Astrology of 10/25 – 10/31: Thinning of The Veils

There’s a lot of Scorpio/Pluto happening this week, as we build toward a Full Moon in Scorpio’s opposite sign, Taurus, next week (November 3). While Taurus emphasizes simplicity, gentleness, and tender cultivation of the garden of life, Scorpio has a penchant for drama and complexity, intrigue, betrayal, scandal, annihilation and the like. Of course there are many other expressions of both of these archetypes. Taurus can be stagnant, and Scorpio can lead us to transformation and empowerment. I want to point out that gardens exist with both of these signs. As we vortex and spin out on drama and entanglement with our situation and with other’s, we spin out gnarly tendrils and webs and get caught up with more than we intended.

The Sun and Jupiter join up in Scorpio – Scorpio relating to our focus and our obsessions, and Jupiter expanding what it touches. Focus can be an esoteric technique, and we can use it for manifestation (a solar, life-giving principle). Pay attention to your focus this week and its proclivity to expand and branch out that which you focus upon. Take some time and space to focus on your dreams, your gratitude, your core values, and the imaginations that relax you. It is psychic food and bandwidth worth indulging in while Scorpio’s creative powers run high. When we focus, we are practicing intimacy. We are getting involved. Choose creatively.

This does not mean ignoring your problems, or your depression, or crises. It means looking at them dispassionately and taking yourself to a plane of focus in which you imagine the solution and branch out the solution’s garden, not obsess on the problem — that is, if you want a Solar-illuminating-breakthrough. But this is not the only way through – deeper into psychic thicket is also a route. Take the irritation’s signal, and inquire and dive inward for epic discovery, descent, into the wetlands of Psyche; a quest that is informing you in some way you ultimately find enjoyable and fertile. Agency is key, whether we are choosing to imagine a new reality or to collect data on a historic one.

And if you should find yourself very enthusiastically attracted and interested (Scorpio), compelled in some way, that is Soul! We call Samhain the thinning of the veil (happening during Scorpio season), and what of the thinning of the veil between Ego and Soul? It’s a little intense (our other fav key word for Scorpio).

Involved is neither good, nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other’s pockets… one becomes involved and it is a long trek back to being uninvolved. And the woman was right, one didn’t do it for one’s health. Nothing this late in the century was done with health in mind. Alsana was no dummy when it came to the Modern Condition. She watched the talk shows, all day long she watched the talk shows — My wife slept with my brother, My mother won’t stay out of my boyfriend’s life — and the microphone holder, whether it be Tanned Man with White Teeth or Scary Married Couple, always asked the same damn silly question: But why do you feel the need…? Wrong! Alsana had to explain it to them through the screen. You blockhead; they are not wanting this, they are not willing it — they are just involved, see? They walk IN and they get trapped between the revolving doors of those two v’s. Involved. Just a tired inevitable fact. Something in the way Joyce said it, involved — wearied, slightly acid — suggested to Alsana that the word meant the same thing to hear. An enormous web you spin to catch yourself.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

(Top Image: Monica Bannister)

Here’s our week:

October 26

Sun in Scorpio conjunct Jupiter in Scorpio: 11:10 AM PDT

• As the Sun and Jupiter join together in rebirth of their cycle, they soon both (the Sun sooner than Jupiter) will square the nodes of the Moon, who are currently in Leo and Aquarius. This can stand for a critical head versus heart impasse that is approaching. Scorpio’s relationship to this is of accelerating intensity magnified by Jupiter, and which direction it goes in tends to be up to our focus. It can as much be about feeling angsty and pain and anger and spiraling into depression as it could be about peak states and deepening realizations about the ultimately blissful, benevolent nature of reality and one’s free will within that reality. The balance of Scorpio’s emotional intensity will balance out in our favor when we lead with the heart (and intellect assists). This can mean choosing to focus on things that open our heart and make us feel good as an emotional starting point – so that from this vibrational place we can align with reality and choices that spring up. (Rather than starting from a place of turmoil and assessing one’s options from there). It’s like I’m advocating for being “centered” but I also mean to go ahead and tip the scales more toward happiness and joy for joy’s sake and see how that helps the general progression of your affairs. (Not sure how to do this? Abraham Hicks is a resource for cultivating one’s vibrational reality – a useful esoteric technique to know!)
• Without free will in the driver’s seat of consciousness (becoming unconsciously attached to externals and making them the cause of one’s happiness or non-happiness), we are simply projecting our creative power onto other things. Pay attention to the opportunities to keep your center of gravity and to generate your essence even in the face of obstacles, rather than becoming implicated in an obstacle and totally absorbed by it. Positive circumstances, and our ability to cultivate them, are like accoutrements for happiness and they certainly facilitate positive feedback loops. But on a deeper level, these circumstances are symbols. Stay laser sharp.
• We are always creating our reality in as much as we are interacting with realities ‘out there’, and we become more skillful artists of reality the more we practice it. It is not as simple as making reality be whatever it wants to be – I’ll take a cue from an artist I met last week who said that they don’t draw ink, they are drawing with ink as much as the ink is drawing them. In what way is life living you, as you are living life? If this intimacy seems to make creativity inseparable from us and the cosmos, it points to a way that our simple, beaming essence matters more than we often are taught to think it does.
• Watch for the presence of life-affirming friendship, advice, assistance – exchanges with others where someone or both people are empowering the creativity and confidence of the other. Try not to undercut or judge people this week, especially before taking a deep look at the parts of yourself that recognize those things in another or at the very least the deeper soulful reasons you have entered psychic/sacred combat with this shadow quality.
• The belt of reality and how reality functions outside of the humanmade contained reality – the things that exist that scientists or materialists have not yet proven – still exists. Scorpio often does push our awareness toward those layers and our perception of them. Sometimes we will understand them directly or emotionally before we can intellectually/systematically.

