In the shape of S (which, if considered closed, is 8, and, lying down, is equally serpentine, infinite), the Serpent includes two spaces, which it encircles and transcends. (The first space is the lower world; the second, the higher world.) In another serpentine figuration – that of the coiled snake, mouth biting tail – it is not the S that is reproduced, but the circle, the symbol of earth, or of the world as we have it. In the shape of S, the Serpent escapes from both Realities and vanishes from Worlds and Universes.
– Fernando Pessoa, Way of the Serpent
I. The Temple of the Eighth Gate
In the eighth house of his nativity, Fernando Pessoa sealed an entire temple. The chamber of Eros, death, silence, and shared secrets became his crucible. There, the Sun, Venus, Neptune, Pluto, and the very Syzygy itself came to reside; a constellation of transmutation that would turn his life into a liturgy of disintegration. Gemini, mutable air, formed the lattice of that hidden chamber; a sign ruled by Mercury, the god of translators, emissaries, and thieves of meaning. It was a shrine where identity was dissolved and passed through veils, where poetry emerged not from inspiration, but from sacrifice. Pessoa did not merely write; he was written through.
The Sun in Gemini, light of the conscious soul, splits, mirrors, and bifurcates. Tifereth, the heart of the Tree, was fractured in multiplicity. And, with it, the illusion of unity was permanently undone. The sword of thought replaced the throne of self. In the Tarot, this alignment echoes the Ten of Swords: finality through mental saturation, a heart pierced by excess cognition. Pessoa did not possess a singular I; he bore a cross of mirrored names, each with its own burden of light and shadow. Every act of authorship was a form of psychic dispersion.
II. The Serpent in the Twelveth Cloister
No temple stands without a cloister. Pessoa’s twelfth house formed precisely that: a monastery of forces not yet born into speech. In this invisible chamber, two planets resided in silence and unrest: Mars, exiled in Libra; and Uranus, retrograde, in the same sign. Both ruled by Venus, they obeyed the eighth house. Desire and upheaval, fury and rupture, libido and revelation; all held captive, all sublimated. Mars, as malefic and displaced warrior, could not act. He gestured, hesitated, deferred. In Libra, the sword of will became a lace of indecision. In the twelfth house, action turned to memory. The red bled into absence.
Equally veiled, Uranus operated inwardly. Retrograde, erratic, and governed by the same Venus of death and offering, it became an organ of psychic electricity. The revolutions of Pessoa’s soul were never public. They were internal earthquakes, often missed, always recorded in verses and broken mirrors. The twelfth house, ruled again through the chain of Venus → Gemini → Mercury in Cancer, tethered all unconscious forces to the same master of veils: the maternal Mercury of the ninth.
III. The Aquatic Scribe of the Ninth House
Mercury, in Pessoa’s chart, rules the eighth house, and thus governs all that dies, desires, transforms, or is offered in his inner world. Nevertheless, it does so not from a throne of logic or air, but from Cancer in the ninth, water cardinal, lunar, emotive, uterine. Mercury, the god of thought, becomes soaked in memory, writing from the womb. A maternal, sacerdotal function: the scribe of grief, the philosopher of loss.
The ninth house speaks of meaning, vision, transcendence. However, when occupied by this lunar Mercury, it transforms into a chapel of reverie. All that the eighth house yields – the dead lovers, the poetic doubles, the erotic compulsions – must pass through this Cancer-lead scribe, who translates in reflection. Pessoa’s entire architecture is governed by this configuration. A murmuring mystic.
In the Tree of Life, Mercury corresponds to Hod, the eighth sefirah. Again, the number returns. Hod is splendour reflected, intellect applied, magic made grammatical. Pessoa’s poetic system is a mercurial rite. And that rite originates in water.
IV. A Life Without Domicile
In Pessoa’s birth chart, not a single planet sits in its home. Mars is exiled in Libra. Saturn is exiled in Leo. Jupiter is exiled in Scorpio. Mercury is in water, a foreign element. Even the luminaries occupy signs of dispersion and performance. There is no sovereign. There is no planetary throne. The entire map is exile. Pessoa was not born to reign, but to reflect, to translate, to fracture. All functions in his life operate from borrowed rooms. All archetypes are performed, a vessel where planetary forces echo across veils.
V. The Ascendant and the Alchemical Body
Pessoa’s Ascendant is Scorpio and within it resides Jupiter, retrograde and exiled. It governs the second and fifth houses, yet it withdraws its gifts. Expansion becomes introspection; faith turns into fermentation. The body he incarnated was not designed for pleasure or visibility, but for depth, silence, and symbolic intensity. It is a pot of inner pressure.
Jupiter answers to Mars – again, the exiled warrior in the twelfth – who in turn responds to Venus in the eighth. That Aphrodite, in Gemini, is subject to Mercury, in Cancer in the ninth, who answers to the Moon in Leo at the Midheaven. The Lunar Mother, in turn, is ruled by the Sun, which sits again in Gemini in the eighth. And the circuit closes. All identity flows back into the eighth house. The face he presents to the world is sculpted from shadows, and those shadows serve the temple of death and desire. There is no self without offering. No name without disappearance.
