INTRODUCTORY ESOTERIC ASTROLOGY

INTRODUCTORY ESOTERIC ASTROLOGY

SCORPIO 2011

Labor of Hercules
Slaying the Lernaean Hydra

On knees to lift the evil writhing Hydra into wind and light — the mystical 9th head of power buried under a Rock.
Kundalini with Fire of Mind and Spirit conquer the entrenched reptilian instincts to become Asklepios and Healing Shaktipat;
Scorpio wrestles again with Antares (cf. Gemini) as Ophiuchus and Hercules; Victory when Hydra seen as unit.

Motto: Warrior am I and from the battle I emerge triumphant.
(Scorpio stages the release of Leo)

Scorpio and Society Scorpio in General

There is nothing like conflict or competition to establish social contact with others on a sustained basis, as found in sports enthusiasts or professional teams. Whether this serves to aggravate self-interest or self-reference in one case or group spirit and teamwork in another depends on the quality of the individual. This is one of Scorpio’s skills and explains a bit why unlikely types have access to such large numbers of people. It also explains the exceptional degree of teamwork that can be found in the same sign and its inevitable perfection of impersonal service.

The higher degrees of conflict experienced with Uranus as planetary ruler in Aries and in Aquarius has a similar effect to that of Scorpio, and brings these three signs into contact (collision) with large numbers of people. Both Scorpio and Aquarius mask or negotiate their presentation and responses to those they engage or avoid. Scorpio and Aries are both deeply vulnerable to conflict and found related to Virgo in the three triangles of each sign with Mercury and Gemini. The impact of the triangle Scorpio-Mercury-Gemini is said to have effect on a wide social and planetary scale; so much so that the nature of these impacts are quite obscure. This probably has relation to the triangle Mars-Scorpio-Taurus and the seven solar systems which are deeply involved in the creative use of conflict and crisis.

One of the first considerations with Scorpio is use of creative energy. Pleasure and sensation-seeking arise when the curious and analytic mind is dead. Service orientation –self, family, club, clan, local and state, state and national, national and international scope– all have their demands, all can be limited by capacity and consciousness, and all need regular audience assessment, project needs, and group or teamwork review. Creative work is powerful, and one must consider its impact and use, its possibilities of aid or harm in the immediate sphere of work focus and in a larger world context.

Scorpio on the Mutable Cross can bring annoying ambitious and silently aggressive types, and Scorpio’s pure ambition is found in a large quotient on the Fixed Cross. Most all of these individuals are still integrating the personality, prior to true Probationary status. The true nature of will –as distinct from force, coercion, intentions, and determination– begins to dawn on Probationers as they move on to Aspirants and form part of the NGWS. They work tirelessly “as though they were ambitious,” but vision (however clouded) and true will is qualitatively distinct as a mobilizer and spur to action and service. Conflict and crisis become clear opportunities to serve (rather than prey upon) and help reform and transform society and themselves along with it, expanding knowledge, skill, and practical or insightful wisdom. Scorpio is one of the best signs in which to anchor reform and spiritual work and purpose, despite its reputation on lower rungs of expression.

Creative Scorpio and Gender

It is a pitiful thing when spiritual students –especially Bailey students– interpret the phrase “rare physiological forms and predispositions” as predispositions in the gross physical body. (EA 233-36 @ 235) That is blaming the mother and her genetic and prenatal nurturing of the fetus. If one wishes to interpret AAB’s comments literally, one must note the fact that these are considered two different causal factors, separated by the word ‘and.’

Contrary to Right-to-Lifers, the Right to Life does not begin at conception and end at birth. The physical body in esotericism is the Etheric Body. Humanity does not incarnate into the world below the four ethers; a human-animal mother is required to match substance from her womb, flesh and blood, to the etheric grid of the soul who wishes to incarnate. The umbilical cord to the Mother is severed to produce an ensouled individual. Without the human soul, the gross body or fetus is a blob of human-animal protoplasm.

