Transitions: Scorpio to Sagittarius

Along the road of the Sun he journeyed--one league he traveled..., dense was the darkness, light there was none. Neither what lies ahead nor behind does it allow him to see.

[…] two leagues he travelled…

Three leagues he travelled …

Four leagues he travelled…

Five leagues he travelled…

Six leagues he travelled…

Seven leagues he travelled…

Eight leagues he travelled…

Nine leagues he travelled…

Ten leagues he travelled…

Eleven leagues he traveled and came out before the sun. Twelve leagues he traveled and it grew brilliant.

[Tablet IX, Epic of Gilgamesh]

By the time all of us reach our mid to late 50s, we’ll be traveling the late stages of our zodiacal Scorpio period looking to transition into Sagittarius. This is the time in the hero’s journey when Luke rejects his father’s appeal to join him in the dark side. It’s an important and difficult transition that merits a deeper exploration, since by this time in the life, many have accrued some positions of power in their chosen fields. But before getting into all that, let me explain what I mean by a Zodiacal period.

Your chart is a map of your life as you perceive it. When it’s turned in space-time, it becomes an itinerary of that journey, which can be looked at from different angles. One of those angles is through the lens of the Zodiacal signs in their natural order, beginning with Aries. This lens – which tells your story as a developing organism – will be the same lens through which your birth cohort is also currently traveling. The Zodiacal periods in question for humans last 1/12 of an average lifespan, or about 7 years. [You can read more about this technique in several blog posts or learn about it in the upcoming TM1 module of the Master Timing Methods course.] So while the Zodiac sign will be the same for all of us who share a similar age, the placements of these signs and their ruling planets will differ, making each story’s perceived events unique to each of us.

Scorpio is the Zodiacal sign that activates between ages 49-56. In the Babylonian agricultural calendar – which had a huge influence in shaping the meaning of the constellations and the months in which they arise – Scorpio's was the month when the fields became inactive, or “idle”. This is the Hellenistic name given to Scorpio’s natural 8^th house in astrology. It was considered an unproductive month when the land laborer would “put up his hoe” and do nothing in the fields until the planting season returned.

In the Sumerian culture, humans were created for toil so that the Gods would not have to. In the Persian cultures to the east, or in Judea to the west, idleness is not well-regarded either. The Bible says idleness leads to slander and gossip: “Besides that, they learn to be idlers, going about from house to house, and not only idlers, but also gossips and busybodies”. [1 Timothy 5:13] From early Christian writers, such as St. Jerome, this sentiment leads to the belief that “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop”.  The idea being that when you have nothing to do, the mind is left to wander into obsessions that underscore bad habits. “Obsessions” being one of the principal contemporary experiences encountered in Scorpio’s 8^th house.

As a psychological need, Scorpio retains this original Mesopotamian imprint. In all timing charts, it signals a period to purge what is unproductive, unsustainable or toxic in our lives. This has nothing to do with individual personality, even when it appears in the natal chart. It has to do with the cycles of nature and the need to expunge what is dying (another meaning of the 8^th house) to make room for what’s alive. Since it’s part of the seasonal wheel, it’s a biological and psychological necessity inherent in living within space-time. The planet that’s most equipped for removals and the fulfillment of the Scorpio need for productive elimination, is its domicile ruler, Mars. Its placement by house will tell you what we perceive needs to be removed from the life in order to ensure the entity’s health and well-being.

To a lesser or greater extent, we’re all creatures of habit. And psychologically speaking, some toxic Scorpio habits could have originated as strategies that we adopted in order to deal with less than ideal circumstances earlier in our lives. But it’s only by traveling through the darkness that we’re led into the light. This journey of confrontation with the “Jungian shadow” is exemplified in Tablet IX of the Epic of Gilgamesh, quoted above. In it, Gilgamesh reaches the mythical Mt. Mashu, whose entrance is guarded over by two Scorpion beings. Gilgamesh needs to pass through the inside of the mountain and convinces the Scorpion men to let him through. He makes that journey of pure darkness – where he can neither see ahead nor behind – for twelve leagues, after which he reaches the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel”. The confrontation with shadow does not involve purging whatever is dark within, but rather integrating it. But doing so, requires the death and elimination of the old self, whose adaptive strategies – many of which may once have served us – no longer do.

