The Ancient Stories in the Stars
Well, here we are again. Scorpio Season 2026
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble…
23 October: The Sun enters Scorpio
24 October: Mercury turns retrograde, the planet ruling communications, short distance travel, and connections with siblings and neighbours. Mercury is also a psychopomp, the Olympian god who, like the goddess Hekate, could travel to and from the Underworld. He can therefore signify messages about death…or even dreams or messages from the dead. Mercury is also closer to Earth than at other times, so its influence becomes stronger and more prominent. Anything involving the transmission of information takes on greater importance, so it is critical to pay closer attention to what we say, what we think, and how we communicate, whether in conversation, in writing, or in any other form. Well, good luck with that because…
October 25: Venus retrogrades back into Libra where it is at home, but Venus is currently in her fighting energy and somewhat discombobulated. With Venus in Scorpio in recent weeks, there have likely been recent considerable strains in relationships and partnerships, to do with shared resources, and mutual obligations in respect of agreeing what we owe to whom in terms of duty and our allocation of our resources, financial and otherwise. And if you recognize this, you’re not out of these woods yet.
25 October: The Full Moon in Taurus in Scorpio season pits Venus, the ruler of Taurus against Mars, the ruler of Scorpio. Both fixed signs, both courageous. This Full Moon is driven by a challenging aspect from Pluto. Ancient history is here again, some long ago issue raises its head and it isn’t pretty. This is a fighting energy, but it may be that when the dust settles, Taurus pawing its hoof, and Scorpio all ready to sting, steaming and scalding, some bulging old cupboard has been well and truly sorted out, and Mercury has been well and truly retrograded in the process.
Just as in Scorpio season 2024, and again in Scorpio season 2025, and none of this, alas, looks like settling any time soon, we are challenged with keeping a cool head, and keeping our footing while watching yet more unfolding of the ongoing escalations in threat and fury, misery and mayhem in public life and on the world stage. The astrology works from the macro to the micro levels, with the ultimate emphasis on the macro, given the governance of the outer planets, and in particular with Saturn and …even more challenging…Neptune in Aries until 2038/39 (war at sea) and Pluto in Aquarius until 2044 (technocracy versus community)
But keep a cool head. Ultimately, we must, while maximising our own energy bursts to care for our patch of earth. To fix, to burn rubbish, to clear, while still to nourish, burnish, cherish all those living, and all that legacy which we most rightfully hold dear.
Scorpio is the ruler of the Eighth House of Death, Inheritance…and Legacy as represented in the Tarot by the Six of Cups. Our memories. Our childhood dreams. Nostalgia. A child is born. This child is its own person. (But who does this child look like? Who do they “take after” ?)
For the natal Scorpio Sun sign native during the birthday month, there is this from Cosmic Tea with Maureen …(highly recommended) “Scorpios are acting out scenes and story lines from 2018, 2010 and back every eight years before that, courtesy of the Venus retrograde. They’re also dealing with Mercury, who is also moving backward in their sign this month. These transits might leave a few of our favorite Scorpios uncharacteristically distracted, and dare I say, flustered. (Don’t tell them I said that!)”
This month we are all children of The Scorpion. Scorpio may sting. And yet, paradoxically it may also heal. Scorpio is potentially a mightily powerful healer. Natural charisma. Venom and…anti-venom.
Read here about the Human Uses of Scorpions
I beg your pardon
I never promised you a rose garden…
But roses thrive on blood and bone meal. Look again at that Death card…
Death carries on its banner the promise of a perfect white rose. Death says there are roses, there shall be roses, always and for ever; even in Death, even in the season of the Scorpion.
Salutations to the celestial Scorpion. Wishing a very Happy Birthday season 2026 to our savvy, deep and subtle Scorpio friends.
Now let’s take a look at the bigger picture, and the ancient back story.
The Stars of Scorpio
Nature, science, religion, astronomy and astrology were intertwined in the ancient world. Scorpius is a massive, spectacular j- shaped constellation located in the skies over the southern hemisphere near the centre of the Milky Way. In the Northern hemisphere it can be seen in July and August, and in the Southern hemisphere, it’s visible from March to October.
Sometime around four thousand years ago the Babylonians looked up, discerned the huge and brightly leaning “J”- shape in the summer stars, saw in this the shape of a gigantic scorpion and called this constellation MUL.GIR.TAB – the ‘Scorpion’, literally read as ‘the (creature with) a burning sting.’
The movements and relative positions of Scorpius were mapped by Babylonian magicians and astrologers, who left written records of the omens they observed.
“When a halo surrounds the Moon and Scorpio stands in it, it will cause men to marry princesses, (or) lions will die, and the traffic of the land will be hindered.”
A comet appearing in Scorpius (Scorpio) was read as a dire warning of a coming plague, but when the Sun rose in Scorpius, alchemists saw their chance for the transmutation of lead into gold.
