece of paper and use this as an opportunity to exercise your knowledge and skills.
Ok now I’ll share. You can share your thoughts in the comments if you like, but I’d prefer it if they didn’t show up anywhere else publicly please.
At first glance I can see that I didn’t develop my ability to go against the norm with the way I used my mind to connect with the world around me; I couldn’t freely follow the beat to my own drum without permission from the authority of the moment: which is displayed with Capricorn being my step ruler, who values tradition. This relates to manipulating myself to be as others want me to be. Obviously when you’re a child you only have so much control of your life. I also couldn’t develop certain lifestyles because they were such a minority in my environment, like veganism or vegetarianism.
Secondly, Leo is a very self-expressive sign that craves adoration for their uniqueness. So if I’m not allowed to develop that, then how am I supposed to learn to honour myself with my north node? Well you could say that my carried over behaviour of people pleasing disallowed me to develop this. Or perhaps my negative outlook of using that sign comes from others telling me so. I honestly can’t remember, but it’s clear I have false beliefs of what it means to honour yourself above others wants and needs. So in this instance, my Leo interception was either stifled by and/or caused by my south node which, as a result, stopped the development of my original way of thinking in order to please people. Therefore my north node is all about undoing this. So yes that could fit the first theory!
However, we do have a unique advantage with me knowing some things about my own life, so what do I make of this? Well, it definitely ring true. But there’s more to the story:
I remember when I was a child. I’m not sure how old, but I was very young. I went to a classmate’s birthday party and I remember standing in the driveway after just arriving. A girl approached me wearing face paint and I mocked her for it. When she came closer, I realized it was my best friend. I felt shocked at myself; I had just been cruel to this girl when I didn’t realize who she was. It was an eye opener and I vowed to never be mean again. I had just understood the meaning of what I had done because I cared about her feelings and it helped me realize strangers had feelings too. I literally remember the vow; before this, I was naturally bossy and left to my own devices but this changed everything. You could see this as me shutting down my Leo Interception with the rise of Step-ruler Cancer.
So before I go into that further, let’s quickly look at the second theory, because what I just said relates to my third theory.
So, I know I potentially wasn’t being born in the wrong place or time because of my parentage. You can see this with my mum and dad in my chart. The Moon is the mum and Saturn is the dad:
My dad is in the sign of Aquarius, in my interception in my third house. Saturn represents authority and that is what we’re supposed to expect from the dad in terms of our needs. My dad was liberal, not too straightforward with rules or clear with authority. In a way, this would enable me to freely connect with the outside world in my own ways. My mum is in the sign of Leo, in my interception in the 9th house. Mum was the Matriarch, she was happily expressive and dominant. The moon represents our emotional worlds and emotional support is what we’re supposed to expect from our mother. My mother has always given me emotional support when I have asked for it. However, I have had to ask for it because any other form of emotional expression was seen as an attack in which mum had to defend her position with her own feelings. So, without having this ability to ask, I could feel overshadowed and dismissed. However, this also means that my ability to use Saturn: my own authority, and my ability to use my moon: my emotional nature, was suppressed along with my interceptions until I had permission to access them.
You could say school added to this and in some ways it probably did. But what I think was truly the cause of what happened was the activity in my eighth house. I want to rewind back to that memory of me mocking my friend and then being appalled at myself. Because that’s when I believe the interception was completely activated. Also, with birth charts, shouldn’t it mean that these interceptions happen straight away rather than in our early years? I’ve seen intercepting signs start just after the very ruling line and before the end of the house. So maybe size matters in terms of when interceptions activate?
Nevertheless, let’s look at my eighth house because I have a planet in there. When we have a planet in our eighth house, it means we’ve put that energy in jail. My chart is below:
Mars is the planet of assertion. It is our identity, our needs, our immediate wants and our ability to go get them. When I vowed at a young age to never be mean again, I believe I was putting my Mars in jail because I rejected myself so hard. By putting my self assertion in jail, I had poor boundaries because I couldn’t assert them. I couldn’t give love to my anger which told me that someone had violated my belonging and that I needed to go into fight mode. Obviously, people need to understand that they can’t touch your belongings which is what we call setting a boundary. So it is up to us to make our boundaries clear: “don’t touch me. Don’t touch my stuff. Don’t go in my room. Don’t talk to me like that.” and not entirely blame other people for not knowing and accidentally crossing them. Of course if they do know that they are crossing a boundary, then mars helps us to act and protect ourselves.