But in the story – which is far more metaphorical – our hero must pass through this Scorpion-guarded mountain range because he's seeking Siduri, the alewife, who lives on the far south side of the range by the sea. Siduri is named after the goddess of wisdom. Gilgamesh needs her to help him locate Utnapishtim (the Biblical Noah), the only living human to have survived the flood and been given immortality by the gods. He’s seeking Utnapishtim’s knowledge about immortality and Siduri is the provider of the direction that gets him there.

This is exactly what occurs in the transition from Scorpio to Sagittarius. Once we have confronted the darkness within – just like Gilgamesh in the last leagues of his dark passage – we reemerge or “come out before the Sun” and must re-orient ourselves. This is an allusion to the Sun’s joyful presence in the 9^th house, said to be the Sun’s joy in Hellenistic astrology. The primary attribute of the Akkadian Sun god Shamash is his wisdom, since he's a god of justice. The search for wisdom is ultimately what we seek as we transition into the realm of Sagittarius. The glyph for Sagittarius is an arrow, which represents the archer’s reorientation toward the new direction that he'll travel once he has acquired that wisdom. Often, this can be a geographical reorientation, but more to the point, it’s a reorientation in the life that points us onward. Light always reveals and guides us in a particular direction. The key is to emerge into enough light that allows us to see it clearly. Jupiter is the guiding planet in this case and he belongs to the diurnal sect precisely because he cannot confirm any direction if the Sun is not present to highlight and reveal one for him. We know that enough light is present, when we see clearly enough to make a decision to forge ahead.

Case Study

I recently read the astrological memoir (I believe the first of its kind) of Roland Orzabal, founding member of the band Tears for Fears. Roland has been very public about the events of his life and the astrology behind them. So I wanted to study this particular Zodiacal transition in his Turning. Judging by his age, it’s the period that actually opens up the book and then circles back to it at the end. So in a clever way, it’s an astrological memoir told in a circular manner, much like the chart tells the story of our lives.

Here’s Roland’s chart. I’ve used the data he supplied himself. [Roland uses the Placidus house system in the book, which results in a chart that contains intercepted signs. But the Turning works better with twelve, 30 degree houses. So I’ve recast it in Equal houses so we can see the transition more clearly.]

The first thing we do is to locate the relevant timeline in the chart. The Scorpio Zodiacal period runs from ages 49 to 56, or 2010 to 2017 for him. In his chart, Scorpio appears over his 6^th house cusp. Orzabal was born with middle degrees of Gemini rising. But unlike the terrestrial arm, which does start its count at the rising degree, the Zodiacal arm is more universal. It begins its count at zero of Aries for everyone. It’s simpler to calculate because it starts the same way for everyone: Zodiacal Scorpio activates at age 49 and runs to age 56 for all of us, regardless of the rising degree. [For details on the calculation see this post: Triquetra Timing.]

In Orzabal’s chart, Scorpio spans roughly the middle of the 5^th to the middle of the 6^th houses, where we find the planet Neptune. Since Orzabal is a famous singer, the 5^th and 6^th houses combined would most likely depict his work (6^th) in the music industry, which is a 5^th house place of entertainment and creativity. As a place of vacations and leisure time, the 5th, when combined with the 6th, can also depict breaks from work or working only sporadically or temporarily. Unlike the 5th, the 6^th is a place where we find all manner of things that keep us tethered to others, such as duties and illness. So he is entering closer to this while transitioning through Scorpio further into the 6th. Knowing what we know now about Zodiacal Scorpio, we’d expect that during this period he might have needed to confront some problematic situation occurring that might have been adaptive in the past, but which now turned toxic or obsessive.

A planet in a chart does not “belong to us”. This means it's not always embodied by the native whose name appears on that chart. Any planet can be encountered through other people in our lives. We can interpret this psychologically as a form of projection and it can occur when we do not see some aspect of an unintegrated archetype within ourselves. So the aspect expresses externally so we can see it. This might be true of Mars, who rules the domicile of Scorpio or of Neptune, which is located there – both of which are active for him during his Scorpio period.

Let’s talk about Neptune first: It has the ability to erode things for us: structures, ideas or conventions...all of which can be a creative asset to any artist. In a demonstrated recognition of this, Orzabal actually named his home recording studio “Neptune’s Kitchen”. As he himself points out, “Neptune will always feature heavily in the charts of musicians. Neptune is an awareness of, even gateway to another world, whatever you want that world to be.” However, Neptune's ability to reach beyond the world created by identity and ego, also endows it with self-denying powers that can strip away the will and lead us to acts of self-sabotage. Self-preservation is not a skill in Neptune's toolbox. For this reason, it has been linked by modern astrologers with drug and alcohol abuse, particularly for those who are avoiding shadow wounds and using Neptune’s powers of escape. Remember, the background environment here is of Scorpio – the need to purge something toxic.

