the 12th house and literal prison
Understanding the Prison Industrial Complex through Derivative Houses
Please view this email on Substack, as it will cut off in Gmail for length.
Consider this a belated May newsletter, however, Happy June!
Let’s jump right in. I was scrolling along the timeline when I came across @millymichelle’s query on criminal histories and house significations; there was a lot of corroborating testimony I agreed with in the replies, but I was surprised at the time to not see any mention of the ninth house, which was my first inclination. So I shared my little thoughts in the forum but continued to mull: if I was drawn to the ninth house due to its implications through derivative houses, what does that mean for the other ten?
While it may be attractive to assign all matters of incarceration to the twelfth house, the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is a system so pervasively ingrained within the fabric of American society, that it requires and benefits from zooming out—derivative houses help us understand how any given topic functions, who it implicates, and what factors support or hinder its agenda. The astrological chart is a network, affirming the mechanisms of life-sized relationships that already exist into connections we can digest, figure by figure. As well as better understanding a particular topic, derivative houses help us strengthen our astrology, forcing us to gain more intimate understandings of the places and why they signify what they do. It’s a good exercise for any astrologer!
Unsurprisingly, putting the pieces together on the PIC was emotionally taxing given the types of narrative research I consumed to further my own understanding—the smallest of fractions made it in here for the sake of space, time, and digestibility. That said, I would like to turn this work and all I couldn’t fit, along with charts(!), into a lecture for Monday, June 20th, to celebrate Juneteenth in a fulfilling way with my astro-community; I’m putting together a panel discussion to follow—if that’s something you’d be interested in attending please leave a comment below after (or while) reading!
Before jumping into the delineations, if you’ve been thinking about booking a session with me, now is absolutely the time! June and July books are now open.
For the next two weeks only, session packages are now available! These save a good amount of $$$—I encourage y’all to check that out! This is a great option for new and old clients alike who are looking for more consistent check-ins on transits and the future.
Also or the month of June, I have a goal to book 19 redistributed gift sessions for new queer and QT black clients—if you would like to facilitate that, you can purchase a gift session here: https://djennebadrammeh.com/booking OR contribute to the fund here: ko-fi.com/djennybeans. Every $170 raised will gift a session to one of the folks who commented on the tweet below, as well as rescue me from a housing insecurity fiasco I’ve found myself in (Saturn stationing RX in the 4th house problems!).
Last, the sliding scale codes for first time sessions across June and July are: DOMICILE15; DOMICILE20; DOMICILE30.
OK. Onward.
‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for it exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology. And it may be taken over either by ‘specialized’ institutions (the penitentiaries or ‘houses of correction’ of the nineteenth century), or by institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals), or by preexisting authorities that find in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mechanisms of power […] or by apparatuses that have made discipline their principle of internal functioning (the disciplinarization of the administrative apparatus from the Napoleonic period), or finally by state apparatuses whose major, if not exclusive, function is to assure that discipline reigns over society as a whole (the police).1
— Michel Foucault, Panopticism
12th House — Bad Spirit
The Twelfth house is where Saturn, the Greater Malefic, rejoices. It is the house of self-undoing; of suffering; of isolation; of exile; of incarceration. It is associated with large, untamed beasts as well as hidden enemies. Incarceration is a twelfth house topic—to be imprisoned is to be isolated from society and caged, quite literally, like an animal. The issue of U.S. arrests and incarceration today is a direct product of chattel slavery, as American policing evolved from slave patrols, first instituted in South Carolina in 1702.2
“if any negroe or other slave shall absent himself from his masters service and lye hid and lurking in obscure places, comitting injuries to the inhabitants, and shall resist any person or persons that shalby any lawfull authority be imployed to apprehend and take the said negroe, that then in case of such resistance, it shalbe lawfull for such person or persons to kill the said negroe or slave soe lying out and resisting.” — Virginia’s 1680 slave codes.3
“The Gray Wastes—our carceral state, a sprawling netherworld of prisons and jails—are a relatively recent invention.”4 Crime is not the single or even most important motivator of America’s uniquely high rates of incarceration, but actually criminal justice policy.