There are 18 known stars in Scorpius, the most famous being the red giant star Antares (Ant-Ares…the rival of Mars/Ares, the god of war, fire and fertility…the original planetary ruler of Scorpio)
Antares, its biggest star, is almost unimaginably huge – our sun is barely more than a dot in comparison- one of the brightest stars in the night sky.
Scorpius contains exo-planets, some extremely old while others are potentially habitable. The planet PSR B1620-26 b, nicknamed “Methuselah” is estimated at 12.7 billion years old (The universe is about 13.7 billion years old.) Methuselah has a mass about twice that of Jupiter and it orbits around not one, but two stars.
Cue existential angst every time I see this video. I may need to lie down awhile in a dark room. Someone pass me the eau-de-cologne. But….the MAJESTY.
Traditional Associations
The fixed water sign of the celestial Scorpion later became the zodiac archetype of Halloween/Samhain, marking the half way point between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere.
This is a liminal space in time. The light is dimming, the veil is thinning. The ghosts get louder. Maybe metabolically too, something ancient is stirring in us. Still waters run deep, truly. But ruled by the fire of Mars, this is water as steam, hot springs or steaming geysers, bursting out from sources deep down in the heart of the hot rock.
The Zodiac glyph
Scorpio’s glyph is symbolic of a serpent, representing the life force energy, the flow of that energy and the release of it. Imagine the “M” as a coil with the energy flow going outward, often with an arrow sign attached. The other “m” glyph in the Zodiac is Virgo, imagined as a coiling serpent with its tail folded inward in protective, healing mode.
Ruling planets: Traditional: Mars as already discussed. Modern: Pluto following Pluto’s discovery in 1930.
House: The Eighth House of power, secrets, sex, death, finance, legacy
Symbols: Scorpion, Serpent, Eagle/Phoenix (nearby constellation, Aquila, the Eagle.)
Element: Water (but this water STEAMS.)
Quality: Fixed
Keywords: I desire. I transform
Hebrew letter: Nun, meaning the snake. Scorpio has three glyphs, the only sign to do so; the snake, scorpion and eagle (or phoenix.) The snake sheds its skin and thus represents transformation, healing and magic.
Colour: Dark red
Birthstone: Yellow Topaz, Opal, Aquamarine, Tourmaline
Body: reproductive/sex organs
Tissue cell salt: calcium sulphate, repair of tissues and resistance to infectious diseases.
Trees: Walnut, hawthorn, blackthorn
Tarot Cards: Death, King of Cups, 5, 6 and 7 of Cups.
The major arcana card in the Tarot representing Scorpio is the Death card, one of the most feared cards in the Tarot deck. Note the Biblical ‘pale horse’ of Death and the white rose. He comes for all, the king, the archbishop, the child. But the rose signifies beauty and immortality. All that has ever once been, is recorded somewhere, somehow, forever.
“Everything perfect in its time”-Ecclesiastes.
The Death card is not usually about the literal death of any person. It may represent the death of something else, like the ending of a situation, chapter, project, plan, or relationship. But. BUT. There is a tendency to try and play this down, but I have learned in my own experience as a reader, the Death card can mean exactly that, the physical death of a person, like it or not. Any of the cards in the Tarot deck can mean exactly what they say on the tin. This lesson has more than once hit me directly, hard, and very close to home in the literal, physical human sense.
There is no space for new Life without Death. We die. Even rivers can die. Even the stars die. Old age is not our natural birth-right. Few animals reach old age living in the wild. It is this sharp focus of such an awareness that gives Scorpio its drive, intensity, its passion, or its preoccupation with the “darker” side of life, and with the occult and the mysterious, but also its power of regeneration, and the drive to procreate new life.
The Real Life Scorpion
- The scorpion is a staggeringly ancient creature. The earliest evidence dates from the Silurian period 450 million years ago, when the first scorpion ancestors left the seas for the land. Fossils from the Carboniferous 300 million years ago indicate little change since then but early scorpions may have had compound eyes.
- They are arachnids: arachnida scorpiones, with a body in two sections, 2 pincers or pedi-palps, 8 legs like a spider, and an exo-skeleton made of chitin. They are more closely related to Harvestmen than spiders.
- They dance before mating, a stately promenade. They give birth to live young and carry them on their backs until the babies have their first moult and disperse. The mothers may eat the young if resources are desperately scarce.
- They have a long life span compared with other arachnids, 2-3 years in the wild but they have lived up to 25 years in captivity. They can live a year without food and they eat insects, spiders, other scorpions and lizards. They will also eat small mammals, such as mice.
- They glow in the dark except when newly moulted. Scorpion fossils still fluoresce, despite spending hundreds of millions of years embedded in rock.
- They are famously venomous. However of the nearly 2,000 known species of scorpions, only 25 have venom powerful enough to be dangerous to an adult human. In the U.S., the Arizona bark scorpion, Centruroides sculpturatus, produces venom strong enough to kill a small child, but anti-venom means deaths are rare.
Thank you for reading.
Coming up soon, the decans of Scorpio…
Till next time 🙂
