8th House Profection Year: Meaning and What to Expect

June 10, 2022

Annual profections show themes of the upcoming year based on your birth chart. An 8th House profection year can indicate losing, death (or endings), and more. If you’re experiencing an 8th House profection year, it can be a reminder to tend to yourself, your emotional world, and a time to embrace the art of surrender.

What Does the 8th House Rule?

Many astrologers will readily admit that the 8th House is a mysterious and complex house. Modern astrologers associate the 8th House with sex, death, fears and your pscyhe. Ancient astrologers link the 8th House with investments, loss, and death, among other topics.

“In my practice, the 8th house in astrology reflects the impact others can make on you and your material circumstances, and ‘inevitability,’” Alyssia Osorio from Praxis Astrology says. “Gifts, inheritances, taxes, debt, and loans are 8th house themes. I also see death, grief, therapeutic work with the intention to release trauma, undoing shame, and unpacking past biases as 8th house topics.”

Annual Profections Astrology

In astrology, annual profections are a tool astrologers can use for predictive work. “Annual profections are a Hellenistic time-lord technique, which sounds like quite the mouthful,” Osorio says. “Breaking it down, it’s a technique from astrologers in the Hellenstic era (1st century to 7th century BCE approximately), which posits that different parts of your natal chart are activated during different time periods in your life.”

Every house in the birth chart has an age associated with it. For example, if you are 27 years old, your 4th House is the house that is activated for you that year. Themes related to home, family, your psychological foundation or generational patterns will likely be a focus. Three years from that, when you’re 30 years old, you will be in a 7th House annual profection year. The 7th House rules one-on-one relationships and contracts. Those themes will likely play out on a larger scale in your personal life.

Meaning

There’s another layer in interpreting annual profections. Once you’ve identified your ruling house for the year, it’s time to figure out the ruling planet associated with it. That ruling planet is also known as your time-lord for the year. Each house in your birth chart has a zodiac sign and symbol associated with it and each zodiac sign has a planet that rules it. 

“If you know your rising sign, you can see which planet is your ‘time-lord,’” they say. “Time-lords are the ruling planet of the sign that’s being activated. So for instance, if you’re a Virgo rising, who is 31 years old, your time-lord would be Mars because that’s the planet that rules the sign of your 8th house, Aries.”

With Mars as your yearly time-lord, when Mars makes connections in the sky that year with other planets and with your own natal chart, you may feel those energies more intensely, they add.

“In this example, Mars transits in your natal chart might become more impactful. You might also notice that when transiting Mars makes aspects to planets, you may be in situations that reflect those transits.”

What to Expect

8th House profection years remind us that we deserve time to slow down and focus on our inner world. Trauma is stored within the body and we deserve the time and space to address it. “8th house years are years where you’re doing a lot of work behind the scenes,” Osorio says. “Your internal process becomes much more important, and your needs might reflect a desire to step back from the spotlight and focus on yourself.”

Deal with Debt

Debt can show up in many ways. “Whether it’s medical debt, student loan debt, rent debt or credit card debt, a union of people organizing against debt, we often think of debt as a ‘bad’ financial decision rather than a tool many people use to survive in an incredibly stratified economy,” Osorio says. “I’ve seen many people during 8th house years either pay down their debt, ask for support around debt, or unlearn shame around debt.” 

Try Out Therapy

An 8th House profection year offers an opportunity to tend to your psyche. Sitting with your past pain and trauma and starting the process of working through it isn’t for the faint of heart, but it can lead to a deeper sense of freedom through self-forgiveness and self-love.

“Trauma can feel really unfair. There are things that happen to us that aren’t our fault, but are our responsibility to heal within ourselves,” Osorio says. “8th house years can be a time where you grapple with your needs in relationship to your internal psychological process. This could be finding a new therapist that reflects your needs, trying new modalities like psychedelic therapy, generative somatics, or EMDR (a form of therapy that uses eye movement).”

Healing can also take place via “exploring ways of using your body for emotional release, through dance, kink, massage, or performance,” they add. 

Learning to Cope with Loss

Loss is a common theme during 8th House profection years.

“Oftentimes 8th house years present an opportunity to slow down, and get vulnerable,” Osorio says. “We go so fast in order to keep up with the world around us, it doesn’t give us time to properly grieve, or work through complex emotions.”

Don’t panic and jump to the worst case scenario, though. “While the 8th house can signify death, what is more likely to happen is that breakups, rejections, disappointments, and the grief alongside those relational fractures become opportunities for growth,” they say. “Greater emotional maturity, the ability to let things go, and the capacity to see a ‘no’ as a ‘yes’ for something even greater, are tools you can leave an 8th house year with.” It is a time of true transformation. 

How to Calculate

To calculate your what year you are in for your annual profections, you start at the ascendant and mark that as your year of life from the moment you were born until you turn 1 year old. The 2nd house marks your first year of life, and from there you add a year to each house.

For reference, you have your first 7th House profection year when you are 6 years old. The next time you have a 7th House profection year will be 12 years from then, when you turn 18.

FAQs

When is my 12th House profection year?

Your 12th House profection years occur when you are 11, 23, 35, 47, 59, and 71 years old.

Is it perfection or profection?

The term is profection, not perfection, and it is a Hellenistic astrology technique used for predictive work.

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