“And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These young men are part of a growing undercaste, permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream society.”5 In the saturnian Gray Wastes of incarceration, imprisoned peoples are designated as the hidden enemies of society, tucked away for their sentence, and further so when out, liable to being swallowed up again by the social factors (poverty, unemployment, education) that pipeline reentry by recidivism.
“[T]he slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back toward slavery.”6 — W.E.B. Du Bois
1st House — Helm
In the First house, which is second to the twelfth house of incarceration, we find life itself. The first house is the hour-marker, or helm. “According to Porphyry, some astrologers believed that the soul entered the body at the moment of birth through the Hour-Marker; this is probably why Antiochus called the first place the entrance point into physical life.”7 (Brennan, 232)
The first house is a place of empowerment by selfhood and this is where Mercury finds its joy. Within the house of self, Mercury dances on the bridge between night and day, a mutable creature along for the ride of personal transformation, however erratic or deliberate. As a raconteur, Mercury’s joy speaks to the possession of our narratives; as a griot, “a living archive of the people's traditions,”8 an essential for the preservation of oral histories for a people banned from literacy. The body becomes a vessel for stories, ensconced by hermetic lids of own our discretion. In Toni Morrison’s terrifically and consistently misquoted Beloved, she writes on behalf of Paul D to a bedridden and mourning Sethe: “You your best thing.”9
When the world goes dark and falls away from us, we remain, left with ourselves. The first house belongs to itself while supporting the place that it succeeds, a relationship of proclaimed ownership. When a person is incarcerated, their life becomes (more obviously) an asset to the state, politically by prison gerrymandering10 and by physical labor, sometimes literally picking cotton11. The second place “is called the place of bios, which in this context means “livelihood,” “means of living,” or “manner of living.” (Brennan, 353).12
2nd House — Gate of Hades
The Second house is third from the twelfth house of incarceration. As mentioned above, this house is responsible for that which sustains us. For incarcerated peoples, communication with the outside is designated a luxury; communication on the inside becomes pertinent to survival. The third house relationships forged in the tangible twelfth house space are responsible for one’s livelihood and protection, as lonesomeness here is a liability. Incarceration is a third house experience onto itself, given a term of imprisonment is spent fenced in on a campus—an artificially produced community. Locality becomes the world; the world becomes liminal.
Poverty, or a lack of second house resources, is the state-manufactured gateway to prison. I talk about this more in the fourth house delineation.
3rd House — Goddess
The Third house, fourth from the twelfth and where the Moon rejoices, is the house of Goddess. The third house is responsible for local matters: neighborhood; regular communication; administration; primary and secondary schooling. We find the school to prison pipeline here, an amalgamation of practices and policies (suspensions; cops in schools; zero-tolerance policies) that disproportionately disadvantage black students to the end that they are more likely to enter the criminal justice system.
Grassroots and community organizing live in this nocturnal space, guided by the Moon’s nourishing and progressive nature. The Underground Railroad and its conductors, white and free black abolitionists, ushered enslaved folks from safe house to safe house across county and state lines in shrouds of secrecy—while the destination was largely a ninth house venture (far north in the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean), the methods of travel were distinctly third house in nature. Riders of the Railroad mainly traveled piecemeal on foot or by wagon. Abolition’s dependence on community networks to succeed exist in stark contrast to ninth house systems of law and order, which function in a top down capacity. The modern prison abolition movement takes its cues here with a focus on grassroots on-the-ground organizing efforts.
4th House — Subterranean
The Fourth house, fifth from the twelfth house, may easily be regarded as Saturn’s other joy. It is the anti-(mid)heaven and is the deepest, darkest area of a chart, providing the foundation and structure for which it may rest and be supported. The fourth house signifies lineage, patrilineage furthermore, inheritances, and property. It is also literally about homes themselves. “Since housing equity makes up about two-thirds of median household wealth, excluding black Americans from establishing equity during a time of unprecedented rises in home values locked in and exacerbated wealth disparities.”13 The fourth house, being so largely about heritage, land, and housing, can be understood as indicative of generational wealth.
