The newcomer to astrology is naturally eager for defini­tions. What, he or she asks, does the sign Scorpio really mean? The original intent of this article was to answer that question, to clearly define the eighth sign in terms the beginner would grasp. But as writing commenced, the fingering on the typewriter became more and more hesitant; something obviously was wrong. The marvel that is Scorpio was escaping — that sense of mystery and power beyond our ability to fully grasp, the essence of November life as part of the zodiac year. It was better, I decided, to try to record the marvel, not to attempt to define its meaning. In that way Scorpio can continue to echo on through our minds, each of us grasping at that from which its miracles emerge. Once defined it would become lifeless and cease to satisfy our human need for this so powerful symbol.

 

 

Half-past Autumn                     

 

KEN GILLMAN

 

 

DO YOU KNOW what time it is? Go outside after dusk this evening. Get away from the glare of the city lights. Look up at the big clock in the sky. To the north, you will see that the Great Bear has just come down to wash his paws in the northern lakes before they are sealed in by winter’s ice. To the east the Pleiades have returned; in a few days mighty Orion will appear in the same posi­tion. Cygnus, the swan, is flying high, close to the zenith. V-flights of honking geese are arrowing across the sky toward the southern horizon. Look to the southwest, Aquila, the Eagle, is still in flight but sinking, night after night, toward the earth.

 

Feel the cool November breeze. Listen to the leaves rustle and swirl. This is when the deliberate oaks finally concede to the season. All of the other trees here in the northeast have passed their bril­liant climax: the soft maples reddened, the birches and poplars turned yellow, the hard maples goldened weeks ago. Now these early trees are almost leaf-bare. Oaks will not be hurried. They grow slowly. In spring they open bud and spread leaves last. They come late to color in the autumn, as though waiting for their impulsive neighbors to end their Libran pomp and pageant. Now, welcoming the Sun into Scor­pio, the oaks put on their deep crimsons, their luminous purples, and their bronze and russet tans, those strong, deep colors that remind us of the earth and its fundamental rocks. Their leaves will still be red and brown and rustling on the branch when snow whit­ens the woods. Through­out November they will be colorful sentinels on the hillsides, chal­lenging the rush of time.

 

Scorpio to the early Americans was the month of the Beaver Moon: long, chilly nights of glittering stars and restless, whispery leaves. The gutters and roadsides now are almost as brilliant as were the trees themselves weeks ago. It is the final act of autumn’s colorful pageant. The countryside and city parks are festive, rustling, restless, raggedly beautiful. The color will fade as the leaves go back whence they came, to the earth. They have had their season in the sun, and this colorful phase is but a moment in the life of a tree. It is the old, old cy­cle, forever repeated, earth to earth.

 

HALLOWEEN: This is the holy season when the barriers be­tween this world and the next are down, the dead return from the grave, gods and strangers from the Underworld walk abroad in the land. It is a time that is not a time, on a day that is not a day, between the worlds, and beyond.

 

It is also a time of beginnings, with all the dangers and protective rituals that belong to begin­nings. Among the Celts the year began at the feast of Samhain (say it as Sow-am, and remember the pig). This was the great festival that marked the end of both summer and the final harvest, the day on which winter and the New Year started together. It was regarded as the most perilous joint of the year. On it, commencing on the Eve, which coincides with our Halloween, the dead were honored, divina­tion was practiced to see what the coming year would bring, harvest-end ceremonies were performed, games were played, and ritual fires were kindled upon hill-tops and open spaces for the purification of the people and the land, and to defeat the powers of evil.

 

Christianity sanctified the old pagan season, called it Vigil and the Feast of All Saints, but has been unable to extinguish the Halloween fires. In the British Isles they continue to blaze only now they burn five days later, on November 5th, Guy Fawkes Day.

 

The true element of the festival today in Brit­ain is fire. On the night of November 5th the sky is bright with fireworks everywhere. Bonfires, large and small, blaze in private gardens, in back streets, on wastelands at the edge of towns, on village greens and high upon the sacred hilltops.

 

Unlike those of Beltane (Mayday), which were lit at dawn, the Hallow-fires and their modern Guy Fawkes successor are lighted at dusk — for luck, for the s‘aining (the blessing) of the fields and of ourselves against the spirits, especially against the Hwch Ddu Gwta, the tail-less Black Sow, and most certainly, for the sake of fun and merriment

 

Halloween parties nowadays involve dressing-up and games. It was similar in olden times. People bobbed for apples, roasted nuts in the fire. The ap­ples promised eternal youth; the coiling apple peel cast over a maid’s shoulder will predict the initial letter of a new love; hazel nuts, gathered from above the sacred pool in which the magical salmon swims, offer wisdom; chestnuts, splitting and spit­ting on the hearth, tell of what is to be.

