Brought to you by Michael Conneely from the Ilkley Happiness Centre
Contact Michael for a full reading of your astrological natal chart, a prediction, relationships astrology, astrology home study courses and astrology workshops.
Tel: 077-992-96821
Email: Michael@starwheel.co.uk
Web: www.starwheel.co.uk
SUN IN SCORPIO
OCTOBER 23 – NOVEMBER 22
It is important to note that Scorpio is potent for good or evil: there is a Higher and a Lower Scorpio – and then there is the Shadow Scorpio.
Higher Scorpios: The Higher Scorpio’s glyph is the eagle. These are the Mahatmas, who have transcended selfish passions and lead a path of spiritual or psychological transformation. They have faced the Hydra (see below) within themselves, and held it up to the Light. They redeem the world.
Lower Scorpios: The Lower Scorpio’s glyph is the scorpion, about whom most of this analysis is addressed
Shadow Scorpios: But the Shadow Scorpios will even sting themselves to death as well as others: ‘Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven’. It will vary to what degree the Shadow manifests.
Scorpio Key Words:
Secretive, passionate, emotional, intense, highly-sexed, possessive, jealous, spiritual, penetrating, sharp, observant, determined, dedicated, resourceful, unshakeable; generous or stringent to a fault. Smouldering. Hints of fathomless depths. Proud, Tends to keep others at a distance. Blunt, provocative and confrontational. Often react against authority. Ambitious. Shrewd and enterprising. Investigative. Coercive, into Power Issues.
Appearance:
Often has very piercing gaze, can be magnetic.
Mouth can be fish-shaped or wide and straight.
Often thick hair.
Defects:
Vindictiveness, power-crazed, scheming, control-freak, driving, workaholic, fails to realise that others are made differently, re-making others, paranoia.
Ruler – Pluto (and Mars). Rules the 8th House
SCORPIO CHARACTERISTICS:
They learned in childhood to mistrust. They saw dark shadows standing behind their parents. The gates of Hell yawned open at the outer edges of their religious teaching and their education.
Scorpios are often masked or enigmatic. They are suspicious and afraid of being hurt. Some hide their profound feeling and sensitivity behind an habitual smokescreen. They are proud, and can’t see that it is sometimes necessary, even courageous, to yield. They can be brooding, neurotic or egotistical.
Scorpios are very subjective and concerned with their own personal values, and can be downright fanatical in their views about people and life – fanaticism which can spur them on to unpleasant, even evil actions and biased, distorted judgement. Facts confuse an issue!
They are very attuned to the shadow in others, and can intuit others’ dark side very quickly. Mistrust of others’ motives can be crippling.
They loathe superficiality.
They loathe weakness of character.
They are sympathetic and compassionate, BUT they are also very ready to be ruthless. Although they respond to suffering, pain and loneliness, they are intolerant of weakness: they feel that no matter what sort of mess you are in, you can do something about it – they fail to realise that people are made differently, and not everyone has their capacity for ruthless self-discipline or their potential for self-transformation.
They are driven by a voracious need for relationship, but their fear of being hurt &/or their power issues can leave them intensely lonely.
Scorpio has a great problem relinquishing control: this means control on a lot of levels: spontaneous showing of emotion, controlling other people, arch-manipulators who pull strings all around them to keep the world in its place. Some make absolute power their ultimate goal.
Scorpios are all-or-nothing about work. They commit themselves to whatever they do. They ruthlessly move mountains.
Their insight enables them to outsmart, avoid or bludgeon their way to what they want. – they can wait for years, if necessary, to achieve their implacable goal. If they do appear apathetic or outwardly submissive, this is because they are eaten up from within by furious resentment and jealousy.
Every Scorpio carries a wound of some kind – an emotional or sexual problem or conflict or frustration, which – no matter how hard he tries – refuses to be solved. He has a penchant for creating crises and pitting himself against his enemies or against life. In this, he is self-destructive.