Broken windows policing is a practice popularized in 1990’s New York City, which holds that areas with visible signs of crime, such as broken windows, must be more severely policed, as crime will increase without this interference. Historical and contemporary redlining barred Black Americans from access to homeownership and therefore wealth building; broken windows policing along with Stop and Frisk are exemplary of the criminalization of poverty as engendered by black economic equality. In Winter 1865, Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman issued an order under Abraham Lincoln’s authority:
“The islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns river, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes [sic] now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.”
…each family shall have a plot of not more than (40) acres of tillable ground, and when it borders on some water channel, with not more than 800 feet water front, in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford them protection, until such time as they can protect themselves, or until Congress shall regulate their title.”14
Following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson as his successor overturned the order by Fall of the same year, returning the land to the white Southerners of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
“In 1910, black Americans owned at least 15 million acres of farmland, nearly all of it in the South, according to the U.S. Agricultural Census. Today, blacks own only 1.1 million acres of farmland and are part owners of another 1.07 million acres.”15
5th House — Good Fortune
The Fifth house, sixth from the twelfth house of bad spirit, is where Venus finds her joy. Venus is an abolitionist. The fifth house is about making pleasure from scratch (art, wine, sex, pregnancy, children) and the sixth house is about health, labor, and displacement. Venus’s joy(s) exists in disconnect to the themes of the twelfth house, as these houses construct an aversion. This fifth house is about wellness and the pains to attain simple, elusive pleasures—it is also about the overwhelming love and yearning for the future; as eleventh from the seventh house of romantic partnerships and family, the fifth house signifies children as hope for a better tomorrow, which is also, of course, an immigration issue.
The aversion to incarceration here illustrates the separation of families as much as it does the joys of being free.
6th House — Bad Fortune
The Sixth house is seventh from the twelfth, and the place of Mars’ joy: the house of subjugation, labor, health and physical injuries, military and police officers, and “changing from place to place.”16 Known as the house of the enslaved, this delineation remains relevant still for contemporary time.
The Sixth house of slaves and slavery overcomes the ninth house of government by square, informing the motivations and conditions of law and order, the justice system, and social policy—culminating a system of rule predicated on and allegiant to racial stratification. The United States, born a British colony on stolen indigenous land and the stolen labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants, operates in service to this history still; as the axis goes, the twelfth house is the house of imprisonment while the sixth house is the house of slavery. The Constitution’s Thirteenth Amendment reads: “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”17 So, per the constitution, slavery in the U.S. remains legal, though singularly as a government mandate; slavery by reinvention and rebrand: not only legal, but punishment deserved.
As one of the declining houses, the sixth is associated with travel, although Mars’ influence by joy colors this signification with shades of exile and displacement by persecution, war, deportation, and asylum.
7th House — Setting
The Seventh house is eighth from the twelfth place of incarceration and hidden enemies. This place serves as the house of open enemies and conflict as well as partnerships and contracts—it is about war, marriage, and family.
In eighteenth- and nineteenth century America, the lives of white women in the United States were circumscribed within a legal and social system based on patriarchal authority. This authority took two forms: public and private. The social, legal, and economic position of women in this society was controlled through the private aspects of patriarchy and defined in terms of their relationship to families headed by men. The society was structured to confine white wives to reproductive labor within the domestic sphere. At the same time, the formation, preservation, and protection of families among white settlers was seen as crucial to the growth and development of American society. In colonial America, white women were seen as vital contributors to the stabilization and growth of society. They were therefore accorded some legal and economic recognition through a patriarchal family structure… […] Unlike white women, racial-ethnic women experienced the oppressions of a patriarchal society but were denied the protections and buffering of a patriarchal family. Their families suffered as a direct result of the organization of the labor systems in which they participated. […] Black men were denied the male resources of a patriarchal society and therefore were unable to turn gender distinctions into female subordination, even if that had been their desire. Black women, on the other hand, were denied support and protection for their roles as mothers and wives.18
Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”19 spoke to the building crisis that was the destruction of the black family as a few hundred years in the making. The report was polarizing in its sensitivity to the realities and impending worsening conditions of the “black community.”
