In the movie Practical Magic, Sally and Gillian Owens live under the shadow of a centuries old curse cast by their ancestor, Maria. Disappointed in love, Maria casts a spell that she would never fall in love again. Proving, however, that she who practices the Craft on herself has a fool for a client, the curse goes awry and poisons the love life of every Owens woman since. The true love of an Owens woman dies an untimely death.
We don’t know a lot about Sally and Gillian’s parents, except that true to the curse, their father dies – and their mother does as well, when the girls are young … “from a broken heart.” Thus, the girls are sent to live with their eccentric aunts, Frances and Jet, practicing witches, who raise them with equal parts magical training and free-spirited thinking, where they have chocolate cake for breakfast and never have to brush their teeth. The price, however, for this magical childhood is steep, and Sally especially feels keenly the ostracisms of the people of the small town where they live. With the abiding pain of losing her parents and the social isolation caused by her birthright, Sally decides to cast a spell so she could never really fall in love, choosing an impossible combination of traits that no man could have.
Her aunts however, cannot bear to see Sally so unhappy, and cast a spell so she would fall in love. Marrying, Sally has two children – girls, of course – and then true to the curse, her husband dies an untimely death. Sally is forced by circumstances and finances to move back with her aunts, but she warns them, “My girls will not learn magic. I want them to have a normal childhood.”
The natives with Pluto in the Eighth face the same quandaries, the same dilemmas. The Eighth is a house of deep and abiding secrets, of seemingly magical connections, representing the thin veil that separates this world from the next. It is the place of alternate Universes, or as the Celts believed, the home of the Sidthe (pronounced shee), the land where time runs different from ours, where once entered, you are forever changed. The people who have strong Eighth House, Scorpio or Plutonic influences feel keenly that there is much more to the Universe than our dimension reveals. They feel the cold burning heat of dimensions that, if expressed, threaten to tear apart our neat and orderly three-dimensional existence. For this reason, these influences leave a mark on their soul, resulting in a certain wariness about the circumstances of their lives. This is the source of their intensity and their driving need to understand the mysteries of the Universe.
Natives with Pluto in the Eighth, however, will not reveal their intense drives to know to just anyone. They are more keenly aware than most that they do not have the answers, and suffer if they act like they do. However, they do have one socially accepted outlet for their curiosities, which is sex. The sexual act is more than a release, it is a doorway to the very mysteries they crave, and any act that drives them closer to “knowing” draws them like moths to a flame. This is why some of the stuff that a Pluto in the Eighth person comes up with in the sexual arena is just plain kink, and sometimes scary for the rest of us mere mortals.
The very act of seeking answers, “to know,” leads to another theme of Eighth House influences – transformation. [Movie Spoiler Alert!] In the movie, Gillian, bored with small town life, moves away, drifting away her life in endless parties, and ultimately in a relationship with an abusive man. In distress, she calls for her sister, who ends up being kidnapped along with Gillian by the violent, disturbed and alcoholic Jimmy. To escape, Sally spikes Jimmy’s tequila with belladonna, but in her haste, she overdoses the liquor and Jimmy dies. Frantic and fearful, they drive Jimmy’s body back to the homestead and attempt a forbidden spell to reanimate him. Sally warns that this is dangerous, that Jimmy would come back as something dark and unnatural. Gillian replies that Jimmy was already dark and unnatural, so it couldn’t make much of a difference. They bring Jimmy back to life, but he comes back twice as violent and dangerous. Sally is forced to kill Jimmy a second time as he is choking Gillian, demanding that she become his wife. But like most abusive men, Jimmy isn’t so easily dispatched, and his spirit – made more malevolent and potent by the abortive transformation spell – haunts the women and eventually possesses Gillian, torturing and slowly killing her.
In the meantime, a law enforcement officer shows up in the town, looking for Jimmy as a suspect in the murder of another woman. Taken aback by the strangeness of the reaction of the townspeople to the two women – and by the weird reactions of the sisters to his questions – he begins to realize that Jimmy might be victim of a crime himself. After seeing the potent shade of Jimmy in possessed Gillian’s bedroom, he suspects the sisters murdered him. Not so coincidentally, this officer possesses all the strange traits of the true love that Sally conjured in her childhood spell. The draw between Sally and the officer becomes very apparent, and both are confused. Sally reveals that she made the spell that brought him to her, and he reveals he wished for someone like Sally himself.
In the meantime, Gillian becomes sicker as the spirit of Jimmy sucks away her life. The aunts decide the only way to save her is to form a coven, and Sally invites the women of the town who rejected her as a child to help. She finds out that the women were not quite so unaccepting of her as she imagined, but the initial attempts of the coven fail, and Jimmy is not dispatched. Sally realizes that she must draw on all her magic to save her sister, and to do so she must accept everything that she is – magic, birthright and all – to do so. But can Sally do this given how much she feels that magic has mucked up her life?
Pluto in the Eighth house individuals are faced with this question as well. Joni Mitchell sings in the song Hejira, “We all live so close to that line and so far from satisfaction.” This is the challenge of Pluto in the Eighth house, finding a way to cross the line that will enhance rather than mess up their life. It is a place where they must apply some practical magic.
About the Author
Beth Turnage is a professional astrologer with over twenty years experience counseling clients in career and relationship issues. She writes an astrology column for a weekly newspaper along the Connecticut shoreline and blogs about astrology at Astrology Media Press.
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What a truly brilliant post, Beth! Magnificent!
Neeti,
Thank you very much!
HI! I love this post! I’m a Pluto in Scorpio in the 8th house on the 8th degree! Pluto opposes my Taurus sun.
I remembered watching Practical Magic in theater, and til this day I still get creeped out about a ‘red’ moon or a moon with a ‘circle’ around it.
What is a difference between, lets say, Pluto in the 8th house versus sun in the 8th house?
May,
Thank you!
The blood on the moon thing, for people who don’t know, meant the the moon was in the process of a full lunar eclipse which does portend in a broad sense death and regeneration, eighth house themes. Many different myths are associated with an eclipse; and the stories follow the theme of a life and death struggle that usually have a positive outcome.
I would think that an eighth house sun is a sun with a Scorpionic or Plutonic edge to it. Imagine a Gemini with the need to know, every single thing, down to the last detail, or an Aquarian who has to master every single last electronic mystery. Scary isn’t it? I’m just kidding here. Seriously Pluto represents your soul’s mission while your Sun represents the engine that drives your personality. So the difference is the drives of the soul vs. the drives of the ego which do not always agree.
Thank you for posting this! I have a Scorpio moon/pluto in the 8th house and this makes a lot of sense. I always feel this weird energy that there is this deep veil that is covering what is really going on sometimes, not just in a universal sense, more so with everyone I personally know. And because of this, I usually avoid letting people in on the truth, no pun intended, but it would scare them to death.
Yes, exactly!
When I counsel clients with this type of energy, there is usually a sigh, and then realization that they are understood and that they are not alone. They still want their secrets, but to know that at least 2% of the humans walking the earth have the same experience as them is comforting.