Death and Magic
The United Nations (UN) was born on 24 October 1945 under the sign of Scorpio. This was the day when the UN Charter was ratified, and every year we celebrate it as UN Day. The Charter’s preamble starts with the words, ‘We the peoples of the United Nations…’. The United Nations is an international organization with 193 nations, and that’s all the world’s nations, with all its citizens – you and me. The UN is a melting-pot where our collective diversity as individuals, races and nations can meet as a potential unity.
Although the UN seems a long way from our everyday lives, it is actually much closer than we think. Consider our world without the global initiatives to – encourage gender equality, environmental protection, disease prevention, air traffic control, global communications, and its role in protecting refugees, clearing landmines and fighting AIDS. Our world would be an even messier, dangerous and more unjust place to live without this global cooperative body of nations.
If we look at the UN as an individual, we can think of it as a world personality made up of many disparate parts – nations, races, religions. Sometimes its parts work together effectively and sometimes there are squabbles, as different nations and groups try to get their national way at the expense of the global whole. The UN, like us, is made up of many selves, all wanting a piece of the action. And like us, it’s full of contradictions. It makes mistakes; it struggles with issues, and tries to sort out its values. Its journey is full of learning experiences causing pain and suffering. It falls down, only to get up again with renewed hope and aspiration to do better. It’s a very human organisation.
The UN represents the Scorpio journey writ large for all to see. This is the path of discipleship, or our spiritual journey to unite with our soul. When we’re ready to acknowledge our own contradictory complexity – the melting-pot of drives, desires, wishes, fears, hopes and dreams that can make up our personality – then we’re walking this path, and we’re already well acquainted with the tests and trials offered by Scorpio. On this path we learn to unify the diverse selves of our personality with our higher self, our soul. This is the transformative death offered by Scorpio to those ready to face and fight the deadly Hydra.
Scorpio and Death
In the Labours of Hercules, we’re told that, in his eighth labour, Hercules sets out to find a monstrous beast with nine-heads – the Hydra – living in, ‘stench-drenched bog’, and, ‘a cavern of perpetual night..’.(1) This is a massive task and Hercules realises he must do three things: First he must acknowledge that the Hydra exists, then he has to search for it, and finally destroy it. The Hydra is a symbol of our nine-headed personality, called by Bailey, the Dweller on the Threshold. ‘This Dweller is the sumtotal of all the personality characteristics which have remained unconquered and unsubdued and which must be finally overcome before initiation can be taken.’ In the legend, Hercules tries to kill the Hydra by chopping off its heads, but they just grow back. Finally he overcomes the Hydra or serpent of desire, by kneeling, ‘and from that position of humility lifts up the serpent into the air, and then deliverance comes’. (2)
Next year, 2012, is being declared as the International Year of Cooperatives. At the tender age of 67, the UN – we the people – are ready to, ‘raise public awareness of the invaluable contributions of cooperative enterprises to poverty reduction, employment generation and social integration. The Year will also highlight the strengths of the cooperative business model as an alternative means of doing business and furthering socioeconomic development’.
Whether motivated by sheer practical necessity like, global destruction, or naked opportunism like scratching each other’s back, the desire to share and cooperate, to form partnerships, is always going to be a better option than competition if we want to maximise efficiency and get things done. So when cooperation is declared a global initiative to further socioeconomic development, the soul of us all is involved. The act of sharing a heavy load may seem like only one small step for man, but, on the level of consciousness, the UNs declaration of the Year of Cooperatives, is one giant leap for humanity.
With the tenacity of Scorpio, humanity is now treading the spiritual path, and we’re finding heads everywhere. So we keep ourselves busy chopping them off – an organisation to stop child trafficking here, and another one to eliminate world poverty there – but the heads just keep growing back. Like Hercules, we can’t kill the Hydra, our collective Dweller, until we lift it into the light of the soul.
That’s why the UN, the world personality, is so important. And that’s why the 2012 International Year of Cooperatives is a great opportunity for each of us. And that’s why our individual effort to raise our own Hydra is of value to not just ourselves, but to human evolution. Each effort we make, to look, search and raise ourselves, contributes to lifting the Hydra of humanity into the light. Many of us are now willing to kneel in humility realising that the old ways are no longer useful to the demands of a new age.
Scorpio and Magic
Taurus is the polar opposite of Scorpio. As with all signs, we need to work with the energies of both polarities to find the best in both of them, merging them into one. The key to Scorpio is death and transformation. We burn up the desires of our lower self, the desire for things represented by the lower aspect of Taurus. The desires of our personality prevent us from fully participating in life, because we’re shutting our ears and eyes to the higher opportunities.
When we’re spending all our time thinking about sex, food, comfort, and money; when we make choices based on fear, hatred and ambition; and when we separate ourselves from others through pride, or feed cruel gossip, we’re not living up to our potential. This potential is our soul’s purpose. Scorpio offers us the opportunity to transform our personal experiences into something more beautiful and worthy. Within every negative lies a positive. In every lower desire lies nestled the potential jewel of a learning experience. With nine heads, every time we learn the lessons offered by the Hydra of our personality, we add another jewel to our collection.
In the month of November, Scorpio offers us the gift of magic. But to win this gift we must offer up the nine-headed hydra, our whole personality with its divisive selves, to the magical realm of the soul. With nine heads that’s a massive task.
Scorpio leads to Capricorn
The keynote of Scorpio is: ‘Warrior I am and from the battle I emerge triumphant’. When Hercules triumphantly raised the Hydra off the ground into the light, he may have shouted these words, for this is a moment of glory. We know that feeling when a gruelling time has been endured; when we’ve been forced to our knees in humility at the sheer weight of the darkness and slimy stench we’ve endured. We also know that wonderful moment when we can see the jewels of wisdom that all the pain and suffering has brought us. In that moment we’re filled with joy. This is the joy of the soul.
Scorpio’s gift of tenacity, the ability to die a thousand deaths, and still endure, leads us on in our quest for spiritual truth. Then we are rewarded, on a higher turn of the spiral, by the gift of illumination in Taurus.
The knees are governed by Saturn, who guards the gateway; the portal between the dweller and the magical gifts of the soul which are really the Christ consciousness. This consciousness sees no separation – between humans, between kingdoms, between the seen and the occult – hence what was unknown becomes known, and all is understood as one great relationship of forces and energies. Knowing this and how to work in this new reality is all that magic really is. Saturn commands us to kneel, and relinquish all that holds us back from receiving what is rightfully ours – spiritual insight into what we must do to create a better world, and the tools of white magic to assist us.
Saturn rules Capricorn, and when we have learned the lessons of Scorpio, and gained the secrets of the soul’s magic, we then pass through Sagittarius, before entering Capricorn where we again kneel, but now it’s on the top of the mountain. There we offer our heart and soul to human service. Then we are permitted to pass through the door of initiation and we’re entrusted with the secrets of life. (3)
Cycling round and round, higher and higher on the spiral of evolution, we gradually build the nine-jewelled magical and immortal head hidden deep within the hydra of our personality. These nine-jewels are the gifts given to us from each of the nine tests in Scorpio. When put together, like jigsaw pieces, they reveal our individual soul’s purpose in this incarnation. We’re now ready to climb to the mountain top in Capricorn, where we gain knowledge of the purpose, not just for our own life, but for all Life on our planet and beyond.
1. Bailey, A., ‘The Labours of Hercules’, p. 140-154
2. Ibid
3. Bailey, A., Esoteric Astrology. p. 93-226.
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