 

CORN-DOLLIES: Every year from the Stone Age to the present, farming communities in the British Isles have woven an idol (dolly) using the vital stuff of the commun­ity’s life — wheat straws. The same farmer who culti­vates his land with trac­tors, monitors market trends by television and keeps tax records in a computer memory sees nothing incongruous in making corn dollies each au­tumn with the last stalks of wheat harvested from his fields. His bones rather than his brains tell him that if he didn’t, there might not be a good harvest next year.

 

The corn-dolly repre­sents the Earth Mother, the Great Goddess, in her trans­formation from Great Provi­der to Great Devourer, Mother-turning-to-Hag. The three transformations of the Goddess are Maid (Kore), Mother (Demeter) and Hag (Hecate), these relate to the waxing, full and waning phases of the Moon.

 

Our ancestors believed that their crops were made to grow by a spirit that dwelled in their fields. As the crops were harvested, the spirit re­treated into the plants that remained. If those, too, were cut and consumed, the spirit would be gone and the fields would not come alive again. Rather, it had to be captured in the last stalks, shaped into a figure and returned to the earth with next year’s planting.

 

Typically, the corn dolly, the Hag’s symbol, is made from the last sheaf by the person who cuts it, he being “doomed to poverty and death for want of energy”. The man who brought home the last load of grain was accordingly called winter. It was be­lieved right into the 18th century that “death would fall on the man and his stock that had the Kern Doll”. Yet the chosen victim accepted his fate with dignity.

 

After the Dolly had been made the farmers each danced with her in turn, circled within the local henge, jogged in procession with her across the countryside and finally hung her over the hearth in the house of he who shall care for her.

 

Today in upstate New York, apple farmers en­sure a final apple remains on the tree after the harvest. It is considered unlucky to pick that ulti­mate fruit that contains the spirit of the tree.

 

PERSEPHONE was also known as Kore, the maid.  Zeus conceived her on Demeter, the Cretan god­dess of agriculture and the fruitful soil. The maid was playing in a meadow when she spied a glorious plant with a hundred blossoms spreading its fra­grance all about. When she went to pluck it the earth gaped and Pluto, lord of the under­world, appeared and carried her down to Hades, the land of the dead, where she became his queen. Evidence of preci­sely where this occurred was lost due to the later tramp­ling of the ground by a herd of wild

 

Demeter wandered the earth for nine days sear­ching for her daughter; then she cursed the earth to bear no fruit until Persephone was released. No matter how deeply the soil was ploughed or how many seeds were planted in the brown furrows, nothing came up from the parched and crumbling soil. The fields lay bare and fallow. Mankind would have perished from hunger had not Zeus commanded Pluto to release Persephone. She had, however, eaten a seed of the pomegranate in the world below and, as a consequence, ever after has to spend one-third of each year with Pluto in Hades. She returns back to our world as the level of the underground water tables start to rise, on Lady Day, Candlemas, when the Sun is in the sign of the water-carrier Aqua­rius, and the first smells of Spring are in the air.

 

NEW GUINEA: Man has celebrated the autumnal change of season all across the world and through the centuries. In New Guinea, right into the present century, this was the time that boys’ puberty rites were concluded. The rites ended in a sexual orgy of several days and nights, during which all in the village except the initiates made free with every­body else, amid the tumult of mythological chants and drum beats. On the final night a fine young girl, painted, oiled and ceremonially costumed was led into the dancing ground and made to lie beneath a platform of very heavy logs. With her, in open view of the festival, the initiates coupled, one after another; when the last youth was unsuspect­ingly embracing her, priests jerked away the sup­ports of the logs above and the platform dropped, to a prodigious boom of drums. A hideous howl went up and the dead girl and boy were dragged from the logs, cut up, roasted and eaten.

 

There is an interdependence of death and sex. This is stated as clearly in the Greek myth of Per­sephone as it is in the New Guinea cannibalism story Reproduction without death would be a calamity, as would death without reproduction. Death and sex can be said to be complementary aspects of the same state of being. It is necessary to kill — kill and eat — to continue this state of being, which is that of man and all life on earth. Every day we must kill, to maintain life. We kill animals and we har­vest, and so kill, plants.

 

All of us will, in the end, become food for other beings. Our death is inherent in our life. Es­pecially now, as the Sun, Mercury and Moon (unusual­ly without Venus this year — this was written in November 1983) join Saturn and Pluto in Scorpio, we have to pay attention to the trees and the other members of the plant world, note how they are linked to the Moon, which also dies and is resurrected and moreover influences, for reasons still mysterious to the biologist, the cycle of the womb.