Mars, on the other hand, is the planet entrusted with purging the toxicity in the life. Significant Pluto transits can function similarly, and often do coincide with this Mars activation of a Scorpio purge in the Turning. This was the case for Roland, who also had a Pluto transit to his Moon during his Zodiacal Scorpio period. A proper wielding of Mars – particularly as provider of Scorpionic needs -- always requires internal courage and external compassion. The internal courage comes through in-sect Mars by acting calmly, but decisively in alignment with internal authenticity; while the compassion comes through the Moon’s empathetic responsiveness. It takes skill to wield Mars in this way because often, what is right for us, is at odds with what may be easiest for others. For this reason, Mars functions better during a nocturnal Turning and in a more general sense, for those born at night, who may be more used to pondering what happens with others.

Orzabal was born at night, but at age 49, he was in a diurnal Turning with the rising Moon about to join the Sun in the upper half of the chart. While a nocturnal chart indicates that his larger life asks him to be attuned to the needs of others, Orzabal had been experiencing a diurnal phase since he met Curt Smith in the 1970s. Now in 2010, with the Moon rising, the external light was about to increase and reinforce a thrust into the world once again. Only this time, the feminine (his rising Moon) was asking for greater public awareness. After the reunion of Orzabal with his partner Curt Smith had ocurred in the previous Libra Zodiacal period, the band had begun a massive international tour across Asia, South America and North America as a precursor to a new album that was being worked on. The North American leg would have begun in 2017, just as he was crossing into Zodiacal Sagittarius. But the US tour had to be interrupted by the events that transpired. We’ll come back to this shortly…

During this 7 year Scorpio period, as the Moon was rising, Mars was being thrust into a more pronounced diurnal state, having to address toxic situations externally. The reason the toxicity is most likely external to the native, is because of the dual luminary presence entering the upper part of the chart. The extra light is present precisely because of the need to see what is being denied or rejected from awareness. Light makes Mars have to manifest externally and inappropriately to the situation at hand (due to its out-of-sect condition) because it’s a planet more appropriately oriented toward internal courage and liberation, not external conflict and separation.

It's with the dangers from toxicity and potential separation where things get interesting and it’s exactly during the late stages of Scorpio transitioning into Sagittarius that Orzabal begins his memoir. His own words speak most poignantly to the experiences that the Epic of Gilgamesh also describe:

“…home has been a dark place for me for too long to remember. [notice Mars in the 4th of home and family] The previous year, 2016, my wife of thirty-five years, Caroline, had been committed under the Mental Health Act – what I thought at the time was the worst day of my life…I was devastated, broken and on the phone with Curt Smith and a manager of ours, immediately canceled a US tour. ”

After 3 months in a psych ward with no alcohol and anti-psychotic drugs, Caroline returned home. She had refused a liver biopsy, so no one knew that she was succumbing to alcohol addiction and cirrhosis of the liver.

"Within weeks of me being on the road, Caroline went back to her old ways. No even worse: secretly drinking and hiding bottles of vodka in the study’s hidden cupboards, as I found out later….

Once again, I stupidly did not realize what the alcohol was doing to her. I thought that this was her choice, that she has some control over the addiction, that she was just punishing us all in our absence. I should have called social services and postponed the tour right then. But I didn’t – I left her in the hand of the care company, believing this behavior if left unabated would carry on for months.”

Then, just like Gilgamesh moving his way through the last leagues of darkness in Mt Mashu, the light begins to break through the cracks of the tunnel, and he steps onto the lands of Siduri and the joy of the Sun. It’s in this new place that the Archer’s arrow begins to reorient and target a new direction… 

"And I was at a crossroads, a tipping point if you like [Side note: This would become the name of the following Tears for Fears album that the band had been working on.] A tipping point that would redefine my life. With all the things that were going on with Caroline, with the visits to psychiatrists, to neurologists, to hepatologists, I was falling in love with a young woman who I believed loved me too and was the opposite of what I had left at home….Was I then, given my unconscious sense that Caroline was dying, opting for the next link in the chain? That night in San Francisco, and I’m not sure why it was that night in particular, I had a talk with myself, out loud, pacing the room like a crazy man. I knew what was going to happen to Caroline…I could choose that scenario, the illness the misery and frustration, or I could choose an alternative and leave the madness behind, just like my mother had with my father. God strike me down, cancel me, whatever, but I chose life.”   

