Scorpio Calling

She is powerful. She is transformative. She is underworld. She is death. She is buried secrets climbing from the depths to be known and healed. She is Scorpio.

Here we are in Scorpio season. The season of the Witch. Scorpio is a fixed water sign. Water signs are associated with emotions. Fixed signs are strong, deeply rooted, and unyielding.

In our thirteen month zodiacal journey through Spiral Muse songs, we visit Scorpio twice. Scorpio energy runs throughout the entire album of Somebody Calling as well as pulsing strongly the title song itself. The horrific cruelty of the Church's extermination of indigenous, Earth-based European religions and medicine has been suppressed, minimized and decontextualized for centuries. Scorpio says, "No more!" The voices of the healers, mothers, sisters, daughters and lovers who were slaughtered in the the Catholic Church's centuries-long quest for absolute authority over the hearts, minds and land of the European people will no longer be suppressed. Somebody Calling hears these whispers from another realm and slowly, throughout the song, amplifies these voices, breaking the spell of secrets and silence and calling out the names of forgotten Goddesses from ages past.

We tend to think of genocide as targeting a specific ethnic group and most often it is. The witch burning of the Middle Ages was the genocide of women. While women were the primary targets, men were killed as well, approximately 15-20% of those slaughtered during this genocide were men. The aim was to eliminate not only women's spirituality and power, but all Earth-based spirituality, and an understanding of spirit that does not place God outside of the individual. This is what had to be destroyed in order for the Church to expand and maintain its economic, political and religious power. This was done in the name of Jesus, as are many brutalities carried out against individuals, communities, ethnic groups and nations to this day. The mythology is that Christianity spread through truth and mercy. Scorpio unearths the bloody truth that it was only through torture and systematic slaughter that Christianity came to dominate Europe.

One of the most devastating and lasting effects of European witch-burning was the mistrust seeded among women. Before they were slaughtered, women were tortured for days on end until they would give eight more names of “witches,” to be similarly tortured and burned alive. This is well documented by the religious and governmental authorities who carried out this torture in their guidebook, the Malleus Maleficarum. They were very proud of this system of gathering so-called information, not dissimilar to tactics used in this current era by the US government in Guatanamo Bay, to name only one example. The torture-driven betrayal women experienced before their brutal murders instilled a deep mistrust among women that lingers to this day. The experience of betrayal by our sisters has been written into our spiritual and psychic DNA. Only when we, as women of European ancestry, understand where this betrayal and mistrust comes from, can we begin to heal it. This is Scorpio's magic. Bringing the truth, the roots of trauma, into the light in order to transform and heal.

Note: This is the twelfth in a thirteen chapter journey through the songs of Somebody Calling, and the zodiacal calendar. Full disclaimer, I am a psychotherapist, I am not an astrologer, so my musing on the zodiacal energies of these songs is that of a layperson. If you are interested in exploring astrology further, I highly recommend the following founts of wisdom:

If you are interested in exploring the underworld of your own psychic terrain with a spiritually grounded psychotherapist, you can learn more about me and how I work here.