So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending—J.R.R. Tolkien. As mist curls in spectral plumes across swathes of rust-coloured forest, the plaintive roar of a rutting deer echoes across the valley. In the north, Scorpio season...
So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending—J.R.R. Tolkien.
As mist curls in spectral plumes across swathes of rust-coloured forest, the plaintive roar of a rutting deer echoes across the valley.
In the north, Scorpio season draws us into rot and decay. This is the realm of dragons and serpents, scorpions that sting, endings that ambush, darkness that seeps from night to day.
October is the month of mulching and composting, of endings and letting go. The ancient festival of Samhain, at the midpoint between the equinox and the winter solstice, marks the death of summer and the impending darkness of winter. October is the month of the dead, monetised at Halloween when the dread of darkness is brightened with a parody of plastic costumes and grotesque face masks destined for land fill. At this time of the earth’s shedding, many of us sit with uncertainty, painfully aware that climate change and the unspeakable brutality of war continues to deliver death and devastation to millions consumed in the conflagration. As news of more suffering washes over our safe, comfortable lives, we may feel scooped out. An unhealable grief sits wetly in the chambers of our still beating heart.
“Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it, ends,” wrote Joan Didion when her husband of 39 years died of a heart attack while she was mixing the salad.
On October 28th, a Scorpio Sun and Taurus Moon hold a séance in an autumnal sky. At Full Moon times, the lunar cycle completes. An eclipse is a super-charged full moon, so we may quite literally be at a time of ending as we draw deep and find the courage to let go and face in the growing darkness, whatever losses we inflict or must endure.
This eclipsed full moon marks the culmination of an 18-month cycle of eclipses in the signs of Scorpio and Taurus, that brought up issues relating to security and rescources and the existential crisis of climate change. Not everyone will resonate with the same intensity as an eclipse brushes over their birth chart. Eclipses are feral, unpredictable things, yet for us all, the symbolism of this lunar eclipse calls us to slow down, feel our feet on the earth and connect with our heart so that we can send love and healing energy out into the world, wrap love around war-ravaged places.
Taurus is associated with material things, property, those things we value and deem to be beautiful, and sensual pleasure. Taurus is a dependable earth sign. Although “being grounded” can seem like one of those self-help amorphisms, grounding, rooting, being in the power of now, affirms the richness of our ordinary lives. Scorpio involves a confrontation with destruction and darkness, and like the mythical phoenix rising from the ashes, we gain insight, healing, and renewal when we drink Scorpio’s strong medicine.“Light thinks it travels faster than anything, but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it” writes Terry Pratchett, in Reaper Man. Death, darkness, trans-formation may be unfolding themes in our lives this month and in our collective future.
At this in-between time of transition, we may feel suspended between life’s crevices and cracks of a choice about a relationship, career or a place of belonging. Eclipse moments bring us to the heart of the matter. Tonight, we may be drawn to what we cherish and hold close to our hearts.
October’s eclipsed moon (5° Taurus) conjoins Jupiter Retrograde as she opposes a coven of planets in Scorpio: Sun, Mercury, and Mars.
Jupiter expands the bitter and the sweet. And Scorpio’s uncompromising intensity takes us deep below the surface, if we are willing to go there.
The symbolism of this lunar eclipse may play out in world events, as Mars and Mercury meet in Scorpio one day after the lunar eclipse, a caustic combination in the fixed sign of Scorpio, amplified by Jupiter Retrograde in the fixed sign of Taurus and the Taurus lunar eclipse. This could be enormously challenging for hostage negotiations as Mars, the war-god, viciously slices through communication (Mercury). Poet, Andrea Gibson, speaks to hunting out the fear, which might mean facing a painful truth and harnessing rampant reactivity or finally daring to open to that difficult conversation.
On November 4th, Saturn (boundaries, structure, self-discipline) turns direct at 0° Pisces, the last sign of the zodiac. Saturn presses slowly forward, suffusing our experiences with necessary endings, the dissolution of outworn structures. Saturn moves through the liminal realm of Pisces from March 7th, 2023, to February 2026. The archetype of Saturn carries ponderous associations with fate and consequence as the western civilization turns to rubble, and unfettered growth and expansion are bounded by the inconvenient truth of climate crisis and mass migration. “Everything you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form,” writes Susan Cain in her new book, Bittersweet: how longing and sorrow make us whole. In a world where enforced smiles and white-knuckled positivity clenches against the wild winds of adversity, she reminds us that “light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired.”
Nature contracts, exposing an uncompromising knot-work of bare branches and stubble fields. The primordial pulse of the year stirs deep in our blood and bones and tonight, as we sense a slow, steady certainty moving through our body. This lunation carries the seed for repair, for release and renewal, if we trust the instruction of our hearts and acknowlege that death, like birth, is both an ending and a beginning. As we pause awhile, in this world of dying things, may those dead places in ourselves open to Love in new and deeper ways. And as the moon’s light grows dark tonight, Tolkien reminds us of the light within: May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.
Please get in touch if you would like a private astrology reading: ingrid@trueheartwork.com