What strikes me as amazing is the language that Roland uses: the idea of being in limbo, of talking to himself and pacing like a madman, of needing to decide on a new direction...This language is very similar to what Gilgamesh describes, exactly at the same point in his own journey. It signals a resistance to the inevitability of death, and of confronting the grief that comes after letting go. In the Epic, Gilgamesh resists the actual death of his friend Enkidu and he searches for the secret to immortality to erase that suffering. But the Scorpio journey is not always triggered by an actual death of a loved one. The feeling of being in limbo and the anxiety comes from resisting the loss and the grief involved in letting go of anything that has been meaningful to us. But in reality, it’s the acceptance and processing of that grief and guilt, that releases us.

Caroline passed away in July of 2017, during the North American leg of the band’s tour, and exactly one month before Roland entered his next Sagittarian 7 year period. You’ll note that Sagittarius spans the 6^th and 7^th houses of his chart. These two houses, when still linked together, speak of obligations and duties to a partnership, while Sagittarius itself, speaks about finding renewed meaning in a new direction. But as I said earlier about encountering planets through projection, they’re there to show us unresolved feelings. In Roland’s case, his Neptune experiences via Caroline’s addiction, were a mirror of his own tendency to repress and deny feelings, which would surface externally as a growing Ambien addiction, weeks after her death.

“After the funeral and the wake, I have such feelings of guilt. Grief and its ugly waves are threatening me, threatening to come up from the depths of my gut, through to my lungs, to break me down into a sobbing wreck at all hours of the day. I know what’s coming. But I can stop it because I have Ambien. That will stop the onslaught of grief. Fuck that monster. Fuck anyone who reminds me of Caroline. Fuck Feelings. I am moving on for God’s sake!”

Roland's transition into Sagittarius, exactly when Caroline passed, did not magically erase the pain for several reasons. First, Neptune was still present. I'm not speaking metaphorically. In fact, by transit, Neptune was right at the top of his chart in Pisces squaring his Ascendant! But why does the Scorpio need linger beyond its bounds? Shouldn't Sagittarius bring a new direction? Yes. It did. It brought a new partnership. Notice that Sagittarius is over the 6th and 7th. So there are obligations and duties involved in partnership. Both within Roland himself, who was still in the process of letting go of his commitment to his wife. But also externally from Emily, Roland's future wife, who stood by him during his subsequent struggles with his own Ambien addiction. Jupiter, the ruler of Sagittarius is in the 8th, attempting to confirm and move beyond the death. And it will eventually provide the 7th and 10th, the new partnership status.

But the real issue when it comes to an unresolved Scorpionic need to let go, is a resistance to Mars! Domicile lords are both the fulfillers of their sign needs and the originators of the houses they occupy. That means that when they create the matters of their houses, they automatically also provide a place where there’s a lack of something that only they can fulfill. In Roland’s case, as ruler of the natal 6^th, Mars is the provider of any environment where duties and obligations exist, be them at work or home. But it also means that in creating his work and other obligations, as ruler of Scorpio, it will also give rise to obsessions that begin to fester and become toxic because something needs to be released and wasn’t.

Like most difficult emotions, Scorpio toxicity in the present tends to be deeply-seeded from childhood. Since Mars is in Libra, for Roland, this would have been the first injustice (Libra is a sign signaling a need for justice) that he experienced in a partnership growing up.

Turned chart During the start of the Zodiacal Scorpio period from 2010-2017.

Establishing Venus’ first activation in the Turning, we can see that this occurred between the ages 7-14, or when his mother left his father. Mars is part of the cardinal T-square involving Venus and the Moon (a configuration that Roland said in an interview that his mother also shares). Feelings that arose from the removal of his parent’s partnership (Mars is in the 4th place of the father), were probably never fully dealt with and integrated. How could they be? Children do not have the emotional maturity to handle experiences that even many adults can’t integrate. And it is precisely Venus that we see opposing his ASC at the time that Scorpio becomes the Zodiacal sign activated from 2010 to 2017 in this Turned chart. (Zodiacal Scorpio is highlighted in red above.) So the unintegrated energy of Mars will express through new relationships. The 6/11 overlay indicates that what has become toxic or unsustainable is an illness involving an affiliation. In the Solar and Terrestrial activations (the green and yellow Capricorn planets), we see that the Moon is about to rise and enter the 7/12 , indicating the nurturing of a partner having entered hospitals.

