With the Sun having entered Scorpio just a few days ago and Halloween just around the corner, we are starting down the path of the hours of darkness outnumbering the hours of daylight in the northern hemisphere. In the ancient Celtic world this was celebrated with Samhain, the festival celebrating the end of harvest and the beginning of winter. There is a definite sense of descending into the underworld during this time. In the northern hemisphere, the days are getting darker and colder and rainier, and we can literally see the deciduous trees shedding their leaves and shutting down until spring.
Although this can seem like a dark time and a time of death, there is a beauty in the turning inward and the introspection that this time brings. Even if we may not consciously be reflecting inward, it is highly likely that we are spending more time at home under a blanket than we did during the summer when we were much more outwardly facing and social. This is a time to think about the seeds we are metaphorically developing that will blossom in the springtime. Are we the kind of person we want to be? Are we living out our values? This isn’t a time to berate ourselves (which is rarely helpful for personal transformation anyway!), but it is a wonderful check-in point to see if we want to change course or alter direction.
And in so many ways, this is what the sign of Scorpio is really all about. Scorpio is a sign that celebrates the depths, and the very beginnings of seedlings that form that will grow into something amazing in the spring.
The Sun is not particularly at home in Scorpio. The Sun thrives when it is seen, and nothing about the Scorpio season celebrates what is seen. However, if the Sun spends its time in Scorpio wisely, it is likely that what the Sun manifests when he makes his way around the zodiac to Aries will be simply amazing. There is no beautiful thing to see without much work going on in the depths and behind the scenes. And this is what the Scorpio Sun is all about. Preparing what is below so that it can burst forth into glory.
It doesn’t feel arbitrary to me that in the classic “Zodiacal Man” which correlates Zodiac signs with body regions, that Scorpio is associated with (among other things) the reproductive organs. There is definitely a pre-birth component to Scorpio that ensures that there is something to be born in the spring.
Scorpio is also a Fixed Water sign, which further gives us clues into the characteristics of the Scorpio season. Fixed signs don’t change quickly, and they represent the most stable part of the season they occupy. (For Scorpio, this is midway through the Autumn.) There is a sense that it is really Fall. Leaves are falling, the weather is getting colder, the days are getting darker; we can’t fool ourselves into thinking that we are still in the Summer the way we often can during Libra season. This is one of the beautiful things about the Fixed signs; they so thoroughly manifest the power of the season they inhabit that we can see the full archetype of that season. For Autumn in the northern hemisphere, that full archetype represents a decent into darkness. In most areas, it also represents an increase in moisture and rain (remember that Scorpio is a Water sign! It is not surprising that our Fixed Water sign heralds the coming of wet days!).
With so much happening astrologically in fixed signs in 2021, the Sun’s entrance into Scorpio also prepares it to square or oppose Saturn, Uranus, and Jupiter over the next month. That is a set of three major aspects! There are definitely many areas for each of us to dig up within ourselves that will be difficult and unexpected, but that also have so much potential to really help us in our journey through life (especially with the final major aspect of the month being a square to our greater benefic planet Jupiter). Hard times are hard; but hard times can also bring good, even though good may feel so far from us.
As I watch the rain outside of my front window today and think about what that means for the Scorpio archetype, I am reminded that pre-birth typically involves darkness and water. That could be the water and darkness that cause a seed to sprout in the earth, the water and darkness that surround a baby in the womb, the tears we may cry in the darkness before we can rise at dawn as a stronger person, or the water and darkness from which humanity collectively came eons ago. Water and darkness are the harbingers of the change of life.
This is the beauty of our Scorpio season; it is our time to go deep within the dark areas of ourselves, do our shadow work, look unflinchingly into our truest selves and prepare the correct seeds to sprout during warmer seasons. This season, I hope I can work from this place of not re-birth, but pre-birth. Which dark corners of ourselves are ripe for examination so that we can manifest something different in the future than we have in the past? Scorpio contains the magic of that work; it is a time to prepare.
Photo by Alex Dukhanov on Unsplash
