Scorpio

October 24-November 22

• Fixed Water, symbolized by icebergs, swamps, mystery, passion and snakeskin.
• Music Gifts for Scorpio: Metallica • Rob Zombie • Korn • Marilyn Manson • Tool • Bob Mould, Black Sheets of Rain • Nine Inch Nails • Elliott Smith • The Plastic Ono Band • Black Sabbath • Funkadelic • Nirvana • Soundgarden • Alice in Chains
• Movie Gifts for Scorpio: Sin City • Sweeney Todd • Corpse Bride • From Hell • The Ninth Gate • The Sixth Sense •Eyes Wide Shut • The Shining • Sleepy Hollow •The Witches of Eastwick

When Libra’s quest for equality inevitably breaks down, you’re faced with a choice: fight like hell to keep your ego intact – or lay yourself bare and see what happens. Scorpio is the sign of both these options with all their attendant mystery, malice, misery – and potential for deep transformation.

At the heart of this choice is our relationship with power and control. The ego is the executive function of the mind, which calculates each emerging choice using input from the brain, the body, the heart and the surrounding environment. Each choice we’re faced with – Stay awake or go back to sleep? Toast or eggs? Go to work or call in sick? – is an effort to have control over what happens to us.

Psychologists say that someone who feels little power over his own life has an “external locus of control,” while someone who feels more powerful from within has an “internal locus of control.” These two ways of seeing the self in the world represent the very choice inherent in the Scorpio archetype: If you believe control of your life is held by someone or something outside yourself, you’re going to act in a very different way than if you believe you hold your own power.

Scorpio grapples intensely with this choice, mostly struggling to ensure internal authority and power. When a person experiences a strong external locus of control, the effort to grab that control for oneself can be fraught with danger. Besides simple anger and power-grabbing schemes, the process can, if taken to extremes, involve manipulation, stealing and brute force. These behaviors, which are often associated with Scorpio, are really just efforts to feel powerful inside. It is the Libran experience of projection taken to an extreme: These kinds of people feel so powerless that they will do anything to try and feel powerful. This person has not yet recognized that power is not grabbed from without, it is grown from within by gaining self-control and self-possession – not control and possession of another.

But at the very depths of Scorpio is a third choice that can really only be had once the locus of control has been experienced internally. That choice is to release one’s personal power to the larger universe. This is the choice of ego-death – not a literal death but rather a letting-go of the conscious ego to the larger pulse of the world. It is not resignation but an acknowledgement of the power in the rhythms and cycles and mysterious logic of the living universe. That choice is the highest point of Scorpio, the phoenix that rises from the ashes of its own death to live again.

Inherent in this choice to let go is the same idea behind exercises like trust falls. Mistrust in the universe is almost always accompanied by fear of a loss of control. Trust, on the other hand, is necessary for releasing one’s own power out into the world. Kathleen Burt, in her excellent book Archetypes of the Zodiac, describes the ancient Egyptian story of Queen Isis and King Osiris in connection with Scorpio:

King Osiris’s brother, Set, was jealous of the throne and had Osiris tricked and trapped inside a golden coffin. Set and his men hauled the coffin down to the Nile River and set it afloat, committing Osiris to his doom. Isis wandered for years and years looking for her husband, but when she finally found him, he was dead and his body mutilated. Isis and her sister searched all over Egypt to gather Osiris’s body parts but were unable to find his phallus. They pieced Osiris back together and, despite the absent part, Isis coupled with her dead husband and created the Divine Child Horus.

This story speaks volumes about control and trust.

When we relinquish control, we signal trust in another. This dynamic occurs in sex, money, drugs, death – four recurring themes in the Scorpio tradition. With regard to sex, it isn’t just that orgasm gives a glimpse of actual death, in its momentary letting-go into the oneness of being. Trust through the release of control also occurs in the more mundane way that sex requires another person to touch us, grasp us, ravage us – while we present ourselves to the other, to the process, vulnerable in our lack of clothes, naked to the degree of honesty in our overtures and responses.

Similarly, in death – literal death – we must of necessity relinquish the power of the ego and submit to the control of the living. When our bodies are so stilled they cannot move, and so quiet they cannot speak, then we must trust others to fulfill our wishes: to treat our body with respect, to speak well of our memory, to pass on our worldly goods to the people we have designated. The common fear of death may come just as much from a fear of losing control as it does from a fear of the unknown.

When you do experience ego death, or the release of personal power to a higher one, you can then allow your full passion and intensity to come forward: self-consciousness is diminished because we trust in the universe to uphold us and support us. Unintegrated, raw passion might manifest as anger, intransigence or simple lust. This is the lower register of passion, symbolized by the Garden of Eden snake as it was characterized by Christian commentators (the snake was not considered so evil in the Jewish tradition). This is the poison of the defensive position.

But integrated – that is, fully aware, open and responsive to the release of power from the self to the world – Scorpio’s passion and intensity can be great gifts to humanity. To wit:

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths
for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men
and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and
children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier.

From “A child said, what is the grass?” by Walt Whitman

Scorpio’s ability to dive to the depths and resurface with treasure shows us the highs and lows of what it means to be human. Without this impulse, we would be always skimming the surface and defending our territory, fearful of losing control.

This unintegrated form of Scorpio is one reason the sign has such a bad reputation. People have amassed experiences with Scorpios that make them think people born under this sign are mean, malicious and manipulative. That may be true for some people who have not yet grappled with their Scorpio energy. But the other ones – those who are drawn to release power and control into the wider universe – can be frightening for an entirely different reason: They are deep. Depth takes folks into the realm of the unconscious, dredging things up, and this process necessarily leads to transformation. And that makes lots of people uncomfortable.

We bury things for a reason. We get resentful when Scorpio energy unearths them, necessary as the unearthing might be.

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Scorpio energy is best balanced by its opposite sign, Taurus. Read the description of that sign to understand what “shadow” traits you might need to integrate. Contact us at (310) 592-0435 or kathy@depthastrology.net for a detailed chart reading that reveals the entire scope of your personality, gifts and challenges.

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