The Death card and a psychic dream premonition
Last time I was talking about on the origins of the Scorpio story: the history, natural history and the scorpion itself, the symbolism, and the astronomy and astrology. Now for a further look at the archetype.
The Scorpio Archetype
The zodiac signs represent archetypes, meaning something that is considered to be a perfect or typical example of a particular kind of person or thing. The zodiac signs paint a ‘poetic’ portrait of a person born at a particular time of year.
Scorpio is The Sorcerer, The Witch, The Investigator, The Hypnotist, The Alchemist and the Necromancer. Scorpio is also the World Serpent, and the Eagle, and the mythological Phoenix, the fire-bird of resurrection, as new life rises from the ashes –The Phoenix.
Scorpio is the season of fast dwindling daylight and with this comes the new season of chills and influenza. The medical salt associated with Scorpio, the tissue cell salt Calcium Sulphate, performs a cleansing and cooling function in the body. Injury or infection may produce pus which may form a boil, and then the boil bursts, expelling infection and with it, expelling the dangerous heat of inflammation. But better out than in. Though like a volcanic eruption, the immediate aftermath may be destructive. This can be viewed as an allegory of world events.
What has been festering, must either turn inward, bringing sepsis, rot and death, or must find a way to break out. Scorpio breaks out with heat and violence and/or conceals by means of stealth, wealth, secrecy and intrigue.
New readers will often discuss the water cards in terms of how healing they are, and and sensitive, ‘spiritual’ and emotional. True. But great emotions will just as readily wreak great turmoil. There are terrifying floods. There are storms at sea. Heaven help Jamaica at the time of writing. There are tsunamis. The fixed water sign that is the Scorpion of the zodiac is ruled by Mars and the red star Antares. It doesn’t freeze. It may steam. It may simmer. But it may scald. It may boil.
The cards representing the fixed water zodiac sign of Scorpio are The Death card, The King of Cups, and the Five, Six and Seven of Cups.
The Death card sits in between two mutable cards: The Hanged Man card of Pisces, denoting twelfth house matters, hidden matters, and a time of inaction, and Temperance of Sagittarius, representing ninth house matters, and the power of right timing and targeted action, just as the arrow of the Archer flies to its mark.
Temperance is also the card of healing where Scorpio is Life or Death.
The Tarot is saying that Death too may be a way of healing. Or rather perhaps, that Death itself is healed. That the Dead go forward into the unknowable with the safe escort of the angel of Temperance, thought to be Michael, the angel of Fire, returning home again. They are going home to the source whence they came, reascending though the Gate of the Gods in Capricorn, rising through the Milky Way, straddled by the constellation of The Archer.
As mentioned last time, and the tarot readers here know all this, 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. The rose signifies beauty and immortality. The rose is meant to suggest all that has ever once been, is recorded somewhere, somehow, forever.
The Death card is rather played down these days. Many readers rush to assure us that the appearance of the Death card does not predict a death, or not in the physical sense. Rather, it is the end of a chapter. And this is often true. But not always. I have learned in my own experience as a reader, the Death card can mean exactly that, and there can be no bottling out. The Death card demands we face the truth of our existence.
A long time ago I saw in a dream the death of a long-ago neighbour, a friend of my parent’s. She was still only quite a young woman, the mother of five children. I woke haunted, the dream was still so vivid, and it sat with me all day. I had not seen this family friend, let’s call her L. for some years. What was she doing in my dreams? So often, when we wake, if we remember them, we clearly see that our dreams have only been processing recent events and conversations.
But what do you do with a dream like that? What can you do? Nothing. You forget it, blame it on cheese at bedtime, or you might log it and put it on one side. A fortnight later I was visiting my parents, and while I was helping my mother in the kitchen, I said, “by the way, Mam, how is L. W.…have you heard from her at all lately?”
My mother turned sharply. Her face set hard like stone.
“Why do you ask?”
“I had such a strange dream about her.”
“Tell me.”
I described the dream. How I had seen people and cars arriving at L’s house one street away from where we had used to live when I was growing up. Some, though not all of these visitors, wearing black. But it was my mother who opened the front door to greet them, and not L or her husband. L did not appear in this dream, herself.
The absence of L, at her own front door, with visitors arriving dressed in black, said this was a dream of death.