This is the sacrificial Mystery Drama of the Mother principle and the Holy Spirit— Artemis/Diana, mother, guardian, and disciplinarian of all animals in her chase of instinct. It is so refreshing to hear neoplatonic ideas and sentiments preserved in modern Greek popular music — in a country dominated by Orthodox Christianity (whose uninterrupted mantra at Mt. Athos is Kyrie eleison – Lord have mercy).

Η ΜΑΝΑ The Mother

Δεν είμαι πια γυναίκα γιε μου, είμ’ ένα δέντρο που ξερίζωσαν
I am no longer a woman, my son, I am a tree which they uprooted,
είμ’ ένα βογγητό του ανέμου μέσα στη νύχτα του χιονιά.
I am a moaning of the wind within a night of snowy weather.
Δεν έχω μάτια να κοιτάζουν, δυο βρύσες έχω για το κλάμα μου
I don't have eyes that can see, two fountains I have for my weeping,
χίλια μαχαίρια που με σφάζουν σ’ αυτή του κόσμου τη γωνιά.
a thousand knives that slaughter me in this, my corner of the world.

Οπου γυρνάω, για σένα μιλώ, Μάη μου παιδί μου
Wherever I turn, for you I speak, my May, my child,
ήλιε μου εσύ, μοναξιά μου χρυσή
you my sun, my golden loneliness,
ψίχα απ’ την ψυχή μου, χαρά που έχασα.
rich inner bread from my soul, joy that I have lost.

Δεν είμαι πια γυναίκα φως μου, είμαι μια μάνα διχως αύριο
I am no longer a woman, my light, only a mother with no tomorrow
έν’ άγριο πουλί στου κόσμου την παγωμένη ανασαιμιά.
a wild bird within the world's frozen breath.

[ΑΛΕΞΙΟΥ Εί...! Τρελάϑηκα 1994]
From: Haris Alexiou, Ei..! Trellathika, 1994 CD

Nevertheless, science has discovered differences in the physical brain of those with opposite-sex and same-sex attraction and appeal. It is clear that normal human sexual appeal expresses as a spectrum or full circle, often making a complete cycle or round in one lifetime. With the population explosion we are witnessing at the beginning of the 21st century, there may be many reasons for single-child laws and alternatives to sex for breeding purposes only, particularly among those unfortunate masses likely to bring nothing but suffering and tragedy into their lives and the world through impossible physical, economic, predatory and disaster circumstances. One must also ask oneself how many dimensions of the etheric body are unfamiliar to us? What are its needs? How do the Law of Attraction and creative etheric work operate in individuals and in groups? This consideration frightens most people, naturally, given our primitive social state of awareness and terror at becoming ‘targeted’ for punishment by the reactionary slopebrow population and for scorn by potential associates and colleagues.

It is clear from this point of view that DK and AAB were writing (during the Nazi era) with mercy in mind for those who did not fit in with the National Socialist fanatic hypocrisy or enthusiasts of the well-bred human-animal set, so popular a trend for society wannabes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is amusing to consider the armorial pride in extensive genealogical trees that undoubtedly included changelings, children born the other side of the bed, and concealed adoptees. To focus 19th and early-20th century sentimental and attitudinal consciousness on the plight of physical hermaphrodites is a method of locking primitive minds and hand-me-down thinking processes (if you can grant that as thinking) into focus on that uncommon phenomenon, while basically saying ‘think it out for yourself.’ Spiritual Intelligentsia have always taken their own path illumined by the factors of analysis, skepticism, and deep consecrated study. It is significant that AAB calls for “establishing a point of equilibrium” and invokes the basic problem as that existing between the Sheep and the Goats. It is pointless to argue with her rebuke of incest and prostitution. The warning as to the dangers of a mentality perverted by emotional attachment to romance and fantasy, and by a spurious guilt caused by misinterpretation of the Christian message provides a helpful perspective. Seen clearly, the cycle of sex is a normal, natural, divine, transformative, and resurrecting function. It simply needs intelligent integration into one’s life and society.

