Lunar eclipse in Scorpio - life and death and attachment
For me, every eclipse season (they happen every six months) brings a sense of cogs shifting, clunking their way into a new configuration. We’re moving towards the end of this phase of eclipses across the Taurus Scorpio axis now. After today’s lunar eclipse in Scorpio, there’s just one remaining, a lunar eclipse in Taurus at the end of October. Here in the northern hemisphere, the lunar eclipse in Scorpio brings a reminder that life and death are one. Even as the world around us turns green with nature’s rich Taurus season growth, the moon in Scorpio is here to tell us that it won’t last forever, that sooner or later what is growing will die.
Apple tree and yew tree; or, how the Taurus Scorpio dynamic shows up in my garden.
The eclipse energy has been showing up this week in all sorts of ways. We’ve been decluttering the house, including finally throwing out “stuff” which has been sitting around for years, even decades, “just in case”. So cathartic. Such a sense of lightness as space is cleared. And of course, this axis of the zodiac speaks to our dynamics around attachment. What are we attached to and why? What emotional pull do physical objects have on us? We attach to people, objects, habits, patterns, situations. I’ve also seen folk this week struggling to let go of attachments, even patterns that brought betrayal and trauma, but which were deeply a part of how they define themselves. That’s tough, especially when the letting go is forced by an external situation. We cling, we resist, we refuse to acknowledge what we secretly know. This dynamic can be about learning self reliance, about standing on our own ground. Taurus and Scorpio remind us that we need close and intimate relationships, that we are an interdependent part of the ecosystem, of the collective. The lunar eclipse across this axis shines a light on where those relationships might be disorted, where there is over-reliance, over-dependency, projection. These fixed, receptive signs can become attached to the illusion of permanence, to an idea of emotional or material security which we need to feel safe. We don’t like to admit that it’s an illusion.
In this water there is new life, in the form of tiny tadpoles, gathering strength for their own Scorpio transformation.
The word “security” comes from the Latin “securus” meaning free from harm and here in the capitalist west at least, we are conditioned into thinking that security comes from the material, from having enough money and even enough stuff. But capitalism also conditions us into a scarcity mentality, a belief that there are limited resources and that we are not safe unless we cling to what we have, or reach desperately for what we don’t have. The Taurus end of this axis especially, where the Sun is right now, reminds us that nature is not actually like this, that the problem is not a lack of resources but a distortion in how those resources are shared. This eclipse cycle is a dynamic part of our current collective journey towards building a new set of values to live by, values of substance and love for the earth, of trust in her abundance whilst not exploiting or taking it for granted. Of learning the difference between want and need, of allowing ourselves to live again by authentic natural cycles.