Full Moon in Taurus – November 2nd,
New Moon in Scorpio – November 16th

"My shadow's Shedding skin and
I've been picking
Scabs again.
I'm down
Digging through
My old muscles
Looking for a clue.
....
I wanna feel the change consume me,
Feel the outside turning in.
I wanna feel the metamorphosis and
Cleansing I've endured within

***The Sun and Mercury through the underworld of Scorpio
***And Venus, the goddess of love, penetrates deeper than she ever does. She dons leather, whips, chains, promises and threats as she wears the Scorpio mask from November 9th - December 1st.

    And so, in the name of Kali, the goddess of ego-destruction, we enter Antares, the boiling red star at the frozen heart of Scorpius.

    I write this article as the snow continues its descent to blanket the aspens and ponderosa pines of the Colorado mountains.  I think of an often overlooked symbol related to Scorpio – that of Ice.   Scorpio is Fixed Water, intended to harness and concentrate the Water element.  And so it pierces us as an icicle, yet it engulfs us as a glacier: the image of the hidden, hibernating soul exploring the contours of the inner shadow.

    Planets in Scorpio, planets in the 8th house  - this is the shadow’s domain, where the occult creeps in to submerge us in the psychodynamics of the unconscious forces.  Freud and Jung, the shamans, the psychotherapists, the past life regressionists, the hypnotherapists, the evolutionary astrologers, the tarot readers, the passion-obsessed, the compulsively intense– we all play in Scorpio’s lair.  Here, our suspicions surge, the rawness of emotion fascinates us, the melodrama, the fresh scars, the old wounds – give us that primal tar of existence to chew on.  We can find ourselves obsessed with dramatic and complicated situations, especially in the realms of relationships and shared business ventures.  From the Scorpionic perspective, we’ve invested so much – our money, time, efforts – all can feel threatened, unless we turn our base desires, as the alchemist does, into a refined gold, a process that first demands the initiation of the Dark Night of the Soul.
   
   Will we play to our projected political examples?  Will we exert power at all costs, allow the extremes of our emotions to overwhelm us and others?  Ask yourself, where do I manipulate my partner?  Where do I try to maintain that upper edge?  How do I pour salt into the wound?  How do I try to take without giving and then play victim to what I asked for?

    Couched between Venus’ sweet and endearing rulership in accommodating Libra and Jupiter’s optimistic adventures in Sagitarrius, Scorpio demands us to enter the black hole, to sift through and purge the detritus of our locked and hidden places, where what is reborn will look very different than who sipped that magical tea.  Will we be able to look in the mirror, to face the fear, and laugh it all away? That ability to bask at Jupiter’s jolly Sagitarrian hearth, with the bounty of gifts and good cheer, comes only after we first pass the Scorpionic threshold.

    Collectively, we are emerging into, not out of the Dark Night of the Soul, hence we need to activate the Dark Knight crusader in all of us.  Batman, as a superhero, is the most ‘shamanic;’ of superheros, in his batcave, masked, donning all black, only coming out at night, but fighting for justice as he faces each of his fears. But who is he? 

    Scorpio, as the yin aspect of Mars, the investigative researcher, penetrates into the Why?, lays us on the couch and demands us to reveal our soul.  Yet will we reveal our own? 

    The fiercely probing nature of Scorpio comples it to understand the dynamics of the soul through consistent transformations.  If the scorpion stays hidden behind the rock, folded inward in the depressive darkness, it cannot regenerate itself.  It must first let go of its control – even to who it thinks itself to be, even to the pain it feels itself to be in. To operate from the light, Scorpio claws its way into the dark crannies of the unconscious,  to watch the bogeyman and to not react, to witness from the place of the higher self. 
   
    Often, during Scorpio phases, we attract karmic connections, threads of our consciousness that we may feel entangled with in just the first encounter.  With Mars as its traditional ruler, Scorpio thrusts its way into risky and complicated situations for the thrill of the raw experience.  And yet we must remember that Pluto, the Lord of the Underworld, is the modern ruler of Scorpio, and Pluto demands surrender.  When souls are entwined, the vine of their union is not so easily severed.  But sometimes we must let go, of another, or a part of ourselves which is no longer suitable for our evolutionary growth.  Hence, the caterpillar, overly attached to its form, will never enter the chrysalis, to nurture its soul, to be reborn as the resplendent butterfly. 

    Let us consider Halloween, All Souls Day, and their Celtic roots in the Samhain festival.  It is still the custom in some areas to set a place for the dead at the Samhain feast, and to tell tales of the ancestors on that night..  This custom is incredibly resonant with the Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico where families build private altars, honoring the deceased, visiting the graves, bearing gifts of sugar skulls.  The sweets, the treats following the tricks, seems to hint at the Sagitarrian quest to venture to other worlds  as the promise of Scorpionic rebirth arrives only in the willingness to embrace our mortality in one form in order to regenerate our life force.  In fact, the wearing of masks, the playing with spirits, remind us of some of the most profound teachings of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, that all deities perceived, both wrathful and heavenly, in the bardo realms, are all figures of our own imagination.  Hence, through the imagination, we can also heal, and herein lies the magic of art, storytelling, myth, and archetype to invoke the vastness of the mystery-play, without attachment to any one form.

