Is the Catharsis Over Yet?

Mother's old homily, Always the darkest before dawn, has been my guiding inspiration for the past month.

Life takes turns like that, I tell myself over and over. Things come to an end, and some of those things are bound to be relationships that have run their courses. I say goodbye sadly, somewhat emotionally scathed, knowing that the inevitable has finally occured; and on the other hand, I welcome fondly old and renewed relationships back into my life -- relationships I thought had died. Relationships richer and more meaningful now that some of us have walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and no longer are deluded about our mortality.

And then there are the new relationships, new seeds sprung up healthily and strong over the last few months.

What a blessing they have been! With Pluto rising in Leo, I am no stranger to the identity crisis, the power struggle, the rebirth of self through transformative dying to the past. It seems as though I've lived several lives as different people with different identities, different careers, and different sets of friends as I morphed through the decades.

Yet there have been some constants in these transformative identity shifts, and they have been, not surprisingly, people who themselves have strong Plutonian coloring in their makeups. These relationships seem to die and be reborn over and over.

(Two such relationships have been the one with my husband and the one with my best female friend, both of which have lasted for nearly 35 years. They have been stormy relationships, marked by Scorpio and all its cathartic messiness and intensity. In fact, she introduced me to him a long time ago, when we were all young.)

So it goes, I tell myself -- this loss and gain is life in its cycles of self-renewal.

Scorpio is very intense and terribly complicated; it causes problems in relationships. In fact, I spent most of the decade of my twenties, like Rodney King, asking the hapless question: Can't we just get along? It was that very question that led me to study astrology, and I'm so glad I did, because astrology has given me a measure of insight and detachment regarding relationship dynamics that otherwise would have eluded me and probably my life would have regularly deconstructed itself in a shambles without the guidance of the ancient wisdom of the fourth dimension -- the intersection of time and space that we call astrology.

I have Scorpio in the fourth house, which is something like the gopher who just happens to have built the entrance to his underground dwelling right smack on the railroad tracks.

Eventually the gopher learns to listen for the faraway rumble and be sure to have ducked and covered in plenty of time for the train to pass overhead. Astrology is good for that. It tells me when that train is coming so I can prepare to get out of the way of what could be my demise in the trainwreck of passing Plutonian energies.

With five planets all bunched up this month in Scorpio, including a transit of Mercury Retrograde, I saw and heard the train coming and decided to go underground, which I'm glad I did. It was the right decision. We all need to pause and take a rest for renewal, and this was exactly the right time for me.

Pilgrim's Progress

Once down there in the Scorpionic realm, I realized I needed to do some Scorpio things: housecleaning, meditation to keep detached and on an even keel and to remain positive, and an old-fashioned examination of the conscience, as they call the preparation for spiritual communion in my childhood alma mater, the Catholic Church.

This examination of the conscience, interestingly enough, seems to have been the very essence of the European medieval mystery plays, said to have come originally from Egypt. The characters would be examined by the energies of the planets -- later they became the saints.

Venus, for example, would ask if the wayfarer had refrained from gossip and other unkind practices, and if so, the pilgrim would be allowed to pass along to the next planet, where he would be questioned as to his fidelity to the highest principles of that planet's energies. Thus would be the essence of the pilgrim's progress as he went about his self-examination to prepare him for spiritual rebirth.

This practice of self-examination is no more than a little lesson in cause-and-effect, or karma. Each of us can benefit from such an honesty-producing process occassionally, and what better time than Scopio, which is the energy of ejection and elimination, the cosmic garbage collector? 

Garbage Can Dwelling

Now that I had made the decision to keep a low profile while the planets played havoc with my Pluto rising in Leo and my Aquarian stellium in the sixth house, all bunched up right at the Descendent, I looked around at my surroundings and decided it was high time to do some Scorpio things. Starting with house-cleaning.

First came the areas of the house that tend to aquire what the Jewish housewife would call schmutz. In horary astrology, these areas, appropriately, are the places in the home where we use water -- kitchens and bathrooms -- or any other area that can be a breeding ground for toxins.

Next came my study, which over the course of about 2 1/2 years, or roughly since the last Mars transit through Scorpio, had become progressively so disorganized that it was virtually dysfunctional.

