Trash to Treasure:  

An Esotheric Look at Scorpio  

By Sandra WILLIAMS

    We are naturally a little fearful of Scorpio.  We tread lightly in the presence of this underground, underworld ocean of energy, look askance at its penchant to seek the depths and probe the darkness within every bauble of light.  A strong dose of Scorpio in a chart endows one with a need to walk the thin razor’s edge between exultation and annihilation.  Fortunately, it also provides one with the nerves of steel it takes to carry this out.  It can be subtle or blatant.

     Whatever feeling we have toward this powerhouse of the zodiac (and it is impossible to be neutral toward this energy), we perhaps need to look at some of the metaphoric and esoteric gifts inherent in the sign.

     Have you ever noticed how the trash of life, the unwanted stuff we throw away, kick around, bury and refuse to claim, has the potential to finally compost into a black richness of the soul that feeds our mature growth?  That’s Scorpio.

     Those abandoned pieces of our lives, our shameful little secrets, our underground histories that we tried to bury, those traumas that we don’t want to look at, the ghosts that haunt the recesses of our longings, the pains that bleed raw into our souls, these have a way of quietly feeding the new becoming that lifts itself delicately into our wisdom years, if we can but give it that chance.  These are the stuff of composted manure that grows rare roses of great perfume and beauty.  The roots of the rose go deep and into well-developed dirt that didn’t always smell exactly wonderful!

     This is a royal road to inner mastery, paved with fires of hell and passions that can easily overwhelm us.  The challenge of Scorpio is to embrace it wholeheartedly, to dive in — and not lose sight of the light.  It is a very delicate balancing act that most don’t master in any given life.  But the potential is there.  I personally believe no one is given the chance who hasn’t the inner fortitude to accomplish it, yet, like any great endeavor, it is seldom accomplished easily or on the first attempt.

     This Scorpionic journey isn’t for the faint-hearted.  It is a crucible of soul-making and only the stout-hearted need apply.  It is the journey into the underworld, where you are divested of all that you’ve proudly claimed as who you are, stripped of all the artificial trappings that up until now have given your life meaning and your ego a sense of identity.  Now is the acid test when you lose everything, and you surrender to the harsh fact that you can’t take anything with you except your experience.  Often people who have been through one of these journeys say they feel violated, torn apart, hollowed out, destroyed.  Essentially, you are hung out to dry and to die to your known self.  In this state of dismemberment, the challenge is one of restructuring your life, your memories, your sense of self and in the aloneness of that black depth, to rise like the Phoenix bird out of the ashes of the destroyed life.

     Scorpio is asked to re-member oneself:  to relearn who it is that nests in the innermost heart of one’s being.  Here, we can and will love ourselves into the light again, into the joy of life.  We can forgive others, having been into hell ourselves and so in need of forgiveness and a helping hand.  We have slipped into the world of taboos, fallen off the path of the “straight and narrow”, and into the pit, the black hole of self-hatred and condemnation.  This is necessary, this scouring of the soul.

     After all, there is something within the soul of Scorpio that seeks the taboos and has a need to experience the other side of the coin in order to become whole.  It is experiencing only the light, without its necessary shadow, to know it as a part of oneself, embrace it and so to become whole.  To experience this side of life takes the courage to step outside the bounds of the acceptable, to refute the claims of society and sully oneself on the outside in order to cleanse oneself on the inside.

     Society has rules to preserve itself.  To remain within the confines of the rules is to deny the fullness of who we are.  To claim that wholeness requires we step, like the Fool of the Tarot, into the void, without guarantees of any kind, without support, without turning back and to go unarmed to face the unknown — within.  Like any soldier who has not been battle-tested, we don’t know if we will stand in courage and fight, or crumble in a paralysis of fear.  Until we step over the edge into the void of Scorpio’s darkness, we are untested and incomplete.

     When we do step off into the black depths -whether by choice or “circumstances” that seem beyond choice - and fall seemingly forever into that bottomless pit; at the end, when all is apparently lost and we are utterly without hope, what we find is a bottom, a ground from which to stand.  A meaning, a reason to be.

     And we realize from that space that the so called “straight and narrow” isn’t what we thought it was.  It isn’t what society cracks it up to be.  It can be a straightjacket of the dogmatic.  Indeed the “good person syndrome” isn’t what we thought it was.  The taboos are there as a beacon to invite us to experience all of life, not just the airy realm of ideals and brightness:  we are sterile and incomplete on that level.  It is only when we have slipped into the world of the forbidden fruit, the taboos, that we find completion, wholeness, tolerance, compassion, and a joy for life, not for the status and things it offers, but for the joy and realizations it gives freely to anyone open to them.  The experience of the Underworld is the coming of age, an initiation, the ripening to seed of a new self and a new sense of the world.  This age old miracle is the transformation of Pluto and of Scorpio.  From trash to treasure.

     This is the cycle of life that had to metamorphose in darkness to transmute the sordid into the sacred.  Scorpio is where we truly lose our innocence and have the potential to reclaim the childlike qualities of true spiritual enlightenment.  Such are the esoteric gifts of Scorpio.