Scorpio the Dangerous Animal, and Anger

Ruled by Pluto-Mars-Mars-Mercury, Scorpio is immersed in a sea of unconscious, subconscious, social, psychological, and physical conflicts, all governed by inheritance and collision with karmic law. The question is how one will handle such crises of conflict and one’s cultivated capacities and enduring will-to-transform these into clear opportunities, into training of the animal instincts through self-discipline and ingenuity, and truly intelligent capacity to exercise reflection and analysis driven toward the aim of reform, discovery, and surgically precise skills in one’s field of endeavor.

For the Sagittarian and Scorpion alike, there are frustrations, anger, and the hazard of hatred in the rage of idealism (Sagittarius) seeking justice, and in the self-confident inspector/inquisitor (Scorpio) seeking his Truth. Suffice it to say the Heart is nourished and protected by Love.

The low-grade expression (in all of us) of reaction to such impacts and dilemmas is frustration, anger, rage, and hatred. Here I hope self-styled disciples and initiates will admit to occasional bouts with these low-grade responses, if only in regard to moronic behavior (not persons) and its unfortunately defectively engineered circumstances and results.

Buddhism considers anger to be the most virulent, insidious and destructive of the Five Poisons (afflictive emotional and mental states, or ‘defilements’), both social and environmental. If one can stop for a moment and maintain the equanimity to examine one’s state of being (and feeling), it should become clear (and felt) that anger arouses all the animal fight/flight responses, generates biochemicals that poison and shrivel the nervous system and brain, destroying memory as well as the thought process. It is the ‘thought-process’ with its faculty of rational analysis and reflection that is damaged in its ability to mobilize the system to respond to the four other ‘Poisons’ and their destructive or non-constructive fallout.

From one point of view, anger is simply excess of energy that needs a creative and constructive outlet and expression. For most, it appears more complicated. Seneca, unwilling tutor to the sado-narcissist Nero, observed that anger is most often thought of as an irrational response or state. The reality is that it is a ‘rational’ response to expectations of rationality in people and social circumstances — but based on the ‘reason’ of their's and one’s own constructed or hand-me-down point of view. In other words, it is a violent and energetic response, of and to the ‘maya’ created by the quality of one’s own ‘mechanism of response,’ to one’s formulation of what the world and human (or animal) society actually is, constructed by mere unthinking tradition or by the lower mind and the modicum of citta at one’s disposal.

For spiritual students it can often be triggered by emotionally playing into the behavior of instinctive natives, or one’s ‘domesticated’ pets, for instance. With basic instinct, other laws and rules of the game are at play. Another side of the mind, one more allied with the subconscious, is drawn into the fray. Hopefully one’s will to spiritually condition one’s circumstances is stronger than the fleeting ‘comfort’ of allowing oneself to be conditioned. Hopefully this will-to-condition is immune from false ‘inspiration’ by the fight or flight syndrome, its impacts and shocks, and emerges with overarching vision from a higher plane, making intelligent response instantaneous and effortless. Perhaps it will augment decision making by pro & con rationalization with the unconscious adaptive processes associated with the instinct-based subconscious which see, hears, and senses all that the finite or conditioned lower mind shuts out.

Political Animals

One’s desire for peace and comfort makes one a plaything of social cybernetic mechanomorph elites, encouraging imitation by the public with its spectacle of fence-sitting polarization and paralysis until more narrow and selfish values emerge to be promoted. We can observe this is the behavior of the so-called “Republicans” in the U.S. Congress who, while taking a brain-dead attitude of social and political superiority, will nearly always refuse to take the superior responsibility to intelligently inform (not mouth off at) the putatively inferior public, a public of the people embodying public-sector civic institutions and public service organizations that any coherent or cogent philosophical ‘republicanism’ would demand. But where are the philosophical republicans of an enlightened Republic, the City on a Hill? A republic is not anti-government or anti-civic in its organization or engagement. Tell that to the Repugs. When the Repugs take power “government ends and the looting begins.” The Right to Life begins at conception and ends at birth (courtesy Barney Frank); Life is then subordinated to social chaos culling. God help their Repug children. God help American citizens who they wish to turn into consumer-spam or prison-fodder.

