D.K. Foundation

This is an abridged version of an article to be included in a publication, The Healing Zodiac,

Scorpio
Reaching to Hell

I knew that infinity was pointing out to me, through the vivid recollection of those forgotten experiences, the intensity and the depth of my drive for control, and thus preparing me for something transcendental to myself. I knew with frightening certainty that something was going to bar any possibility of my being in control, and that I needed, more than anything else, sobriety, fluidity, and abandon in order to face the things that I felt were coming to me.

The modern ruler of Scorpio, since its discovery in 1930, is Pluto, the planet furthest from the Sun. Pluto is the higher octave of Mars; if Mars represents the personal will and desire-nature of the individual, Pluto describes a much stronger force, the will of life, or what we might reasonably call necessity. Dane Rudhyar writes of Pluto reducing things to essentials. It operates ruthlessly and relentlessly to shake us free of whatever in us is non-essential (obsolete or inauthentic). It provides therefore the possibility of rebirth and regeneration. Pluto oversees the radical pruning operations of consciousness!
Pluto takes us into areas we would never volunteer to go, where we have to confront the poverty of rational consciousness, the limits of willpower and the insistence of our instinctual drives. Pluto brings us into relationship with what Jungian terminology calls the Shadow: that which has been repressed, disowned or rejected. The contents of the Shadow are not necessarily negative; human beings have a persistent tendency to disown their fullness of spirit. We reject our brilliance, our power, beauty and vision just as readily as we reject our aggression, compulsiveness and ugliness. Jung used the expression, ‘For a trees branches to reach to heaven its roots must reach to hell.’ We seem to have trouble reaching to either extreme, keeping ourselves instead within a narrow band of familiar conditioned ordinariness that we find stultifying but safe.
When Pluto or a planet in Scorpio is activated, that which was hidden is forced up from the underbelly and erupts through the surface. Pluto oversees processes of elimination at every level. Whether this is the elimination of toxins through a boil, the elimination of pressure through volcanic activity or elimination of waste material through death, it is Pluto activity that is involved. Elimination is the pre-requisite for regeneration, for which Pluto sets the stage. Hence, Scorpio is associated with transformative processes, because, with Pluto, it effects the kind of radical clearance that makes room for radical change: ‘Pluto registers that a time has come for the possibility to move from one level of consciousness and activity to another; he then produces the conditions required for such a passage or transmutation.’ Scorpio and Pluto bring healing through elimination and purification.
People experiencing Pluto energy are often thrust into dark experiences that confound rationality and exceed all notions of fairness. This energy shakes us free of ancient conditioning and often operates by creating conditions of loss and trauma that can cut through the conditioned consciousness. People in the throes of a Pluto crisis talk of the ‘dark night of the soul’, being abandoned by God, or the feeling that life has forgotten them. Plutonian crises force us to integrate the rejected parts of ourselves and to go on a quest for higher meaning. Indeed, people often embark on a crusade to find God just so that they can tell him what they think of him! At some point on this crusade some of the richness that comes from integrating forgotten aspects of self is likely to be felt; one finds oneself changed, richer, deeper and, through the humiliation of the Pluto experience, more respectful of life and its processes. The ‘treasure’ of the descent to hell is described in the following way by Rudhyar:

We might, in the context of health and healing, add to this that encountering the Shadow reveals the essential unity of health and sickness, of healing and wounding and of growth and decay.
Scorpio and the eighth house rule the organs of elimination and reproduction: the large intestine, rectum, gonads, appendix, prostate gland and pelvic area. The gonads are the manifestation of the sacral chakra, svadhisthana, which pertains to sex, power and creativity. Mars rules the sweat glands (and as they operate as eliminators it seems justifiable to attribute them to the eighth house and Mars in Scorpio rather than Aries). Pluto, as noted, rules conditions of blackness, hidden cell changes, destruction of tissue, boils, sexual disorders, toxicity caused by impaired elimination, haemorrhoids and violent attacks (arising within or outside of the body). These are conditions of purification and purging. Bowel problems and many menstrual conditions and sexual difficulties are Scorpionic.