Later that same year at Howard University’s commencement ceremony, President Lyndon Johnson co-signed the findings of the report in his address, saying “[Black family breakdown] flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man. It flows from the long years of degradation and discrimination, which have attacked his dignity and assaulted his ability to produce for his family.”20 These ideas were poorly received by white liberals and conservatives alike, for varying reasons, and without a plan to amend the destruction laid out, served as mere platitudes, radical though they might be. With no policies in place to address the dire state of affairs for black communities, an over-correction emerged by way of the emerging Gray Wastes of the 70’s, a carceral over-correction antithetical to Moynihan’s initial intents.
Let’s talk about this more at June 20th’s lecture.
8th House — Idle
The Eighth house of Idle-ness is ninth from the twelfth house, “which conveys a sense of not being in motion or doing anything, perhaps because this is the last phaf the angular triad associated with the Descendant were planets set each day.”21 The eighth house is about what is shared and what is owed: secrets; assets; debts. The eighth’s trine to the place of incarceration reifies imprisonment as the ostensible payment of a debt to society, framed, though not actualized, as redemption. Redemption then is tucked away as a private affair, something to do in the shadows before emerging with declared progress. A society who cannot bear witness to progress will find it hard to believe.
Bail and parole are both eighth house matters—cash bail subjects those arrested for a crime without means to pay for temporary release to lengthy periods of incarcerated limbo, awaiting actual conviction and sentencing. The fourth house of generational resources trines the eighth in a harmonious relationship for the economically privileged—access to generational wealth determines the ability to afford cash bail. A 2021 CalMatters investigation found “at least 1,300 people have been incarcerated in California’s jails longer than three years without being tried or sentenced. Of those, 332 people have been waiting in jail for longer than five years.”22 The crowd sourced efforts of community bail funds is one of the more beneficial significations of the eighth house.
Parole, from the French parole for “word,” as in to give one’s, is liminal in nature. Provisional release submits parolees to general surveillance while attempting to reintegrate to society; because the standards of living and morality are so much higher for parolees, without all the necessary support to facilitate them, parole puts persons in a state of idleness, as there is always the chance that one may transgress and be sent back to prison to complete a full sentence.
9th House — God
The Ninth house of God is tenth from the twelfth house of incarceration. The ninth house is about power: federal government and the judicial system function in an overcoming square to the twelfth house of incarceration. As tenth from the twelfth, this place functions as the public vestige of what is hidden. There is no formal incarceration without a legal system to facilitate it. In the U.S., those convicted of felonies are excluded from most jobs; cases become matters of public record; they are disenfranchised from the civic duty of voting. The sun, signifying authority, rejoices in the ninth, highlighting the state and federal powers responsible for sentencing; the legal process of catching and defending case; and, by design, the functionally inescapable reputation born of a criminal history.
The type of sight associated with the astrological Sun has both physical and metaphysical dimensions; it represents the literal surveillance of an empire by its rulers as well as the omnipotence of an all-seeing god or eye. […] It is associated with surveillance because its power always emerges through a top-down approach. If the Sun stands for the future, then it also stands for a specific type of future that is carefully engineered, omnipotently surveilled, and designed to break society away from its own histories and traditions.23
The panopticon is a ninth house signification, a surveillance on the carceral structure, made possible by its height and the eye of the sun, both literal and by metaphor.
10th House — Praxis
The Tenth house of Praxis, or the Midheaven, is eleventh from the twelfth house. As the most visible area of the chart, the tenth house is about reputational standing and social climbing (non-derogatory). “Generally, the tenth and its ruler are also associated with how effective or successful the native is,”24 which is clearly influenced by criminal history, given the social and economic barriers it erects long after a societal debt has been “paid.”
While redemption and rehabilitation are pushed to the dark corners of the eighth house by imposing powers, real redemption and exoneration comes in the tenth, where it functions as the place of Good Spirit and reputation in relationship to the place of incarceration. It is the house of praxis, which is to say action, where one may be evaluated by strangers, for better or worse.