There is a fine line separating the bottom-line lust for making money from crime, conflict, crises and debt (with its justification of an absolutist control) — and the bottom-line accelerant of a worse conflagration that consumes pawns and predators alike. The huge conglomerate corporations (negative Aquarius) are not focused so much on cornering the market and sequestering money (which is still vulnerable in banks to market collapse). They are more interested in the superior method of making all competitors and individuals slaves to the currency of debt (control and social blackmail). Obsessive focus on the materialist bottom-line feeds and nourishes Ignorance and social paralysis in prospective consumer and opportunistic predator alike.

“Why do people fear the Truth? It demands Responsibility, and that is why it is dreaded.” “The man of idealism must become the man of action” (if ‘only’ on inner planes). Idealisms lead to true ‘spiritual’ Aspiration — the Probationer becomes the Aspirant. “The masses are in the Scales (Libra)” while spiritual students are tested in Scorpio. There is a distinction between the searching and struggles of Idealism and the constructive Aspiration and sustained efforts of the wise builder (Capricorn). Later, the distinction between definitive (Relative) and Ultimate (not absolute) Truth –the “Two Truths” in Buddhism– will become increasingly apparent. Conventional (descriptive) truth is simply self-constructed delusion, and must be recognized as Ignorance, flourishing under the great Open Sky of the Great Illusion.

This repugnant crowd remains a slave to instinct, devoid of deep psychoanalysis, reflective rationality and true intellect and intelligence. ‘Intelligence’ to this crowd signifies data, information, knowledge and strategic thinking, but falls short of true knowledge-interests, self-conscious intellect and wisdom valuation. It is intelligence utilized by Aquarian mechanomorphs, comfortable in their accustomed strata of society; niche-fillers with limited conceptual constructive ability or understanding of the wider world — negative builders of automata, great machines of politics and technological society. Now the race is on between liberating social media and the control mechanisms of harvesting consumers and twisting public opinion — dumbing downward to materialist interests, making everyone slaves of debt (while selling planned obsolescent goods).

Corporate Plantation Democracy

The first point to be made is that nothing negative or outworn in the world is changed except with expansion of consciousness. Activism can only go as far as the consciousness of its proponents, organizers and public interest. Degenerating anti-government Republicans in the U.S. have made it clear that a Republic is not a goal.

Multinationals want the ‘freedom’ to establish their plantation slave-owning domains free of national borders. Public sector interests and the welfare of its disposable human resources is nonexistent. I am speaking of standard-issue raw attitudes free from humanitarian conscience and personal or social sense of responsibility (or noblesse oblige). The multinational rage in investment resembles the exodus of southern slaveowners who settled Texas through murder of the indigenous Mexican-American landholders, collusion with feral bankers and who made sure there was a secession clause in their ‘state’ constitution of which many Americans wish they would avail themselves in order to become a DMZ southern border.

The difficulty is that this will lead to a world order unified by the norms of the marketplace, demanding a purchased and blackmailed government and legal system, through bribes, laundered and misdirected resources and tit-for-tat social norms of ‘justice.’ Plantation democracy is a variant of the medieval marketplace under the ramparts of unaccountable shifting and warring feudal lords vying for turf like common criminal gangs. All the advances of humanity in the sciences (besides technology) — social, psychological, knowledge-interests, and norms based on humanitarian and spiritual/religious values will become secondary to government by the dust-filled marketplace, the Souk; government by a Dickensian elite of rag merchants and their indentured rag-pickers such as we see in South American favelas and cities. All this is fine if you prefer a Darwinian Devolution over conscious and intelligent participation in a planetary humanitarian adaptive social Evolution — shop shop shop until you adapt, slave.

