22 Oct Soul-Making ~ Scorpio Season – October 23rd-November 22nd, 2022
On October 23rd, 2022 the Sun crosses over the threshold of the underworld and slips into the dark waters of Scorpio, initiating the season of death. The light grows dim, chilling the air. Vines and branches begin to wither. And the warmth of autumnal color begins to drain, bleeding out into the night. Every morning’s slightly paler than the last.
“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”
Loss is felt everywhere as the atmosphere grows dark and heavy. The lengthening shadows summon a haunted mood as dead dreams begin to wander through your mind, sighing about what could have been and what should have been. Here, the past threatens to consume the future with regret.
The wisdom of Scorpio offers you two choices. You can rage against the dying of the light or you can break on through to the other side.
Into the Woods
This year, the Sun’s transit through Scorpio begins in a tight conjunction with Venus and a dramatic set of eclipses.
Locked together in a long kiss, the Sun and Venus enter into the darkness of Scorpio together. But in the dark, your soul can speak. Venus inside the Sun will stir an ember of desire inside your soul. A restless longing for love and meaning will burn. And you’ll no longer be able to live on tasteless food, dry kisses and dull conversation.
It’s time to get lost in someone’s eyes, wander into the woods, and suffer for your art.
This season of eclipses will initiate a wave of tremendous growth along with a healing crisis. Psychological challenges will sharpen as primal fears of loss and abandonment threaten your morale. The season ahead belongs to those who are willing to sacrifice for what they love and who refuse to break under pressure. You can stumble and cry, but you can’t give up.
The ruler of Scorpio, Mars will station retrograde in Gemini in between the eclipses on October 30th. This begins a major re-write of the mass mind. Tides are turning in consensus opinion. Institutions of power are bleeding to death. The old economy is crumbling. And with the US election falling upon the lunar eclipse, you’ll need a dark sense of humor to remain conscious and alert.
The season of death summons primal fears. But there’s also a tremendous feeling of peace in yielding to the unknown. As the Sun sinks into the underworld, a long struggle comes to an end. And it will be such a relief to let go, to surrender, and allow the eternal to reveal itself.
Magnified in intensity by the eclipses, this Scorpio season is about shedding, releasing, and letting the past finally be laid to rest.
“Shed no tear! oh, shed no tear!
The flower will bloom another year.
Scorpio season is an alchemical initiation, revealing how death makes room for the future to come. Rotting leaves will be reborn as the darling buds of May. The black earth devours the disintegration, all the bones and the ashes from the past will give birth the the future.
The wisdom of Scorpio season is to let dying things die gracefully. Loss is your greatest teacher, inspiring deepest gratitude for everything you still have to hold.
A Little Death
“Love is my religion — I could die for that — I could die for you.”
Scorpio rules all the invisible rays of power and the mysteries of sex and death. With Venus’ influence so potent this season, a lust for life will emerge to reignite your passions. You may feel insatiable and exhausted, like there’s never enough to satisfy your soul.
In Scorpio season, everything is a matter of life and death. And those born under the dim Sun in Scorpio exhibit an intensity of feeling and an emotional honesty that can seem monstrous to more civilized creatures.
Those born during Scorpio season are marked by the pang of loss. A gnawing hunger drives them to suck the marrow out of life. And these natives must sharpen their senses so they can feel their way through the dark, following invisible trails.
A Scorpio friend uses these subtle senses to feel into your soul. They peer through the veils you have wrapped around your secrets. This intimate nature inspires strong reactions of worship or revulsion: love or hate.
Absorbed in the darkness of the underworld, the Sun in Scorpio burns as an ember of desire. A famous love letter, written by John Keats to his fiancé in 1819, is a timeless expression of Scorpionic passion…
“Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you. . . I cannot exist without you – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have absorb’d me.”
Today, Keats’ immoderate passions would probably be labeled as toxic. In this psychologically sanitized world, this letter would be labeled as a symptom of codependency.