Scorpios have an acute sense of Justice, and don’t seem keen on turning the other cheek. The Scorpio does not hold the intellectual balanced justice of the Libran; it’s a powerful gut-level emotional reaction – and the Scorpio dictionary may not distinguish this from retaliation or revenge.Revenge can be an art form. One example is the ‘happy family’, where the wife sabotages her husband’s masculinity and loads her children with guilt at her unlived life. Scorpios can be very prepared to use sex for punishment.
Scorpio can systematically and protractedly ravage a marriage, can be possessive, jealous – even pathologically so. Shadow Scorpio is the calculating user who denies or justifies his or her abuse. Shadow Scorpio can be fanatically possessed by an ideology and at some level or other, project what they can not deal with themselves out onto the world and define it as their mission to redeem humanity: whether it’s in the home, at gun-point, on the rack, at the stake, from the fundamentalist pulpit, the politician’s seat in parliament, the social worker’s assessment unit or the psychiatrist’s cell or the custody and control unit’s therapy section next door to it.
Mysterious, fascinating and sensual, Scorpios have passion in abundance. Many Scorpios have a deep and mystical feeling about sex. Sex and love can be bound up with some sort of longing which ordinary relationship can not provide. Sex can be a symbol for reaching a different order of experience – perhaps surrender: a magic gateway to upper (or lower) realms. The Shadow brings in cruelty masochism and fantasy. Scorpios usually worship the erotic and reject anything ‘mechanical’. Scorpio possesses a capacity for enduring love – and this can sometimes amount to an act of self-sacrifice: it can be permeated with fanaticism. Either way, there will be nothing lukewarm. Scorpio can devastate love by his/her need to maintain control. – and this includes jealousy, as much as it includes deep and enduring love. Scorpio may very well seek to posses or re-make his/her lover. Scorpio may fail to respect the partner who will not fight him/her – and yet that fight can destroy everything: so either you have to fight, or be persecuted as ‘pathetic’. Either way, Scorpio has to win. If there isn’t a fight, it will be a case of a seethingly repressed Scorpio sabotaging and manipulating. Scorpio relationships can all too often be marred by implacable resentment and revenge for every slight (real or imagined) and constant blow-ups and crises. They will viciously cut deep and take the view that honesty precludes compassion.
Scorpio tends to hold traditional attitudes to marriage.
Yet, Scorpio has a rare potential as a lover, for understanding and insight – because he/she misses little. Scorpio may do his utmost to read and meet the other’s needs. Like all water signs, they thrive on being needed. They are not afraid of ugliness, whether internal or external. They have depth of awareness as to motive.
Double standards are often part of the Scorpio game. What’s good for him/her, s/he wont tolerate in you. They are subtle, complex and never obvious. Their fierce individuality can inspire respect – even love (if it doesn’t inspire fear and hatred).
Yet underneath it all, there’s Scorpio’s need for affection, acceptance, reassurance, love and companionship. They can not bear coldness. They are terribly sensitive. They’re hurt by neglect. If they are embarrassed by so much emotion, they can become hard-driving workaholics, ruthless and ambitious. They do need some arena where they can unleash or transform.
THE SCORPIO MYTHS
a) Pluto and Persephone
Pluto is the ruler of Scorpio:
Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, saw Persephone innocently playing in a field. Aphrodite told her son Eros to fire an arrow at the God Pluto, who was nearby.
But symbolically, it was Persephone who brought Pluto upon herself when she picked a narcissus flower: the earth gaped open at her feet and Pluto issued forth drawn by black horses breathing fire. Pluto abducted Persephone to the Underworld, raped her and made her his Queen.
Persephone’s mother, the Harvest Goddess Demeter was distraught – not knowing where Persephone had gone. Demeter wandered the world grieving. All the crops on earth withered, and it was winter.
Eventually, with the help of the other Gods, a deal was struck: Persephone only spends half the year in Hades.