October 27

Venus in Libra square Pluto in Capricorn: 8:19 PM PDT

Added into this aspect, we have Venus in conjunction to Goddess asteroid Vesta (related to temple and sacred space, devotion) and Pluto in conjunction with Goddess asteroid Juno (related to Soul contracts, contacts we have with other Souls which compel us at the deepest level). And, Uranus and Eris in Aries form a T-square to this alignment with Pluto at the fulcrum.

In short, this would relate to emotional confrontations that are triggered by relationship with other people – tension and discord that is psychically generative of growth and transformation. Potentials to note:

• A transformation of ethic may occur when we are situated in a context in which we have simply never been before (likely within relationship). Rather than to go backward to some old template which worked in the past, we are tasked to imagine new forms of peace and new structures or agreements which accommodate them.
• Types of balancing occurring in our relationships which are not equal give and take on a superficial level, but equal give and take of natural authority – allowing and recognizing the emergence of the natural authorities/strengths people possess.
• If we are being too rigid (likely from an unconscious place or attachment) and narrow in focus, it is likely something in our environment will show us that – the external world may balance us out. If we are meeting resistance or forms of external balance that aren’t simpatico for you, take it as a cue that your own interior is looking for some more balance in perspective from the inside, of which the external may be offering you initation.
• When listening to another illicits an ego-death because the way they ask you to listen challenges embedded structures of Psyche.

(Detail from Fearless Colors by Samplerman)

• We may encounter (or see around us) friendships or erotic connections that transcend ordinary barriers, such as differing political beliefs (or anything else that is taboo in some way). Observe the tensions and power plays that are involved with this as well as the opportunities for transmutation of consciousness. It is not to say one’s political opinion may change in this example, but an energy or frequency that is associated with the other may be transmitted – obviously something strong enough that it competes with surface levels of discrimination.
• We may think to the way in which when connection occurs across a significant taboo barrier – social or personal – it is Beauty and the Beast esque… instead of depending upon shared values and shared cultural mores and their corresponding social cues, one enters a more primordial, animal, instinctive space with the other. This may happen because a frequency/energy about another person has a significant draw or magnetism which encourages a superficial layer of judgement to fall away in the path of forging a deeper, primordial connection. In a less dramatic situation, it may just be about the friction of shadows in relationships in a more nuanced, subtle way.
• Altogether, Venus-Pluto squares can be uncomfortable, sexy and cathartic, bringing us into contact with the essences we are attracted to, which may also annihilate us in some capacity. There are a lot of reasons we might examine the taboos upon sexuality, but one very deeply rooted one may simply be that it is a way to transmute consciousness, that in a sexual encounter we may be transformed. It is Eros and Thanatos at the same time. While it may show up in a variety of ways this week, pay attention to where yielding to attraction or even simply to compromise with another – breaks an embedded psychic structure on the interior. Pluto in Capricorn is interesting in that while it resists a break in the status quo at all costs, another part of the archetype also deeply desires exactly that.
• If you don’t feel you have any of this going on in relationship, it may be more about the relationship you have to your own Psyche – your own not yet contacted mysteries which emerge to the surface via the square aspect. Stay gentle with yourself and others – this is deep content we work with.

Mercury in Scorpio sextile Pluto in Capricorn: 8:22 PM PDT

• A meditation on discerning what containers can hold privileged information, and the ways that we recognize these containers, or are ourselves such containers.
• The actual transformation that results when we tell someone something we normally don’t tell anyone or have never told anyone.
• An interior transformation of our own shame such that when we do tell someone privileged information, we are not handing them our own future betrayal. Shame externalizes power to a judging Other.
• Taking the opportunity this week to recognize the gravity of self-disclosure from others and to respect it with the proper dignity and compassion.
• The right to decline invitation if we do not wish to be attendant, the right to have communication boundaries. The right to say no in general.
• Asking permission as a form of conscious entrance to deeper layers of intimacy rather than just going there without due diligence. The respect and eroticism of it – a gentle opportunity for this week for ethical connectivity.
• However, some of these themes are very difficult when they are actually occurring, we’re involved and we’re not just detachedly examining them. It’s hard to discern when the information present is murky or slightly concealed. There can be a deep probing curiosity, and instinctual defenses to that. There can be deep rewards for going places in our conversations which we have never gone before, and it can feel really vulnerable. Have compassion this week for what is sensitive, privileged, private, intimate, and see what kinds of safe containers you can create for you and yours.

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Thank you for meditating on the planets with me this week! Let me know how your week is going in the comments!

With love,

Sabrina Monarch

Sabrina Monarch is a soul-centered Evolutionary Astrologer who publishes weekly astrological forecasts. She has been collecting astrological experience for over a decade. She also enjoys kundalini and ashtanga yoga, hiking and creative writing.

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