What Does Scorpio Feel Like?

I’m currently working on a series of lectures for the Narrative Astrology Lab called “Voices of the Signs.” I’m interested in the signs as archetypes or spirits, beings with their own will, who possess us like Aphrodite walking before Helen in The Iliad.

Each lecture in the series focuses on one of the astrological signs, asking questions like: What does the energy of the sign feel like? What does it want? What is it trying to inspire us to do?

Because I’m taking a spiritual approach to the signs, I begin each lecture with an evocation. My intent is to invite the sign into the space, but, so far, I have found that the sign is there when we arrive, waiting for us to begin. By the time I’m ready to give a lecture, I have spent a week or two preparing, communing with the sign on my own, and it is as if the sign has cabin fever from being cooped up with me and is impatient to meet the rest of the lab.

While I was preparing the lecture on Scorpio, I had a particularly vivid experience of the sign. I stopped what I was doing and pulled out a notebook to record the experience.

This is what happened:

I had a suspicion that working on the Scorpio talk would put me in a scorpionic headspace, but I didn’t expect it to be like this.

First, I avoided preparing the talk at all. I usually give myself two weeks to work on these talks, and I “accidentally” gave myself a week.*

Now that I’m actually in it, I am simultaneously depressed and looking at my depression from the outside with this cold quipping:

“You’re listening to Radiohead? Really? This really is the end of all things, isn’t it? And now you’re putting your notifications on mute, so no one can get through to you with affection. AirPods in. Pen out. Self-pity activated. Do you even want to be happy? And now we’re pulling out the ephemeris and looking for a planet to blame. Hasn’t Saturn been your punching bag for long enough?”

Thoughts like these go on.

While I listen to the Scorpio playlist I’m building on Spotify, I feel myself fall into the depression completely. I embrace it instead of running from it, and it is amazing how different it feels embracing it this way. I feel more alive, not less alive. Everything is dark and beautiful, sad and intensely passionate. I feel like an iceberg has fallen into the ocean of my heart and is melting.

I was reading about Scorpio in The Inner Sky [by Steven Forrest], and I am really interested in the part about desire. Really opening up to the reality of death is supposed to help you pinpoint what you really desire.

“If you had six months to live,” he asks. “What would you do?”

The thought of knowing what I really want is appealing to me, so I am spending some time meditating on the question. At first, I was really focused on using that question to find an object of desire. What do I want? Who do I want? What do I want to do?

In The Book of Water, Steven says that when you don’t know what you want, and you are in a scorpionic space, you feel this inexplicable pressure, and that’s exactly what happened when I tried to find the object of my desire. I had no idea what I wanted, but I could feel the shape of it trying to swim up to the surface of my consciousness.

I reached out to embrace the answer, but nothing came. Nothing. At first, I was certain that this was more avoidance. Then, I realized that what I really wanted wasn’t to have or to do anything. There was no object of my desire. All I wanted was to feel.

I want to feel this much emotional intensity. The dark, beautiful, sad passion. Right now.

I have been musing on the idea of desire without an object ever since this experience. Is the feeling of desire without an object part of the experience of pure Scorpio? Is Scorpio found in the dark, delicious passion of desire when there is an object of our desire? Or is the fact that there was no object of desire present an essential part of Scorpio’s nature?

Put another way, is Scorpio itself raw desire, desire without an object? Are the stories that we tell about what we want really just sophisticated attempts to avoid the idea that it’s a feeling we’re after, and the object of our desire itself isn’t really the point?

I know that these questions are scorpionic in nature, but I don’t know how to answer them.

Somehow, I think that’s the point.

*Unconscious avoidance behaviors are a classic response to Scorpio.

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