And now my mother told me, she had just heard from L’s husband who was a close colleague of my mother’s, that L., only fifty at the time, the mother of five children, a fun, brave and vivacious person, a real fighter always, a local politician, an educator, and something of a social justice warrior, had just a few days previously been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour.
In terms of the date, I will never know how closely the news of this dreadful diagnosis coincided with the dream of the funeral or wake. But how much closer did it need to be, my God.
L. had been in a minor road traffic accident. She had hit another car, no great damage done. But she hadn’t seen the other car. So she went to the opticians who saw something he did not like the look of, who referred her to a specialist and then they found the tumour.
How long did dear L have, my -always very hard-headed- mother now asked. How long did I think?
I am a Taurus sun sign sun native. People may not tend to think of the earthy mid spring sign of Taurus in terms of all things psychic, supernatural or occult. But The High priestess which is widely associated with Pisces, represents Hathor and the Bull Cult of Apis, and Walpurgis Night is in Taurus, April 30, May Eve, the spring time equivalent of Halloween and all things the other side of The Veil. The crescent moon of her headdress does double duty as the cow horns of Hathor, her throne festooned with the pomegranates of Persephone, queen of the Underworld.
Scorpio is the opposite sun sign of Taurus and vice versa. The shadow sun self, one might say, while my own personal Taurus natal sun is in the eighth house, ruled by Scorpio.
We are not defined by our birth charts. Or by our sun sign. We are zodiac kaleidoscopes. But still, we are the children of the place and season into which we were born. The rocks, the light, the animals, the flowers, the birds, the skies at night at the time of our birth. The hours of daylight and the vitamin D of our mothers. The melatonin. Our zodiac sun sign is our touchstone and our totem.
Back to my mother’s grief stricken question. How long did our friend L. have? Those children at home, and the youngest still only little? Of course I do not know the answer to such questions. Nor do I want to. But I told my mother what I felt, that she had maybe two years, and sadly, it was not even quite that. L died at home one night aged 52, sitting up suddenly, fighting for air, in the bed she still shared with her husband, and with her mother who had come to stay to help with the children, there in the next room and beside her when she died.
God bless and keep L. and her mother, now also long gone, detaching gently from the tree like a faded leaf.
But unpopular Pluto, Hades, lord of the Underworld has a compassion all his own. It is not Death itself that is our enemy, or the enemy of Life itself, but despair. Like the song says, after all, the ‘Seasons Don’t Fear The Reaper’.
Scorpio confronts us with Death. But this is not about any kind of a death wish. It is the cry of Life’s own longing for itself.
Many years later, when I started to work with the cards, I was trying to understand more about this dream, and other such experiences. Where did such dreams come from. And what was the point of them? What good did they do anyone?
I did not like it. But it is what it is. And later, when I started to learn to read the cards, I sometimes saw death in the cards, although I will never predict it. But still, a reader should be prepared to “go there” and at least discuss it if someone asks in all seriousness. To walk the road alongside. No ducking the tough discussions. There is much that can be discussed. Not least, family matters. Usually, a legal professional is already being consulted, as is wholly appropriate. But people have still wanted this other kind of conversation and there is a careful, critical line between respect, ethical responsibilities, and officiousness or nannying.
It is important to note that there are other cards in the Tarot deck that may indicate a death. The Three of Swords or the Six, Nine or Ten of Swords, for instance. The Death card, in my experience so far, has tended to denote a peaceful natural death.
The entirety of human experience is encapsulated past, present and the future unknown in a deck of only 78 cards. It is of no use for a reader to seek to work with the tarot or any oracle, shirking the most difficult questions, though we must still adhere to strictest ethics, and like Hippocrates, first we must do no harm.
It’s a tricky line at times. Readers are on the one hand, fallible, and need to remember this at all times, while on the other hand, to be of service, we have to trust ourselves sufficiently to speak clearly, and to the heart of the matter in service to this oracle of the human spirit.
“The man, who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.”~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Old age is not our natural birth-right. Few animals reach old age living in the wild. The scorpion itself lives 2-3 years in the wild…although in captivity, incredibly it may live 25 years. The price of freedom, hey? But 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.
Thank you for reading.
Back soon…the decans of Scorpio, and Halloween
Till next time 🙂
True Tarot Tales 