Also, if my mars is in jail, I couldn’t develop self-awareness. Thankfully, my Pluto was well and active in the first house, so this helped me sift through all the emotional, mental and physical information I had. However, this goes with something I learned recently: You can have all the knowledge, but without the experience you’re not going to be able to understand the meaning of it all. Also, without the effectiveness of Mars, I had all this self-understanding without the ability to establish it. Essentially, I trapped.
What happens when we have locked away a part of ourselves without love or acceptance? It doesn’t go away. Instead it acts out. It becomes extreme. Everything needs to be balanced in order to function healthily, and without the attention it needed, my self-assertion in my house of power was facing the worst of neglect. It wasn’t developing. I would have rage attacks where anger would come over me for no reason and I’d want to lash out. Sometimes I’d have violent thoughts in my head. I didn’t understand this was me desperately trying to tell myself that I was not honouring my own boundaries. And when you don’t honour your own boundaries, you subsequently allow others to cross them too.
So you see, I never wanted to draw attention to myself because I was scared of other people taking advantage of me. I had no confidence in myself to assert power healthily, or at all. When I intuitively picked up on their feelings, as if my Pluto was overcompensating by looking for danger. I already felt violated without them having to cross my boundaries because I believed it was inevitable. The funny thing is, I didn’t understand why I felt this way!
This also makes sense as to why I didn’t chase my unconventional dreams; I couldn’t trust in my own power to look after myself and so I stayed a little behind. Don’t get my wrong, life threw things at me and I had to push back and try to assert my power. However, it was amateurishly done. The fear of my random emotional outburst and extreme reactions to things was something I didn’t understand.
My mum always said “You’ve got to play the game.” meaning that life was a certain way and to succeed, you had to play it. However, in doing so, you could find ways to cheat. Haha, that’s so mum. I think I took this dispiritedly because it felt like I was being told to ignore my dreams and be something I wasn’t. I felt like everyone was telling me to be something I wasn’t and go along with things. “The world is the way it is.” It’s not me. I am not the world the way it is. I wasn’t born to carry the world on the way it is. If I have no interest in playing the game in front of me, I’ll make a new game up. There’s no such thing as absolute: no one game; no one way to think; no one belief or world. We all have different views here but I like to leave mine open because I always get surprised.
But this is why astrology can be so helpful to our healing; it can help us understand where we struggle and how we can correct our destructive behaviours. Our chart is a story of our relationship with ourselves. Look for the love and look for the absence of it.
I’m learning to re-embrace my mars now. I’ve got affirmations like “I have control. I can set boundaries. I can assert my power. I can protect myself. I am the driver and I will honour myself.”. When I truly rehabilitate my mars, I believe I will be able to fully develop my Leo in the ninth house and my Aquarius in my third house.
This period of isolation has given me so much. So much inner quality. I never had a vision for myself except to be a writer with meaningless day jobs to get by. I still write but I don’t have the day job. I’m in a lucky position where I don’t need one right now and I love that. It’s not that I don’t contribute or want to work; it’s just that I searched for an income elsewhere and it made me unfulfilled. It dampened my real gifts. I’m starting to see new possibilities and dreams for myself, I never paid mind to before: like astrological chart readings one day; paranormal investigator perhaps; an actual novelist or even a teacher of spiritual, astrological or self awareness practices. Someone who basically lives in the stars, which is somewhere I’ve told myself isn’t a realistic place to be (hello Capricorn co-ruler!). The beauty of it is, I’ve learned to empathise with people and understand their needs thanks to my Cancer co-ruler, before I take the show. I haven’t lost out on development; I’ve been developing the whole time, in these areas the most! I want to help others establish their own power, validate their own feelings, and live true to themselves no matter how unconventional or different it is! I really, really want that. So hey, maybe that’s where this is all leading. ❤
Love to you all and thank you for reading!
I must also please ask that you do me a favour and respect the information presented by my birth chart. I do not want anybody to share their analysis of me with either me or anyone else, except in regards to the exercise question in the article on the comments section only. It’s purpose is to act as an example for a lesson. Please use your own chart to practice on, or make random ones on free chart websites. Thank you again and have a wonderful day.
Grace King 