We now also witness a steamboat tide of gambling casinos, ostensibly to provide state revenues but actually to prepare the infotainment environment with an opiate for unemployed slaves and their wealthy slaveowners. This is where plantation democracy segues into trickle-down casino capiddleism; two systems which find civic education and social studies dispensable because normative-value education and its inevitable evolving demand for benevolent regulation intolerable.

Consciousness is best raised by education (and reflection) in and out of educational institutions in the planetary World University. For thousands of years, many of the best scientists, philosophers, innovators, and forerunners have been forced to go it alone. In a plantation democracy these ‘factors’ will simply devolve to entertainers in black-face for their casino culture. We are back in the decaying Roman Empire that worshipped the goddess Fortuna in a self-indulgent and atomized society of sado-narcissist self-delusion and denial. Enough said.

Scorpio and Indignation
or, The Revival of Feudalism in the Corporate Technocratic Anti-government State/Republic and its Bureaucracy of Profitable Ad Hoc Cascading Delegationism

Scorpio is properly absorbed in the Adventure of Self-Discipline merges into the goal orientation of Sagittarius training in Purposefulness through sustained concentration and continuous cultivation of the three personality vehicles. It is said that Leo seeks release in Scorpio. Perhaps that is to say the sense of isolation the fully self-conscious individual feels, and that perfects the qualities of self-control and social navigation, are facilitated by Scorpio and its focus on creative work, inevitably disclosing one’s unique individuality as well as cultivating natural and normal (unobtrusive) leadership qualities over time.

The Greeds –Repug NEO-FEUDALISTS, corporate white-collar felons, or totalitarian technocrat monopolists– think of themselves as an elite or aristocracy. The American Revolution was one of the few revolutions initiated by an aristocracy — an imported Anglo aristocracy (Virginia Burgesses) and wealthy elites from various backgrounds (sharp business-practice Puritans, public spirited Quakers, Jacksonian-style yahoo power-brokers). They think of themselves as an elite, but have in fact devolved most thoroughly into self-interested emotional or fanatic revivalists of Feudalism — slovenly and sloppily organized non-governmental rulership by sheer force and competitive corporate murder. They see true humans as their lackeys and mop-ups.
( * See David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America for a lucid exposition of Anglo types still to be found following their old folkways — whether in the rural suburbs or in their steel and glass palaces...; also see commentary on David Stockman's forthcoming book with the working title The Triumph of Crony Capitalism for a similarly lucid account of the present U.S. economic debacle.)

For a quick synopsis of Scorpio’s involvement in the present state of the World Order, I would recommend the film The International. Take a moment to take flight over the noisy marketplace for a more inclusive view. Its location shots are worth the time spent. The film returns again and again to the theme of Truth within the Great Illusion of human life and the universe. On somewhat of a tangent, in the waking dream state (as in film) there can be more conscious insight and reflection than in the program and regimes of the day — just as in meditation. It has been observed that a good night’s sleep helps the decision-making process. There is an unconscious processing that the brain automatically (sometimes desperately) tries to complete when it gets the time, integrating all that has been experienced both consciously and subconsciously throughout the day/year/life. Memory is deeply involved with the signs of Virgo and Scorpio. This unconscious processing is often superior to hours spent in pro-vs.-con rationalization.

When anger arises, try to remember that Ignorance and the Five Poisons (afflictive mental and emotional states) are all-pervasive in the social environment. With an exploding and dysfunctional population growth and urban-rural-suburban development devoid of Smart Planning, the US environment exerts a squeeze-play passive-aggressive conditioning effect that everyone is forced to deal with, due to its increasing invasiveness in public sector rights to privacy and human dignity. Pope John Paul had it right in his encyclical on the innate and inalienable human right to work for a sustainable living wage and the basic human dignity and mutual respect that ensures any social contract. Unfortunately this inalienable right to honest livelihood and public service was left out of the U.S. Constitution. If it were in the Constitution and anti-government Americanism was not at a feverish pitch as it is at present, we would not be experiencing the effects of a kindergarten regime that resembles the condition of congestive heart failure as much as anything else, produced by the in-sane (non-healthful) and childish bickering stasis influenced by capital on labor and citizenship. Cooperation between labor and capital with a principled focus on win/win solutions to warring interests and values is something every modern government in the world worked out in the 20th century. Pity the rabble is so cock-sure of its superiority — the “ugly American.”