11th House — Good Spirit
The Eleventh house of Good Spirit is twelfth from the twelfth house of incarceration. This is the place of social groups and hopes and dreams, themes that become become cadent in relationship to incarceration. Jupiter rejoices in what is relationally a liminal space, dreamlike even; I place restorative justice here. Restorative justice requires community facilitation, an eleventh house process, and functions as a niche alternative, still low in American popularity, to punitive measure. Because the eleventh house sextiles the ninth house of criminal justice, an implication rests that restorative justice has merits in a lawfully ordered society if only the appropriate authorities would consider it. As a succeedent house, it supports the tenth house of praxis and exoneration with the tools necessary for their livelihood. The eleventh house does not sell dreams, it offers an imaginative pursuit of justice; it demands we pursue, hand in hand with our siblings, the world we’d like to see.
I know this was lengthy, thank you for reading through to the end! If you have any thoughts I would love to learn them!
Michel Foucault, Panoptiscism (The Foucault Reader, 1984) p207
Jill Lepore, The Invention of the Police (The New Yorker, July 2020) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-invention-of-the-police
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Black Family In The Age of Mass Incarceration (The Atlantic, October 2015) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Black Family In The Age of Mass Incarceration (The Atlantic, October 2015) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Black Family In The Age of Mass Incarceration (The Atlantic, October 2015) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/
W.E.B Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1935)
Chris Brennan, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune (Amor Fati, 2017) p353
Francis Bebey, African Music, A People's Art. (Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books, 1969, 1975)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1987) p173
Hansi Lo Wang, Kumari Devarajan, 'Your Body Being Used': Where Prisoners Who Can't Vote Fill Voting Districts (NPR, December 2019) https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/12/31/761932806/your-body-being-used-where-prisoners-who-can-t-vote-fill-voting-districts#:~:text=in%20biblical%20studies.-,Since%20the%20first%20U.S.%20census%20in%201790%2C%20the%20federal%20government,of%20where%20they're%20imprisoned
Daniele Selby, How the 13th Amendment Kept Slavery Alive: Perspectives From the Prison Where Slavery Never Ended (Innocence Project, September 2021) https://innocenceproject.org/13th-amendment-slavery-prison-labor-angola-louisiana/
Chris Brennan, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune (Amor Fati, 2017) p353
Calvin Schermerhorn, Why the racial wealth gap persists, more than 150 years after emancipation (Washington Post, June 2019) https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/06/19/why-racial-wealth-gap-persists-more-than-years-after-emancipation/
Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Truth Behind ’40 Acres and a Mule,’ https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/
Todd Lewan, Dolores Barclay, ‘When They Steal Your Land, They Steal Your Future’ (LA Times, December 2001) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-dec-02-mn-10514-story.html
Demetra George, Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice: A Manual of Traditional Techniques. Assessing Planetary Condition. Volume 1. p720
13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (National Archives, 1865) https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/13th-amendment#:~:text=Passed%20by%20Congress%20on%20January,slavery%20in%20the%20United%20States
Bonnie Thornton Dill, Race, Class, and Gender: Our Mother's’ Grief: Racial Ethnic Women and the Maintenance of Families (Thompson Wadworth, 2004) p266, 269
Daniel Geary, The Moynihan Report: An Annotated Edition (The Atlantic, September 2015) https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-moynihan-report-an-annotated-edition/404632/
Lyndon B. Johnson, "To Fulfill These Rights." (Howard University Commencement, 1965) https://www.c-span.org/video/?326895-1/president-lyndon-b-johnson-commencement-address-howard-university
Chris Brennan, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune (Amor Fati, 2017) p359
Robert Lewis, Waiting for Justice (CalMatters, March 2021) https://calmatters.org/justice/2021/03/waiting-for-justice/
Alice Sparkly Kat, Post Colonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor (North Atlantic Books, 2021) p23
Chris Brennan, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune (Amor Fati, 2017) p361
this is so well researched!! im interested in that lecture djenneba, thank you for sharing your labor and love 💚💚💚
Illuminating :)