 

MEXICO: The goddess Tlalteutli was walk­ing alone upon the face of the primor­dial waters — a great and wonderful maiden, with eyes and jaws at every joint that could see and bite like animals — she was spied by Quetzalcoatl (Venus as the morning star) and Tezcatli­poca (Venus as evening star). Decid­ing they should create the world from her, the two primary gods transformed themselves into mighty serpents and came at her from either side. One seized her from the right hand to the left foot, the other from the left hand to the right foot, and together they ripped her asunder. From the parts they fashioned not only the earth and heavens, but mankind also. And then to comfort the goddess for what had happened to her, all the gods came down and, paying her obeisance, commanded that there should come from her all the fruits that men require for their life. From her hair they then made trees, flowers, and grass; from her eyes springs, foun­tains, and the little caves; from her mouth rivers and the great caves; from her nose valleys, and from her shoulders mountains. But the goddess wept all night, for she had a craving to consume human hearts. She would not be quiet until they were brought to her. Nor would she bear fruit until she had been drenched with human blood.

 

MARTINMAS: The nine days that Demeter wandered searching for Persephone take us from her descent into Hades at Halloween to the other important November festi­val. This is clear from the old Scots rhyme that was sung round the hilltop bonfires on October 31st.

 

This is Hallaevan

The Morn is Halladay,

Nine free nights till Martinmas

An’ sune they’ll wear away.

 

Martinmas falls on November 11th. It was some­times called St. Martin-in-the-Winter to distin­guish it from the Feast of the Translation of St. Martin on July 4th. On this day the Germanic tribes celebrated their New Year and start-of-winter festival. Throughout northern Europe it was a day for paying debts, for festive eating and drinking, a day when thanks were given and the dead were remem­bered. From time immemorial, certainly back to the great Neolithic oxen festivals that are still remembered so vividly in Spain, it was the custom to slaughter large num­bers of cattle and other beasts on this day. There was a sim­ple economic reason for doing this, before modern farming methods were known it was not possible to maintain all of the beasts throughout the winter and therefore the ma­jority was killed off. Most of the meat went into winter stores, but some was eaten fresh at the Martinmas feast. The Roman Vinalia, a feast honoring Bacchus the god of wine, fell on this day. With the calendar change to New Style, which added ten days to Old Style dates, this annual feasting continues with the same solar dating here in North America. We call it Thanksgiving.

 

There were other reasons for the slaughtering of the beasts and feasting besides the purely prac­tical ones. It was considered essential that blood should be shed at Martinmas. If it was not done, in northern Europe as in Aztec-America, the follow­ing twelve months would be unlucky and the harvest would be poor,

 

Don’t tell the I.R.S. but Martinmas is really the best time to collect the money people owe you (the blood-shedding reminded me). For many cen­turies throughout Europe this was an important day for the payment of rents and the beginning and ending of tenancies and contracts. On it servants packed their possessions and left to find new em­ployment.

 

After 1918, Martinmas took on a new signifi­cance as Armistice or Veterans Day, the anniversary of the ending of the First World War at 11 AM on the 11th day of the 11th month. The millions who died in that and subsequent wars are remembered at Martinmas just as for countless centuries previously the pagans of northern Europe feasted and bade farewell to the newly dead of the past year.

 

 

HALF-PAST AUTUMN

The Sun is in Scorpio.

This is Pluto’s zodiac territory.

Now, do you know what time it is?

 

The November winds will blow away and dispose all rot and decay, they spare only that which con­tains life and can blossom again next spring. This is when man must justify himself, the time of judgment: was the past year productive or a petty empti­ness? Are there in the harvest seeds germinating for a new task, or is this an end without further devel­opment? This is the time just before winter begins when the opposites meet, when the decisive battles are fought. Winter is approaching. Time always moves forward, it will never deviate. It never reverses it­self, although the movement can stop. If it grows weak, it simply ceases, but as long as it moves, the movement is forward. In the I-Ching this is the time of Chien, the three undivided lines of the Crea­tive, the trigram before K’an, the Abysmal. Now we sacrifice to the old gods. We pay our debts. Work is done, the harvest has been gathered, the Kern-doll hung above the hearth; we give thanks. Now we can battle with the God within, and consider the core of the issue. Even if despair and despondency make everything seem useless, we can nonetheless assert ourselves against these voices. When the time comes, let it be beneath the heavy logs. For this is the time of Scorpio.

 

This article was originally published in the Premier issue of Considerations, December 1983.