“Birth for Scorpio is the end part of a process, the reincarnation that follows a previous death.”
– Lindsay River & Sally Gillespie
Moving behind closed doors
From the courtship of Libra, we now move to what really takes place behind closed doors in every relationship. This is where the real dance of power, trust, and naked vulnerability takes place. I remember this co-worker who said that they preferred to do it naked when they wanted to have an intimate conversation with their partner. She said it helped speak to the truth when both parties were naked and vulnerable with each other. I don’t know if she was a Scorpio, but the image has stayed with me ever since.
While Libra is motivated towards balance, equality/equity, and justice, Scorpio is the dimension that knows that issues around power, trust, and loyalty aren’t as easy as what is written on contractual agreements. There’s a deeper knowledge here around a human dimension that polite society struggles to acknowledge. It’s one that is about the power of our instincts, sexuality, and wounds to affect the balance of the apple cart. Scorpio recognizes power wherever they see it, and they know that there’s sugarcoating it.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons Scorpio has a contentious PR because this is a sign the sheds light by going deep into the nuanced and complex elements that make us human. As a fixed sign, Scorpio is persistent and determined, much like the claws of the scorpion, in holding on for the wild ride and exploring where angels fear to tread. This is a sign that speaks to the fine veil between life and death, trust and betrayal, love and indifference, power and powerlessness, and creation and destruction. Living on this emotional razor’s edge is not for the faint of heart.
Facing the shadow within and naming it without
In the Middle Ages, the time of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere) that signaled Scorpio’s arrival was when farmers had to kill some of their livestock to secure food for the winter. One had to eliminate the animals used for food, knowing that they only had so much food stored to feed themselves and their animals. It was a time of preparation for winter’s arrival, and survival issues were very much on people’s minds.
Even the most mild-mannered Scorpio has at their core an understanding of what it takes to stay alive or succumb to death. Scorpio’s instinct is about what it takes to go down into the Underworld and come back (or be reborn.) Even in the ‘lightest’ of their expressions, Scorpios know that to live, something needs to die. They understand intimately what it’s like to be in the trenches wrestling with their own shadow, as well as death, and where the nuanced balance of power lives. If you think of the other animals that also stand for Scorpio: the eagle and the snake, you see how all of these animals are known for their hunting and transformative abilities. Another symbol of Scorpio is the mythic creature – the Phoenix – with its gift of dying and be reborn.
It’s this instinctual understanding of life and death that enables Scorpios to venture into exploring the hidden, often taboo, areas of life. They have the ‘spidey senses’ for what is underneath the veneer of ‘civilized society.’ They know, beyond the rational mind’s ability to grasp, that when it comes to survival – be it emotional, physical, and ideological, our rational mind is but a straw house compared to our instincts’ wolf-like strength.
Shadow Dance
When it comes to an understanding of a Sun Sign, it’s best to see its opposite-complimentary sign. In Scorpio’s case, we look to often characterized as placid and stubborn Taurus. These two signs speak to the polarity between Spring’s fertility power and life’s strength of rising again and the realm of surrendering and releasing to the dance’s natural forces between life and death. Taurus beckons us to understand the wisdom of the body, as well as our material world. It has a practical, if not at a time, simplistic view of life: eat when hungry, sleep when tired, have sex when aroused.
Scorpio beckons us to look beneath the surface. It teaches us that ‘no shit, no lotus.’ It intrinsically knows that without death, there’s no life. That without surrender, one can’t fulfill the cycle of life and death. It’s deeply in tune with this mysterious aspect of life, it’s most tightly held secret, that for eons mystery traditions have tried to teach but also hold sacred.
What Scorpio would benefit from Taurus’s learning is not to be too attached to the drama of life. As its often quoted as being Freud’s wisdom: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Both Taurus and Scorpio are stubborn and fixed in their own ways, but Scorpio can get lost in the paranoia of thinking that there’s always a conspiracy taking place behind a closed door, one in which they need to bust open. The shadow dance of Scorpio is to learn to let go of the wound and embrace the healing. Being stuck in the story’s drama is an obstacle to their own healing, and it stops them from bringing their medicine to the world.
Respecting the tiger within
Scorpio’s gift teaches us that sinking our teeth into something with feeling, passion, and tenacity can lead us towards uncovering buried treasures within. That in acknowledging the existence of the shadow, we also find our medicine within. In being emotionally brave and vulnerably naked, we discover that what scared us is our inner gold.
As the second water sign (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces), Scorpio is the second dimension that describes our Ego death. While in Cancer, the ego faces the forces of one’s emotional inner world, Scorpio teaches us that we die – i.e., our Ego dies – when we merge and are in an intimate relationship with another, be it a person, thing, process, or ideal. Part of the intensity of Scorpio is its dance of “I want to hold on to power” and “I want to surrender to the merging.”
The French call orgasm ‘le petit mort,’ which in many ways describes the intense and vulnerable dance of Scorpio. The build-up of arousal eventually leads to the release of the orgasm – the ‘small death’ that allows us to merge with the other and experience the mystery of being naked and vulnerable together.
As the Sun arrives in the realm of Scorpio, all of us, even if we have no planets in Scorpio, are invited to partake of the foods of the Underworld and put on our detective hats to explore our own emotional inner landscape and go where angels fear to tread.
*Main image: Odilon Redon – Melancholy (1876)