The Scorpio conditions fall into three related areas: passion, change and power. By ‘passion’ I am referring to the powerful human emotions pertaining to the Scorpionic themes of sex and death - lust, envy, anger, resentment, denial, fear, etc. (All of these have positive counterparts, which can be considered as the gifts of Scorpio and the eighth house: joy, intensity, love, perception of depth, etc. Guilt should perhaps be mentioned in this regard (and a quincunx aspect involving a water sign is likely to result in emotional strain that shows as guilt), though guilt, however deeply felt, is a response to a passion and actually represents the attempt to camouflage the real issue - not only to hide our shame from others but also to conceal our difficult natures from ourselves.
Getting stuck in old patterns produces toxic emotions; toxicity will be commensurate with resistance to change. Symptoms will tend to show up as plutonic processes or in the Scorpio areas of the body - bowel, pelvic area - and will describe, of themselves, the nature of the emotional pattern in which the person is stuck. Symptoms may often involve the elimination of toxic materials: the boil bursts through the skin depositing its cargo of toxins safely on the other side of the body. The surface level of existence erupts and the contents of the Unconscious are dumped within the conscious realm to be dealt with; thus, Scorpio asks us to face up to the truth of ourselves and so move to a more integrated level of being:

Scorpio challenges are radically transformative. Alice Bailey gives the keynotes of the sign as Test, Trial and Triumph; the trials of Scorpio arise, esoterically, as the ‘serpent of wisdom’ (the soul) seeks to overpower the ‘serpent of evil’ (personality/form life). Energetically this is a matter of raising energy from below the diaphragm to above it. For trauma to be transformed into wisdom there needs to be humility in the face of powers far greater than the personal will. This implies the need to develop a more adequate understanding of power. We need to have an appreciation of our personal power and of its limitation. Issues of power are, of course, in the province of Scorpio and the eighth house.
Scorpio urges us to accept responsibility for our personal power, and to refrain from abusing it or undermining it; it also urges us to bow to a far greater power than our own: the power of necessity - the Way It Is.
Scorpio and Pluto bring to light what has been excluded and rejected - the marginal aspects of ourselves. We exclude aspects of ourselves when we deem them transgressive, unacceptable, challenging or disgusting. Exclusion from power gives the Shadow a peculiar kind of potency and, when activated by transit or progression, we experience a rude, terroristic incursion as the Shadow makes a raid on the personality. This happens in our social and political lives just as it happens in our close relationships and within our own bodies and beings. The Shadow’s raid on the personality is never a revenge attack or a punishment, it is simply the only way the being knows how to move towards wholeness. The Shadow’s raid expresses a readiness for integration and healing arising from the dark, fertile depths of life.

References
Bailey, Alice, Esoteric Astrology (London: Lucis Trust, 1951).
Castaneda, Carlos, The Active Side of Infinity (London: HarperCollins, 1998).
Dethlefsen, Thorwald and Rüdiger Dahlke, The Healing Power of Illness (1983; Shaftesbury: Element, 1990).
Greene, Liz, The Astrology of Fate (1984; London: Thorsons, 1997).
Hay, Louise L., You Can Heal Your Life (Carson, CA: Hay House, Inc., 1984).
Myss, Caroline, Anatomy of the Spirit (London: Bantam, 1997).
Perera, Sylvia Brinton, Descent to the Goddess (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1981).
Rilke, Rainer Maria, Letters to a Young Poet (trans. M.D. Hester Norton; London: Norton, 1993).
Rudhyar, Dane, The Sun is Also a Star (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1975).
Sasportas, Howard, The Gods of Change (London: Arkana, 1989).

©Kate Wickens 2001

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Scorpio Reaching to Hell

Scorpio
Reaching to Hell