Layers upon layers of papers lying about had to be culled and filed. The fourth house is the province of the Moon. My Moon is in Gemini, which is the news gatherer and information collector: the writer. She is squared by Saturn in Virgo -- the organizer, the taskmaster, the old teacher who is a stickler for proper punctuation, spelling and grammar. My Moon in Gemini square Saturn in Virgo mostly come to a workable truce because they are both ruled by Mercury, the writer.

But sometimes that Moon gets really tired of being told to put that paper away in its proper place and she becomes disobediant to the inner voice of tidiness and order and she piles paper upon paper in ways that only she knows exist and she is proud of what a great memory she has to be able to pick out just the right paper from a stack three-feet high.

Eventually, the height of the stacks reaches a critical mass and the whole thing falls upon the floor in a disorderly fashion, which the cat frolics within, thinking we are playing some sort of leaves-in-the-garden, raking game. So Saturn in Virgo wins. He always wins this silly little contest of wills and then we have to go through the tedious process of sorting and filing and doing things in the correct manner in order to bring some functionality into our office space. Now that we can once again see the floor and have elbow room on the desk, we can get back to work on our writing in some sort of workable and comfortable fashion.

You would think I would learn my lesson about this, but that hasn't happened so far. Maybe I enjoy this self-abuse (Scorpio in the fourth house) and maybe I like this ritual penance (Catholic conscience: Moon rules the fourth) so that I may be forgiven my sins of disorderliness and be made clean again to accept the sacrament of work.

I've noticed that this process of cleaning out my study in a less than timely manner is very much like going on an archeological dig. The whole mess is a time-capsule that I sort through carefully, so that the processes of memory (Moon, fourth house) are stimulated as I handle each piece of paper and decide, belatedly, whether or not to keep the paper, and if so, where to file it.

The process of the examination of conscience (Mercury Retrograde in Scorpio in the fourth house) cannot be avoided.

Question of the Examiner: And what, pray tell, became of this project?

Answer of the Examinee: Well, nothing, really. I didn't finish it.

Question: And this pile of papers, and that one?

Answer: Same thing. I didn't finish those either.

Like I said, Saturn in Virgo always wins, always gets the last word. Moon in Gemini becomes momentarily excited by many things and spreads herself too thin. She says she's going to write a history of these times someday and is collecting every fact she can find. She doesn't finish everything she starts, but she has an uncanny ability to find information and collect it. If Saturn didn't come down on her occasionally and force some order upon her, she could become one of those elderly people about whom you read in the newspaper, whose corpses were found after the firemen made their ways laboriously through an intricate maze of stacked-up newspapers and magazines. She was going to give them to a library but she happened to pass away before she got around to it.

Oh well, life takes turns like that.

If it weren't for Saturn setting some limits, this information collecting impulse could become an obsessive-compulsive disorder (Pluto rising at the Ascendent).

Saturn in Virgo (The Examiner): Here is where the garbage can comes in. This is not a library. This is a home study. A base of operations in which the space is limited. Toss it out. Go ahead -- chuck it. There, that didn't hurt so much, did it? No, don't pick it out again. Leave it there.

Just as function follows form, I find myself going through layer upon layer of memory, and stop short at a file of photographs, taken a couple of years ago.

It's a scene of camaraderie, a fellowship dinner at my house and there are three couples in attendance. Three of us are writers and I had this idea that turned out to be a fantasy, an illusion that went away like a soap bubble (Neptune was sitting exactly on my Descendent at that time) -- that we would form a writers' round-table discussion group and we would read each others' writing and be an encouragement to each other. It seemed that these relationships would last a long time and we would always be happy, around the table, with our spouses.

Wrong.

It turned out that nobody really, upon close examination, had the same beliefs (Neptune at the Descendent), although it had seemed to me at the time that we did and it had seemed to me that we were extraordinarily compatible. (Neptune and soap bubbles.)

