The New Moon in Scorpio comes to us on Samhain this year. It’s a treat to have those two align. And it does the trick; there’s something about beginning a lunar cycle at the very same moment as we pause at a solar threshold, marking the last harvest, and transitioning into dissolution through both sun and moon. It’s not a simple moment, but a deep one. A doorway into ancestral lands opens up pathways of old songs becoming relevant again, of old teachings becoming embodied, of ancient roots linking beneath the ground, licking flames of new understandings.
We arrive at the gateways of the underworld. Scorpio is our guide. She knows how to navigate in the dark. She loves the dark. And the darkness loves her. She knows that death and darkness are where life is made. Scorpio makes love to darkness itself. She is La Petite Mort; the “little death,” that is the pleasure that sparks life, and with it, inevitably, begins the process of dying.
Scorpio is the death queen, the unapologetic wildness of the unseen, the creature of the inbetween, the liminal time when the veil is thin, and she likes to send us deep within, to drop dead and shed a skin. She’ll inspire a tour in the cemetery of broken dreams and teach you how to laugh and handle the disappointments, how to own your power in the most heartbreaking moments, how to devour the endings of stories, so that you can give birth to new ones.
Samhain is a pagan holiday, marking the midpoint between Fall and Winter, a shift into the depth of Autumn, into days of death and decay, into low, dimmed light and long stretching nights.
The archetypal power of the moment is not one everyone wants to face, but one everyone must face at some point. Life is never without death. Scorpio season / Samhain season offer us an opportunity to do the important work of conversing with our fears of demise, with our shadows, with that which lurks in the untamed, unlit alleys of our existence.
Scorpio makes grief chic.
Samhain is the pre-christian European origin of Halloween and Dio De Los Muertos. It is a celebration of life through its eternal partner, death, a love letter to the dead, a visit in the graveyard of the year’s unmet expectations, lost hopes, and heartbreaking goodbyes, and an initiation into the underworld journey.
This lunar cycle carries us into the depth of our soul as it unfolds along the darkening days of the year. But only if we choose to go. Our conversation with ourselves only goes where we are willing to take it. How much of your own darkness are you willing to see? How many of your ghosts are you willing to entertain? Are you willing to feed your demons? They need a good meal. You don’t want a hungry ghost floating around your psyche.
We are only a few days away from the election. The fears are flourishing. The polarization is amplified. The extremes are heightened. This threshold is not one to take lightly. We are dealing with a collective shadow that we must address. The shadows must be seen. This is what this season teaches us. Otherwise we will be consumed by it. As we look into the eyes of the demonic, we must be able to see ourselves there. We must be able to integrate. We must be able to find ways to work together. How? I don’t know.
All I know is that there is one candidate who if you wrote a comic book with him as the villain, it would seem like an exaggeration; no one can be that evil, that much of an idiot, that ridiculously dangerous. But here we are.
How do we integrate as a society when there’s that, when there are that many people who are not only willing to vote for him? I don’t know.
No matter how excited or uninspired, motivated or over it we may feel, Kamala Harris is a great option if we don’t want to live under a dictatorship! Perfect? No! Are there problems? Yes! There’s problems everywhere. Everywhere you look there’s imperfections and broken pieces and too much of something and not enough of another. Shadow looms over anywhere where there is light. And anything that ripens into nourishment holds in it toxicity and the capacity to rot and decay.
Please vote! Vote for Harris. Vote for someone who will take better care of people and planet, for someone who stands for human rights instead of gun rights, for someone who can actually lead. For someone who can actually read. Please vote!
Humanity is going through a lot right now. It’s quite a phase. Everywhere we look we see hatred and binary thinking and lack of intelligence and faith based arguments. And if we listen to nature’s cyclical teachings, to the sun and the moon and the seasons, if we lean into this season’s invitation, we can spark hope and cultivate beauty right now, exactly where we are, in this moment of upheaval.
We are undergoing intense transformation. The Scorpio archetype doesn’t shy away from it, it invites us into the flames, into the compost pile.
There is paradox and nuance and dichotomy and complexity to embrace rather than resolve. And there are issues we must find solutions for. There are shadows that we must tend to and feed, and we must not be consumed and ruled by them. There is receptivity and resistance we must continue to weave together.
Oh dear Scorpio
Creature of the underworld
Survival
Renewal
Dissolution
Rebirth
You bless us with your unapologetic stare
Cave like eyes that strip us bare
Your voice a cackle of echoing memories
And silence that envelops us in the darkness
Of what has not yet come
Beast of the inbetween
Spaces of the unseen
Take us under the surface of things
Sting us
And we will
Learn the lessons of death
So that we may rise again
May this Samhain, Halloween, Dio De Los Muertos, Scorpio New Moon moment, bless you with ancestral wisdom, support you in the shedding of skins, lead you into the roots that tangle and twist with something more than themselves so that the tree of who you are, and the forest of which you are a part, can not only survive the storms of the season, but thrive in the next.
Have a meaningful journey.
Read this poem for Scorpio/Samhain inspiration.
Read last year’s Samhain essay, including journal prompts.
With much love,
Hagar