Star Watch

by Maria Barron

Welcome, star watchers, to November, the month of the sign of “fixed water.” In the northern hemisphere, it’s time to dig out the ice skates, but beware! Scorpio’s lake may be frozen on the surface, but under the stillness, the waters run deep and passionate.

Terri Smallwood, your usual guide on this monthly tour of reflections of outer and inner space, will be back soon. Meanwhile, the exploration she led us into two months ago, a year-long examination of the signs as stages in the continuing cycle of the soul’s evolution, leads us now into Scorpio, a water sign by element, fixed by quality, of inward, yin, feminine character but ruled by the masculine warrior, Pluto. In the wheel of 12 signs, Scorpio emerges as No. 8 ... symbolized by the loop-de-loop of above and below ... the ever-circling spiral of the figure 8.

In our spiritual growth, we like to think of rising ever higher, but Scorpio, in its natural rulership of astrological house No. 8, reminds us that at the apex of the figure, the circle bends. The Scorpio Eagle soars ... and then winds down, becoming the hidden, nocturnal Scorpion lurking in the dark - the sign ruled by Pluto, lord of the underworld. Symbolizing the concerns of Scorpio and the 8th house, the upper and lower loops of the number 8 link the surface and the underworld, the obvious and the deep, the physical and its loss. The typical astrological keywords for the sign and house are “sex and death.” You could say this station on the chart is a little intense.

Like every stop on the wheel of the zodiac, this one has its lessons to impart, taking the teachings of the sign before it, building on them, and handing them along to the sign to come. Scorpio’s deep digging helps the soul learn to fly. Those turns through the under-
ground, juxtaposed with the turns above ground, provide practice in the dynamics of the figure 8.

As a figure skater practices a twirling leap on land, in sneakers, before performing the move on blade’s edge on the ice, so the Scorpio energy learns its moves, probing the netherworlds and re-emerging, learning to work the loops, in an effort to link not only the depths and the surface, but ultimately the Earth and heaven. It is no small matter, then, that Scorpio and the 8th house are associated not just with sex and death, but also with the Phoenix energy; with passings, but also with what continues, both in terms of inheritance and in the symbolism of rising and rebirth. All the signs in the stations to come, 9-12, build on these questions of religion, morality and the place of the individual in relation to the “whole.”

No wonder people born under this sign have a reputation for having intense eyes, if eyes are indeed the windows of the soul. Theirs is an intense task. The lessons, of course, are for us all. Every soul is challenged to learn and strive to integrate the understandings reflected in every sign. Like those born under any sign, Scorpio natives live their lessons, and those around are free to learn from them. But do try to understand that people with strong Scorpio placements might not always be able or willing to speak what deep-down they know. As a water sign, Scorpio feels its way along. As a fixed sign, it holds those feelings close, sometimes for a long time.

The preceding sign on the wheel, Libra, represented the first emergence from the lower, more private, hemisphere of the Earth’s astrological chart - the natural chart - into the more public, top half. Libra, a masculine sign ruled by a feminine planet, sought to balance private and public concerns and anything else s/he could measure with those scales, having learned both the value of measurement and the value of doing for others from the preceding sign, Virgo. Libra took the sensible first step in bridging the private world with the public world, taking that task one step at a time by focusing on one-to-one relationships. Libra and the 7th house rule partnerships.

In Scorpio, the lesson leaves the coziness of the twosome and is drawn inexorably into the wider arena of the big, bad world. By the time the lesson moves into Sagittarius and the 9th house, those spunky Archer-animals are singing, “Oh, sweet embraceable you,” to woo the wonderful world, but Scorpio is none too sure that the world is worth wooing. There’s a lot of pushing and pulling in the Scorpio energy between the self-protective “I” and the scary but enticing world out there that includes “all the rest of you.” In Linda Goodman’s Love Signs, Scorpio represents desire. Its place in the evolution of the signs is “to teach that love is passion and learn that love is surrender.” That’s a lot for a sign ruled by a secretive warrior like Pluto.

Yet, it is an important task in life to come to terms with the vast questions of life and death, the possibilities of ascension and rebirth, and to get some practice with the twists and turns of those deeply personal and yet transcendent issues before one heads out to embrace the world. In this Scorpio month, which began October 23 and continues until November 22, we all get a chance to ponder those lessons.

It is fitting in a time ruled by a sign of death and rebirth that this month is host to a pair of total eclipses, one of the Moon and one of the Sun, although the solar eclipse will not be visible in much of the world and actually occurs late in November, just after the Sun passes from Scorpio to Sagittarius. Still, the eclipses represent yet another Scorpionic sign of going down into death, having one’s light in effect consumed, and returning to shine again unscathed.

Down here on Earth, Steve Miller’s song Jet Airliner seems to me to reflect the essence of Scorpio’s role on the wheel, where it bridges the close partnerships of Libra and the very public Sagittarian interests.

Goodbye to all my friends at home
Goodbye to people I’ve trusted
I’ve got to go out and make my way
I might get rich, you know I might get busted

But my heart keeps calling me backwards
As I get on the 707
Riding high, I’ve got tears in my eyes
You know you’ve got to go through hell
Before you get to heaven

Big ol’ jet airliner, don’t carry me too far away
Big ol’ jet airliner, ’cause it’s here that I’ve got to stay.

Now, in Scorpio’s time, is a good time to go within in internal reflection on the big quesions in your life and how it all relates to the wider world. Just remember that when Scorpio’s time has passed, Sagittarius will be waiting in the outside world, ready to talk it all over and have a party.

This November also offers a beautiful mix of potentially consciousness-expanding transits hinging on beauty and art while the Sun is in Scorpio. About two-thirds of the way through the month, as the Sun nears its crossing into Sagittarius, the transit energy shifts towards indicators of conflict. In the last week of November, the upset energy could break through or resolve one way or another, under rather contrasting transits, leading finally, in a calmer way, into December.

For a detailed listing of this month’s transits, see
the November Interactive Calendar