    It’s a question of how willing we are to lift the veils, and peer into the truth of our souls.  In regression or soul-retrieval work, people are often shocked at the types of soul-dramas held in condensed pockets of energy within us, obstacles to our current incarnation’s fulfillment.  Traditionally, during Samhain, it was essential to analyze the grain supplies and herds, deciding which animals would be slaughtered for the people to survive the winter.  With this acute wisdom, let us clear away the cobwebs of our soul. Is there an ancestor, an ancestral pattern, a relationship habit,  a soul-drama past life choking your intentions for ascension and awakening in this lifetime? Now is the season of cleansing.  Call in the cathartic release: a medicine ceremony, a soul-retrieval session, an evolutionary astrology reading, or even a scary movie.  Just  find the safe container to let out the demons, without creating new sanskaras, or karmic attachments.  Perhaps its dance, perhaps its death metal, perhaps a punching bag.  Don’t make a value judgement, just feel it, so that it won’t get stuck and repeat itself through some other person, or in your next incarnation.  For when the soul experiences defeat, there opens a wound, and until the wound is healed we will compulsively repeat the same wounding situations until we intend absolute transparency to ourselves, the kind of self-awareness that services the healing of ourselves and the entire planet.  Allow the totems of serpent, butterfly, owl, phoenix, and scarab to teach you the wise ways of willing decay and patient regeneration

    When Scorpio drags us ball and chain through its wasteland of turmoil and tension, we must remember the opposite sign of Taurus, the simple bliss of nature’s pleasures – delicious foods, ecstatic dance, blissful music, that remind us of the body’s connection with the Gaian matrix, not just the body as a storehouse for the psyche’s labyrinthine cell.  We can also consider why the leaves so entrance us with their beauty when they change form, right before they fall.  Similarly, we must ourselves, as MAGI, as wise ones, to die, to enter our personal autumn.  We swallow the red pill, we journey into the medicine of mystery’s truth, knowing all along that we will dismember ourselves, and put ourselves back together.  The willingness to feel ALL of IT, not just the new age glitterpaint, but ALL of the shades and textures of BEING and BECOMING, the transience of Transformation – it is that willingness which exalts us to the peak of the pyramid, as empowered shaman, as transfigured alchemist.

    I share this brief story as a guide through the often murky swamps of Scorpio.
Conscious Scorpio is the ability to witness the whole emotional game and not be sucked into its traps.  This summer I watched as my beloved at a festival caressed and played with another, just as I wanted to dance with her.  I witnessed jealousy sting and slide like a serpent with spikes through me. Should I run up and make a scene? Give a dirty look? Act tough? It was an unfamiliar emotion for me., with little Scorpio, 8th house, or strong Pluto in my chart.  However, I knew that I had just entered a Lunar cycle with Scorpio and that I was a Scorpio rising for the year with my Solar Return chart.   So I knew I was being tested, invited to discover this archetype.  I felt the volcano vortex through me.  I watched it rise.   I concocted whole dramas, dripping with tragic manipulative linguistics, power plays I could shove onto her.  I psychoanalyzed the whole situation, even as I watched her simple joys in being held, nurtured in a way the uniqueness of our connections would not allow.  I could see  the value she was experiencing in that moment with another, a kind of tenderness which she had been longing for.   And I also recognized that this experience would not undervalue or threaten the values and purposes we shared together.  In the fullness of the felt experience, the jealousy lifted after a few moments.  Then I uncontrollably laughed as I entered the truth of emotional impermanence and I realized that I wanted the same space to share my heart with others, that I could not hold a hypocritical grudge and that it would serve no purpose in our souls’ work together.  I still wanted her to feel my presence, without invading their moment in any forcible way.  With subtle grace and attentive step, i entered their space and suggested that I’d like to share a dance with her and gave that extra half a second of serious stare through my eyes.  You know this – the Scorpio stare.  I knew she received my message that I needed her to check in with me, that my edges were being curled back, by the way she nodded and said she would come to me in just a minute.  Ironically, as we danced in front of the stage moments later, we both simultaneously gazed upon the undeniably gorgeous fairy playing violin onstage.  My beloved looked at me, knowing this archetype on stage as a sort of fantasy of mine.  My beloved nodded her head in the fairy violinist's direction as if to invite me to go up closer and bask in my romantic vision.  Immediately, we had both danced in jealousy's trickster garb, and let it play through like blowing bubbles, together in the ephemeral.

    We are in these times now.  Instant karma - retribution or salvation.  We must be careful now, full of care.  And honor the intimacy we build with another, the depth and trust and vulnerability - to know and allow the other's fantasies, even if we do not fulfill them.  To also know the sore spots of each other and how to nurture them.  To be in truth, of truth, and for truth.

     In Scorpio, in the 8th house, tethered to Pluto – in all of these cases we are blended, we are pureed, we are chopped, and mixed and mashed – we are psychichally linked, and cannot hide from our partner – and through the loud cacophony of the blender, the scream of agony and ecstacy – we create the juice, what allows for the ultimate expression of this archetype, Tantric Union, where the two souls meet their creator and their destroyer, as egos dissolve into the spiral coil of divine consorts, Shiva, Shakti – the One, awake to the awesome powers of eternal mystery.

....
Contemplate what I've been clinging to.
....
See my shadow changing,
Stretching up and over me.
Soften this old armor.
Hoping I can clear the way
By stepping through my shadow,
Coming out the other side.
Step into the shadow.
Forty six and two are just ahead of me."

Lyrics by Maynard James Keenan of Tool, "46 and 2"
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