Scorpio gets a bad rap in the zodiacal world. Some people see it as a sign of darkness. I know. I’m a Scorpio. A woman from my ex-cult once point-blank told me, “Every Scorpio I’ve known has hurt me.”
People with preconceived ideas about this sign do not understand it at all. These are people who still mainly take the Zodiac for the superficial, daily fate-forecasting parlor trick it has become in the common world. They don’t yet understand that there are deep and powerful spiritual lessons and intelligences to be gained in each sign.
While the sign of Scorpio does contain the power to destroy, it also contains an equally potent power to heal.
It’s said: “Scorpio can be a destructive bomb or a tremendous healing tool.”
But even the destructive power in Scorpio cannot be taken at face value, because there are things worth destroying — especially for souls on a serious spiritual path.
Here’s an example: I destroyed by two ex-gurus. You could even say that I killed them. More specifically, the Truth killed them. And I was a teller of the truth. A truth they had hidden for decades and never wanted the world to know.
Once it was out there, they couldn’t tolerate the brilliant bright light shining on their evil darkness. The exposure was too much for them. So they withered and shrunk from view. One went crazy and his own close followers bludgeoned him to death. The other died in hiding, bitter and seeking revenge on those who exposed the truth about him.
Now they no longer exist, even as sources of worship. Because the organization they built doesn’t want to be associated with their evil, with the taint of their diseased lives.
While killing these two spiritual conmen, I simultaneously reached out to their victims to help them anyway I could. To help them, above all, heal from the tragedy they had endured, which I wrote about in detail in my book, Sex, Lies, and Two Hindu Gurus.
Destroying the Worldly Self
While not every Scorpio will be put into such a dramatic situation, the dual power to destroy and heal in Scorpio is ultimately a power required for each soul to advance forward on his or her spiritual path and ascend to higher worlds. This cannot happen until they destroy their worldly self. This is the self tied to things of this world, which can be summed up as “ego.”
We all have three basic aspects of our being. Our physical self, our psychic or soul self, and our spirit self. Only our spirit will ascend. The other parts of us must be destroyed so that we can become only one self — spirit.
There is an ancient myth that illustrates this lesson in the form of an allegory, according to Reverend Bill Darlison, in The Gospel and the Zodiac. It is the story of how Hercules killed the hydra during the phase of Scorpio.
The hydra is a monstrous nine-headed beast that lives in a stagnant, polluted, murky, fetid swamp. The nine heads represent each of the trouble areas that beset anyone seeking self-mastery.
- Three of the nine heads symbolize our misplaced desire associated with sex, money, and comfort.
- Three concern the passions of fear, hatred, and desire for power.
- Three represent the vices of the unillumined mind: pride, separateness, and cruelty (criticism).
To pass the test in Scorpio, Hercules had to enter the quicksand-like swamp and kill the beast. At first he couldn’t find the hydra, then he provoked it with flaming arrows. The hydra, its nine angry heads breathing flame, emerged. Its scaly tail lashed furiously in the water and the mud. It sprang at Hercules and sought to coil about his feet.
Hercules severed one of its heads. But two new heads grew in its place. Again and again, Hercules attacked the raging monster. But it grew stronger, not weaker, with each assault.
Then Hercules remembered his teacher’s words: “We rise by kneeling.”
Hercules knelt, grasped the hydra with his bare hands, and raised it aloft. Suspended in purifying air and light, its strength diminished.
The monster, strong in darkness and in mud, lost its power in the rays of the sun. The nine heads drooped and it fell limp.
The moral of the story is this: The dark, dank swamp represents the baser inclinations found within the dark recesses of our own minds. The nine heads of the hydra are the elements of our own lower human nature hidden in the darkness of our subconscious. They keep us bound in this world.
To rise out of the mud — with all of its accumulated evils, mistakes, and failures — and into the air of the spirit, we must destroy the beast within us. But we can’t do it by fighting it, because it just gets stronger. Instead, we must expose it to the light, to the truth. It’s our most powerful weapon.
Succeeding on this test requires three qualities:
- Discrimination to acknowledge our base desires’ existence. We must accept the shadow within.
- Patience to discover its dark hidden lair (our subconscious).
- Humility to bring dark fragments of the subconscious to the surface, and expose them to the light of wisdom.
So, the Scorpion task is actually an enormous cleansing process (healing), rooting out and eradicating the baser twists of mind found within our own dark recesses.
The Power of Pluto
Scorpio is ruled by both transformative Pluto and explosive Mars. Pluto’s dynamic two-fold energy of creation and destruction assists Scorpio in the annihilation of the lower desires, so that the qualities of the higher self can flourish. But in its early phase of expression, the power of Pluto is easily distorted by the unenlightened personality (ego) into extreme willfulness, ruthlessness, and a willingness to let the end justify the means.
As a result, Scorpio is the sign most susceptible to the dynamic forces of dark or light. It is indeed a time when choices must be made between higher and lower forms of existence. And those choices will direct the kind of transformation that takes place within a soul — further into the darkness or into the light.
The Pluto ideal, thwarted by the self-serving focus of Mars, generates frustration as the battle rages on between these antagonistic forces. Mars acts as a bridge between the perceived ideal and what is presently manifesting. It represents tests and trials where we see, by the conflicts, what illusions we hold.
Far from merely being the zodiacal sign of dark forces, Scorpio is where we enter our supreme test: emancipation from the illusions behind which reality veils itself.
The intelligence we must gain in Scorpio is to become a conqueror of both destruction and healing. Successful Scorpions demonstrate their capacity to overcome desires, exhibit poise and balance in viewing the world, and gain the ability to walk one-pointedly into the light.
Our motto is: “Warrior am I. And from battle I emerge triumphant.”