In the other half of the year, Pluto gives Persephone back to Demeter, thus the gift of Plenty is made to the earth.
Thus, out of the black suffering of Pluto transits, plenty and rebirth can be won.
Pluto’s gift is Cornucopia – the horn from which flows endless plenty and creativity. From the magical secret union of Pluto and Persephone, flows the cosmic fire of creation and conception: great opportunity: an open window beyond time and space: a void where anything can happen. It is the union of apparent opposites. It is miraculous rebirth out of destruction.
This mystery is not for the common run of humanity – it can not be explained to the mundane or profane (as is appropriate for a planet and its satellite who’s dance is so far away).
It needs to be remembered that one of our handicaps is that we are actually afraid of our potential, afraid of our greatness – it can seem far easier to stay with the familiar.
b) Hercules and the Slaying of the Hydra
Another myth that is relevant to understanding of Pluto, especially Pluto in Transit, is The Slaying of the Hydra, from The Labours of Hercules.
Just as you feel you have resolved matters with a Pluto transit, a new dimension of challenge and pain can manifest.
The Hydra had nine heads. As Hercules cut off one, the rest just kept coming. In the end, Hercules lifted the Hydra out of the stagnant swamp it dwelt in, exposed it to the light of day, and killed it. After the nine heads were cut off, Hercules gained the jewel the Hydra had been hoarding.
So, it is that our feelings must not be left festering, but need to be brought out into the open and held in the light of consciousness to be acknowledged and resolved, for liberation from pain to be won.
Blind instincts and drives must not be left to fester in the stagnant swamp, but must be brought out into the open.
c) Ishtar and Ereshkigal
A third myth that is relevant to a full understanding of the descent into darkness that is involved in a Pluto transit is this myth from Babylon:
Ishtar, radiant Queen of Heaven descended into the Underworld to attend the funeral of the husband of her sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld.
As Ishtar descends, she is forced to give up her clothing and possessions, and is eventually hung up on a hook – utterly brought low.
So great is Ereshkigal’s power in her grief and rage that none of the Gods can do anything to save Ishtar.
Ishtar remains abandoned and defiled.
The world is bereft of light.
Eventually, the solution the darkness is found. The Gods fashion two little mourners who can slip unnoticed past the guards of the Underworld.
The Mourners win Ishtar’s return to the skies because they realise that what Ereshkigal needs is to be listened to. Ereshkigal needed her grief and rage to be understood and honoured.
This is one of the early challenges of a Pluto transit.
d) The Erinyes
The fourth myth needed for a full understanding of Pluto is that of the Furies (the Erinyes).
The Furies were born when Cronos (Saturn) castrated his father Uranus who had become a tyrant, imprisoning his children back in the womb of his consort Gaia, because of his dissatisfaction with them.
Cronos castrated his father with a sickle and where the seed of the dying Sky God fell on the Earth, it produced the terrifying Goddesses of Vengeance called The Furies.
(In fact the Greeks knew it was ill-omened even to mention their name so they referred to them ass the Eumenides – The Kindly Ones!, instead – to placate them!).
The Furies pursue all those who offend against the Laws of Nature, who sin against the family, who live some aspect of their life that is somehow out of true, who live contrary to their True Selves. Then, during a transit of Pluto, The Furies will pursue them, to manifest as illness.
Pluto is the avenger of Natural Law. The Furies are His instruments.
OEdipus was pursued to the ends of the earth by the Furies for killing his father and sleeping with his mother, albeit he was not aware of the identity of either parent when he committed these actions – but the point was OEdipus and those associated with him had tried to outwit his Fate.
e) Serpent lore
The serpent sheds her skin cyclically, and this was anciently perceived as symbolic of immortality and constant self-renewal.
The serpent was also seen as symbolic of the wisdom of Earth herself – timeless, ancient and knowing the secret of life, and also deadly
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