The Scorpio Phase Of Seven Year Cycle
Scorpio is the eighth phase of the seven year cycle and it’s symbol is The Scorpion. The Scorpion symbolizes death and regeneration, the process of facing base level fears, the need for regeneration.
The Scorpio Phase involves a process of purification by fire, or death. It can be experienced in one’s life as a time when significant demands are being made upon you emotionally that require you to move DOWN into a depth of feeling that opens you up.
The level of emotions are primitive and intense, and as one writer puts it, in Scorpio “to go up, you have to go down”. It involves the necessity to give up the sense of you in any way being in control of ‘your life’. You are in a sense controlled by forces greater than you and, in some archetypal sense, out to destroy you if you are incapable of ‘submitting’ to the process of “letting go” that is required. This can seem very difficult to do, as the “forces” seem very persuasive and seem to demand attention, even require it.
These experiences may happen in any kind of actual life circumstance. Two examples are the completion of graduate school in which the student was completely overwhelmed with the final requirements for completing his degree. It felt to him like a mythic struggle to submit to the final necessities, involving a level of self transcendence unknown to him at the time. Another example is a person who, during the Libra Phase, discovered he had a disease that he felt to be potentially life threatening, and at a minimum, reducing his expectations of long, healthy life. This moved him into an intense emotional process that brought him down into primitive and base level fears that involved a tremendous submission and self transcendence to move beyond.
A further description of this phase is that you struggle to come to terms with some of your most basic fears, with circumstances and conditions that threaten you very fundamentally and emotionally, that bring up your most intense vulnerability and sense of overwhelm. It is your struggle to reorient away from being controlled by your reaction to these demands and perceived threats. The sense of threat and struggle with forces “out of your control” can be quite overwhelming during this phase.
The archetype of Scorpio is associated with great forces in nature that tend to overwhelm the sense of individual power or control. You will find yourself in situations where the demand upon you (often prior to the mid-point) is very intense and often seems to be quite overwhelming. The larger environment of your life, i.e. your relationships or just life in general, appears to be threatening to you, appears to be demanding more than you are willing to give.
The powers that appear to confront you may seem to devalue you greatly, or appears to threaten your sense of being in any kind of ultimate control in your life. At the midpoint you face a crisis with these forces or powers that are demanding so much energy and attention. At this time life demands great sacrifices in order to incarnate a new direction or reorientation, just as it did after the midpoints of the Taurus and Leo phases. It is very difficult, yet you have no choice, there is no going back after this break with the past and toward that something new, as yet unexplored.
Those things in your environment that appear to be making such intense and unyielding demands upon your very self-hood can range from work/career situations and persons in those situations to health issues which may fundamentally threaten bodily existence, or obsessive fears or impulses. The experience is of your present sense of selfhood being overwhelmed or having it’s integrity threatened. At a minimum it may be the experience of your sense of selfhood being fundamentally disacknowledged.
This phase is the opposite of the Taurus phase and can be seen as it’s complement in many ways. These two phases are often experienced as the most difficult personally during the seven year cycle because they have to do with such intense struggle with how one values oneself, or with how one views oneself as being “of value” in life and relationships. They both demand a self transcendence, an incarnation of ‘spiritual’ strength at a very basic level. You must choose to grow and to not allow these forces of despair or threat to overwhelm your greater intelligence and understanding.
Last updated on July 6, 2014 at 10:10 pm. Word Count: 747