But the soul of Scorpio is brutally honest about primal desire. Some part of your soul knows that love is all consuming and life-threatening. “I cannot exist without you”.
The wisdom of Scorpio knows that love and sex are really about the death of self or absorption in another’s light.
Eros and Thanatos are always on each other’s trail, demanding great sacrifices for love. Every orgasm is a little death. Every act of passion and birth depletes your life-force. And all this struggle and sacrifice gives birth to your soul.
“I could die for that.”
Vale of Soul-Making: Life & Death of John Keats
The dark beauty and wisdom of Scorpio is fully embodied in the life and death of the Romantic poet, John Keats. His writing stimulates the awakening of your inner vision, feeding your soul with the glimpses of eternity.
Born on October 31st, 1795 with his Sun conjunct Venus and Neptune in Scorpio, Keats serves as a messenger of the underworld, using poetry to transmute the darkness of suffering into the light of the soul.
Keats died of tuberculosis when he was only 25 years old. Immortalized by his peers, Keats became mythologized as a frail genius, a “pale flower” too sensitive for this world. But he was not frail. Keats was unusually strong in body, mind and spirit. He faced death, allowing the fear and pain to drive his creative process.
Born under the Mars-ruled sign of Scorpio, he was a skilled boxer and trained physician, a man who knew how to use a sword and a surgeon’s knife.
At night, Keats wrote poetry. But by day, he worked in a grim hospital, where screaming patients were amputated without anesthesia and sawdust soaked up the blood. Keats was strong enough to handle his medical profession because of his personal history of pain and tragedy.
When he was 8 years old, his father died in a riding accident. Six years later, his mother died of tuberculosis. And in his adolescence, his brother became ill with tuberculosis and died.
“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains…”
At 21, Keats contracted tuberculosis and struggled with the disease for 3 years before he died. Keats spent the majority of his short life meditating on death, trying to discover the purpose of pain in the creative process. Much of his work was written through feverish suffering.
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan…
As a messenger from the underworld, he bore witness to the pure potential energy that hides within darkness.
“I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive — and yet I think I perceive it…There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions — but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.”
Staring straight into the abyss revealed to Keats that all of the pain and loss of life is what actually creates your soul.
“Call the world, if you please, “the Vale of Soul Making”.
He believed that all humans were born with divine sparks of intelligence, but they weren’t developed into souls until the human heart was subjected to the world of suffering.
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways….”
In 1818, when he began showing the first signs of tuberculosis, the fear of death began to torment his mind. In response, he wrote the sonnet, “When I have fears that I may cease to be…”
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance.
He expresses his fear that death will prevent him from rising to fame as a revered poet and separate him from his beloved, who he could not exist without. But by the end of the poem, he breaks through and releases his attachments to love and fame.
. . .then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
In the end, he accepted death as a release from his suffering: the burning desire for love and fame, the agony of sickness and the urgency of all his unanswered questions.
As a Scorpio, Keats’ pleasures in life were always twisted by pain. His loving heart and poetic genius were always haunted by suffering and death. But on his last day, his final words were:
“I am dying. I shall die easy. Don’t be frightened–be firm, and thank God it has come.”
Keats’ poems and letters still make an impression because he captured the essence of the eternal by discovering tremendous beauty even in his suffering. His shadowy life became a revelation of the soul’s immortality.
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases;
it will never pass into nothingness.”
Conclusion
The wisdom of Scorpio asks you to feel existence, its agony and ecstasy, awakening to the process of your soul’s creation underneath it all. Stirred up by the chaos of the eclipses and the Mars retrograde, this season will inspire you to grow, taking risks with your heart and making great sacrifices for what you love.
But have no fear. Nothing is wasted in the process of soul-making.
On November 23rd, after a long journey through the underworld, your fears will be conquered as the Sun is resurrected in the fires of Sagittarius. And everything will become illuminated in the holy-days leading up to the solstice.
Much Love,
Rachel
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