The essential or core Buddhist tantric teaching on Anger starts with the prayer “the wrathful Vajra extirpates anger/hatred.” This could be paraphrased for Mahayana (Compassion-focused) Buddhist students as “the wrathful (buddhic) jewel in the lotus of ultimate (not absolutist) peace and harmlessness utterly overcomes anger/hatred and indignation/irritation by projecting a perfect balance of the Three Fires and Seven Rays through the Mirror-like Wisdom (Vajra) into the Three Worlds of self and other.” The general Mahayana practice is to visualize all sentient beings as once having been one’s mother in previous lives. I find this rather difficult, on Rays 1-2-4. As Father/Mother I would recognize all afflicted humans (and others) as appearing like normal adults with reflective and rational faculties, but essentially behaving as adult-children who must be loved, outwitted, and trained like instinct-enslaved animals, or educated like humans through intelligent loving speech and example. Once this exercise achieves its purpose of detachment, it would be followed by meditation on the Four Immeasurables — loving-kindness, wishing the best for all, compassionate engagement, and equanimity. Advanced students are said to see all phenomena as the mind, body and speech of initiatory gods and goddesses — as a Buddha-field. With animals (such as household pets) it also helps to dispassionately assess the situation and environment and make those changes in their environment that will guide instinctive behavior — and know when NOT to interfere when instinctive/territorial negotiations and adjustments are taking place, on their own terms and in their own proper sphere.

Having thus commented on contemporary human society (the U.S.) it is imperative to reiterate the all-pervasiveness of appearances (maya), psychological delusions (glamour), and the Great Illusion. Human social ideals, values, motivations, methods –and individuals– are layered and stratified and often initially indecipherable — whether incomprehensible because unregenerate, middling manipulative/complex and half confused, or operating above one’s consciousness and ‘mechanism of response.’

Scorpio and Hope

Scorpio is the dangerous ambitious animal who evolves into the great healer, highly skilled analyst or engineer, educator, psychologist, economic and legal reformer, and forerunner of discoveries in science and all fields of human endeavor. This takes place via the long (evolutionary) transition from Mars to Mercury, from instinct to intellect to intuition and group-conscious teamwork. That is why these two planets are so powerfully placed in politicians and influential actors on the world stage — Mars/Mercury orthodox, esoteric, heliocentric, nodal, heliocosmic, and by pre-ordained (soul timing) cyclic transit.

Hope? It is easy to see we are all doomed. We are “prisoners of the planet” and tethered like cattle to the wheel of karma (interdependent causation, the ‘network of thought’), or under the wheel of the goddess Fortuna (with a rudder in her right hand, and a cornucopia in her left). Hope comes from the Delphic dictum Know Thyself (Gnothi Seauton), as we are operating blind, like Oedipus. In the ancient Greek sense this phrase meant more “know thy place,” which has evolved into “know thy place as a cell or center in the Body of Deity and Humanity." I’ll repeat Isabel Hickey here, who used to say “The first occult law is to mind your own business” — focus on cultivating one’s own garden, though it be seasonally blasted. This is a First Ray approach, but applies to all. It contextualizes so-called ‘hope’ and keeps it in perspective. Let’s focus rather on Joy and Light (Trained Observation and divine Indifference). Scorpio’s Work is the wick of the lamp of Joy.

Inspiration: Alice A. Bailey, Esoteric Astrology, and her 24 books on esoteric philosophy.
NY: Lucis Publishing Company – website (http://www.lucistrust.org/en/publications_store).