The Mysterious Depth: Houses 2, 6, 8 and 12

Every tradition of chart reading warns you about houses 6, 8 and 12, and treats house 2 as a modest matter of money and family. Bepin Behari gathers all four into a single region and gives it a name that changes how you see them: the Mysterious Depth, the primeval state from which the universe itself arose, which some of his diagrams label the Sea of Immutability. Objective existence, he writes, lies in the bosom of subjective consciousness. The Cardinal houses are the field of life; these four are its foundation and its final dissolution.

The Second house: the churning of the ocean

The Second house represents sensitivity, speech and death. Behari reaches for the great myth of the churning of the Cosmic Ocean, when gods and demons together churned the deep and many things emerged, among them the nectar of immortality. The Mysterious Depth works the same way: astrology discovers what is being churned up from your depths into everyday life. Speech here is not mere sound but prana, the life-giving breath acting as a creative force. Wealth and jewels are the treasures the ocean gives up. And the house also bestows death, the limit at which the individual is gathered back into the Depth.

The Sixth house: the Great Illusion

Exoteric astrology reads the Sixth as enemies, debt, disease and servitude. Behari reads those as the outer expressions of Maya, the Great Illusion that veils the real nature of the Eternal. The strange classical significations, cooked rice, receiving alms, a fall from a boat, are, he argues, concealed references to stages of initiation. Cooked rice is the Divine benediction, the food a disciple receives on acceptance by the guru. The begging bowl is taken up not from poverty but from understanding. The fall from the boat is the moment the disciple stops flowing with the current and learns to swim by himself. Until the individual hears the call, the Sixth house keeps raising storms; it is the preparatory stage, the house of latent faculties.

The Eighth house: the Serpent Fire

The Eighth is the enemy's fortress, linked in the yogic literature to the Muladhara chakra at the base of the spine, where the Serpent Fire, kundalini, lies coiled. The terrifying significations of the house, decapitation, mutilation, sudden affliction, are read by Behari as the trials of initiation: the conquest of the inner fortress transforms life radically, but the arousal of the Serpent Fire is difficult and dangerous, hedged with secrecy, and achieved with the suddenness this house is famous for. Secrecy, suddenness and life-giving energy are its three signatures.

The Twelfth house: the Sea of Dissolution

The Twelfth is release. Its suggestive appellations include renouncing one's couch, redemption of debt, ascension to heaven, the dawn of humility. Life is a continuous burden, and release from it is a redemption from debt; merged in the Mysterious Depth, the soul paradoxically becomes the owner of everything the Depth contains. For the man of the world the same house means loss, expenditure and imprisonment. That double action is the rule for all four houses: if the individual is ready for the next step, their spiritual features manifest; for most people, the exoteric and more negative features predominate.

The Raja Yoga hidden in the depths

The chapter ends with a combination almost nobody teaches. If the lords of the Sixth, Eighth and Twelfth houses are confined to those houses, singly or in association with one another, in friendly, own or exaltation signs, and not associated with any other planet by conjunction or aspect, the situation produces a Raja Yoga: the classical text promises an emperor whose domain extends far and wide and who rules uninterruptedly in great affluence. The logic is pure Behari: the lords of the depths, kept within the depths and harming no other house, stop disturbing the rest of life, and the reservoir of the Mysterious Depth works for the native instead of against him. Modern readers will recognize the family resemblance to Vipareeta Raja Yoga; Behari's version is stricter, demanding isolation from all other planetary contact.

Two smaller rules complete the picture. Benefics placed in the Sixth, Eighth and Twelfth are generally adverse for worldly purposes, while malefics bestow good results there. And Jupiter's ownership of the Eighth, or Venus in the Sixth, is considered favorable for acquiring siddhis, the powers these houses guard, even while they still create adverse earthly conditions. The depths give their gifts, but never as an unmitigated boon.