VI. The Midheaven and the Weight of Saturn
At the cusp of his chart, the Medium Coeli in Leo carries three figures: Saturn, the Moon, and the North Node. All are governed by the Sun in Gemini in the eighth. The public destiny, the soul’s hunger, the karmic direction – filtered through the house of transformation. The exiled Chronos brings gravity to the vocation. The world demands a performance and Pessoa answers with withdrawal.
The Moon, also in Leo, speaks of a soul that longs for recognition but hides behind masks. The North Node aligns with both, signifying that the call was never toward comfort, but toward a labour of concealment. His mission was solar, but his Sun was hidden; his work was public, and yet his core was silence. Every applause was an echo in a tomb.
VII. The Spirit in Virgo – Earth as Ritual
The Lot of Spirit falls in Virgo in the eleventh house. Ruled by the same Mercury in Cancer. Spirit is earth mutable, under lunar command. The soul’s work is to serve, to refine, to transcribe. But the material through which it does so is not clear-cut logic, but emotional trace, psychic resonance, archetypal memory. In this configuration, Spirit kneels. It labours. It polishes fragments of the Real into symbolic vessels. The eleventh house makes it collective, prophetic, and future-facing. Yet its ruler roots it in the maternal past. Pessoa’s destiny was to preserve its shadows, as a sacred archivist of liminar points.
VIII. Fortune in the Second – The Hidden Substance
The Lot of Fortune falls in Sagittarius in the second house, ruled by Jupiter retrograde in the Ascendant. Material substance is camouflaged, sealed within the very flesh. The body becomes cipher; value arises through the art of bearing, of enduring, of remaining intact amidst fragmentation. His resources were encrypted in the sinews, his talents pressed into the grain of existence like a hidden scroll that only the right season could reveal.
Fortune’s path is mapped through Saturn, the ancient warden of substance. In Zodiacal Releasing, Pessoa’s years were governed by two L1 periods of Saturnine rule, both anchored in the body: first Capricorn (his third house, the house of gesture, speech, the embodied word) from ages eleven to thirty-seven, then Aquarius (his fourth house, the root, the ancestral body, the IC) until death at forty-seven. He died under L2 of Mercury; once more the return to language, to pilgrimage, to the eternal search for home, only days before a transition to L2 of Leo.
Throughout this long Saturnine pilgrimage, every manifestation of Fortune was filtered by the solar Saturn in Leo at the Medium Coeli, ruler of the ZR from Fortune: the law that anything given must first be withheld; that all substance is a kind of exile.
IX. The Archangels and the Absent Flame
Pessoa’s chart is drenched in Air and Water, invoking two archangels above all others: Raphael and Gabriel. The first governs Hod, intellect, thought, movement, communication. Gabriel rules Yesod, memory, dream, emotion, vision. Fernando moved entirely between their currents. He received. He mirrored. He translated what never belonged to him.
Uriel, the archangel of Earth, remains uninvoked. It is Earth that is missing. There is no stable ground, no enduring substance, no field for cultivation. The chart is a temple of reflection, not of embodiment. All solidity dissolves into language. Pessoa’s world shimmers with images, with dreams, with thoughts, yet nothing descends into the world of matter, nothing finds rest in the clay of incarnation. Even his Lot of Spirit, placed in mutable Earth (Virgo), is also ruled by Mercury in water, refusing to root. His work is forever an offering, never a possession. He glides through veils, but never touches soil.
In this cosmos, the Rose never blooms. The sacred flower, the heart of incarnation, remains latent, folded in silence, always imagined, never touched. There is no Grail in the field, only its rumour. There is no altar strewn with petals, only the perfume of longing.
X. The Seal of Eight
Eight is not only a house in Pessoa’s chart; it is the number that stamps him from all sides. He was born in 1888. His house of transmutation contains five planetary bodies. The Tree of Life associates Mercury with Hod, the eighth sphere, which governs language, ritual, and the splendour of intelligible form. His very being is shaped in the pattern of the serpent; the number 8 doubled and doubled again.
In Way of the Serpent, Pessoa writes that the S, when closed, becomes an 8, and the snake escapes between two worlds. He names this shape as the path of transcendence, as a form that disappears even from duality. The Serpent vanishes, evading both Realities. This is the final image of Pessoa’s map: a figure whose essence can only be traced. A being whose language is shape; whose self is reflection; whose truth is evasion. He was a sealed letter, vanishing from the Worlds and Universes.
Coda – Ritual of the Uncoiling Serpent
The chart of Fernando Pessoa is a closed circuit, a serpent folded upon itself, ouroboros of word and fate; eight drawn as a loop, Rose never incarnate, matter ever absent. In the turning of this study, as in the turning of the Two of Pentacles – Jupiter in Capricorn, first decan, beneath Lecabel and Vasariah, Chesed of Assiah – the lesson is not only to recognise the circuit, but to risk its untying.
Take this moment as a silent ritual. Gaze inward, where the ouroboros guards the entrance to your own house, where absence becomes motion and longing becomes return, loosening the knots. The loop that contains the poem, the body, the soul; may yet be opened by the same mercy that closes it: circulation, change, movement, the willingness to enter the world of substance, even if only for an instant.
May the serpent uncoil, may the Rose dream of earth, may the words become body, and the ritual find its exit in the lived world. What could not bloom in Pessoa may yet root in oneself.
Fiat Lux.