The chart speaks quite clearly to what can be documented by Orzabal’s memoir. But I want to get back to this idea of unprocessed grief because it was present in the words he uses in the last quote. Roland tries to stave off the grief of losing Caroline to alcohol addiction with increased Ambien. But Neptune embodied in others is merely a projection of denial in self. Orzabal’s addiction to Ambien began years before because of his inability to relax and sleep. But why?

I have said before that Mars is very important to those born with nocturnal charts. Its activation terrestrially, and the types of things that manifest then, give us a clue to our internal relationship with that archetype. For Orzabal, Mars activated in the terrestrial arm (that means it was rising at the time) between 1989 and 1996. This is the period when the Tears for Fears partnership fell apart. In 1989 their second album, The Seeds of Love was released. The album was difficult to birth, in large part because of the perfectionistic and exacting approach that Orzabal brought to the project, resulting in an overly bloated budget and a lot of irritated folks. The band was also being mismanaged, leading to theft, a lawsuit and large financial losses. Because of this, his partnership with Curt Smith was under stress and deteriorated. Aside from siding on different camps in the legal disputes, Curt’s marriage was breaking up and he was moving on to a new life and love in America. Orzabal confesses some remorse over not being very available for his friend at that time. The creative break-up resembled the original creative break-up of his early family. “Hmmm…”

So what does this tell us? Mars’ involvement – in not one marital break-up but three – tells us that the original one left some unprocessed separation grief. Mars aligns with the Moon by sect. It needs to be internalized. All archetypes, but especially Mars, require emotional processing in order to reconcile fragmentation into wholeness. But in all 3 cases of separations (Mars’ principle), Orzabal’s attention seemed to unconsciously seek out the solar side. In 1989’s partnership dissolution, Orzabal felt a greater sense of creative freedom to pursue his own identity. In 2017, he had literally made the decision (a solar action) to choose life by separating from Caroline the night before she passed. And in the case of childhood divorce, our luminaries are literally embodied by the mother-father divide. Orzabal’s mother left his father, Georges, because he was abusive towards her. But Roland craved wholeness, and while he recognized that his father physically beat his mother, he felt saddened and guilty for leaving the exciting and unorthodox life that Georges had created for the family. He says that after his mother moved out, “his life went from color to black and white.”(p.34)

Despite being the non-dominant luminary in the chart, the Sun will always exert a large influence upon Roland for several reasons: 1) It is at 29 degrees of its own sign. These are the critical degrees that create an imperative drive to fulfill the sign’s need. In this case, Leo desperately wants the recognition that he did not receive from his neglectful and emotionally distant father; and 2) the prenatal lunation (this will be a topic for an upcoming article) of this chart, was also an eclipse of the Sun at 18 degrees, involving the North Node. This creates an “eclipsing” of the solar light in the life, which one will forever seek out for the sake of wholeness. Since the Moon in Capricorn will dominate, and since it is accompanied by Jupiter and Saturn, this will create the well-behaved responsible boy, capable of great things, but forever looking for the freedom and joy that only his unintegrated, carefree, and autonomous Leo solar light (and father) can provide. Funnily enough, the Sabian symbol for the 19^th degree of Leo where the solar eclipse occurred, shows a houseboat party and says: “​It is healthy to 'let your hair down' occasionally​. Spending time unconstrained by polite society." At the release of Sowing the Seeds of Love when his Mars activated terrestrially, Roland let his hair grow out and was chastised for it by the record label. This beautifully encapsulates the eclipsed solar light of this degree.

I’ve strayed a bit from the Scorpio-Sagittarius transition. But what we can conclude from this examination is that the extent of the difficulty of this particular transition is largely dependent upon our relationship with Mars and how we’ve integrated any early experiences of separation or conflict between our parents, since they will calcify in the soul as fragmentation between the solar and lunar archetypes. Those of us born with Neptune in Scorpio have the added imprint of experiencing confusion or denial around the place where the Scorpio theme exists. However, Sagittarius and Jupiter always bring the light back. Charles Waring, a writer for Record Collector, captures it best in his review of The Tipping Point -- the Tears for Fears album authored during this period:

“an album blazing with a refulgent light that illuminates the darkness. Ultimately, it's a cathartic celebration of life co-created by someone who's survived a traumatic experience. More importantly, it shows how heartbreak, suffering and tragedy can be refashioned into transcendent art."

Amen!