Not only did we not have the same beliefs, but also, as time went by, we became increasingly intolerant of each others' beliefs. We came to doubt each other, and we came to be suspicious of each others' motives. We changed from being kind to being unkind. Power struggles that were barely discernable at first became increasingly apparent, and spousal jealouslies (Neptune at the Descendent) worked behind the scenes to undermine the happy group of writers. None of the spouses were writers and people can do some pretty strange things when they feel threatened or outshined. I learned that the hard way and wish I didn't know it, but now I do. Live and learn.

I put the pictures back in the folder and put them away in a box of old photos. Maybe these relationships will come back and be reborn again, in that Plutonian way that has characterized some of my other relationships. On the other hand, maybe it's really the end. Finis. That's the other Plutonian way. The finality of death. Maybe I will never see these people again.

Only time will tell.

I noticed that all this falling away of the relationships became apparent when Neptune was at 18 Aquarius; the Sabian symbol for that degree is a picture of the last man at the Mardi Gras celebration taking off his mask, coming out from his introverted self to reveal his true identity.

I realized that I was the last person of the three to reveal my true colors, and when that happened, the relationships were effectively over.

It was the mask of Urania that did it.  It was me coming out as an astrologer that ended the little dining-room fellowship.

For nearly three decades, I had studied astrology, but mostly kept it to myself in order to navigate the straight world, in order to work, and in order to keep peace, and in order to avoid being called flaky.  I hid my true identity, (Pluto at the Ascendent) for what I thought was my survival (Pluto).

My Pluto at the Ascendent was now opposed by transiting Neptune in Aquarius, and I was ready to reveal myself as an astrologer.

I knew that when I came out as an astrologer, I would loose relationships. I just didn't know it would be those relationships because I believed they were my closest relationships. Neptune removed my mask. My belief in astrology was at the root of the undermining of the relationships.

I put away the pictures with a certain sadness in my heart, finally understanding what had happened. The presence of five planets in Scorpio: Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter squaring my Ascendent/Descendent axis had made some space in my life not only for some old relationships to be reborn, relationships that include very old friends of my spouse, but also room for the new friends I have found since Uranias 9th House has come into being.

Of course, I see now in the last analysis that it's been another one of those Pluto rising, death-and-rebirth experiences involving the first-house, identity, or in other words, the way other people see you.

I decided to wait until the Scorpio traffic jam in my fourth house started to move along, so I could get some distance and perspective in order to write again. I decided to wait until Mercury went Stationary Direct before writing again. That happened yesterday at the 10th degree of Scorpio. Here is the Sabian Symbol for that degree:

A FELLOWSHIP SUPPER REAWAKENS UNFORGETTABLE INNER TIES: Companionship rooted in past performance. Group-personality emergence. Fraternity of ideals uplifting individual efforts.

Now that I am coming to the end of my house-cleaning project, I'm beginning to come out of the chthonic cloister of the deeper layers of Scorpio. The wisdom of the fourth dimension has spoken to me in the old parables of the Earth.

The snake must shed its skin in order to grow. The Scorpion transforms itself into the eagle. Understanding the root causes of emotional disturbances and clearing away the garbage allows us, for a while, to soar above the Earth and to gain some perspective, like the eagle as it takes flight up high. We can see things from above, after spending some time below. It's all part of the cycles of life, death, and hopefully, spiritual renewal and growth.

And so it goes, until the next cycle of renewal must be lived through.

I look around and see I'm not the only one going through house-cleaning rituals of renewal. We went through one in our government affairs with the election on November 7, which gave us a liberal majority in both houses of Congress.

In fact, if truth be told, there is no one I know with planets in fixed signs who came out unscathed from this Scorpio passage. Something has died.

Something has been reborn.

Thankfully, Venus has now moved into Sagittarius, and she's getting ready for a party. Now that there is elbow room at my desk, I can go back to work again.

Now that there is elbow room at my dining-room table, our old friends for more than three decades will dine with us at Thanksgiving, and we will give thanks that we are all still alive and still together.

We're at the age now that each has had a glimpse of his or her mortality. The brush with death makes our camaraderie all the more precious.

And now I shall go back to my house cleaning. It was a long, slow process and still it is not quite done.

For what it was worth, this was my Scorpio story. I dedicate it to my best friend and old chum, who has eight planets in Scorpio, and that's a lot of changes.