The Lion and the Cobra and the Leo-Scorpio Square

There are often profound insights to be found in scripture. This has nothing to do with religious belief either, it merely states a clear fact, because it states in the bible that you really don’t want to be stepping on the Lion and the Cobra if you can possibly avoid it. (Actually it says that you can tread on the Lion and the Cobra, providing you trust in the Lord thus: “No evil will befall you, Nor will any plague come near your tent. For He will give His angels charge concerning you, To guard you in all your ways. They will bear you up in their hands, That you do not strike your foot against a stone. You will tread upon the lion and cobra, The young lion and the serpent you will trample down.” From Psalm 91). Clearly though the wisdom contained therein suggests that unless you have the Lord’s protection, then the last things you should step upon in all creation are the Lion or the Cobra. They’ll mess you up. The aphorism derived from this is astrologically apt, the Cobra will leave you alone providing you don’t provoke it, and a happy well-fed lion will happily ignore you too, providing you show it proper respect and this is no more or no less than we understand about the nature of Leo and Scorpio.

In my experience Leo speaks to two key principles; leadership and creativity and all Leos and Leo placements will have at their essence one of these concerns (and often both). The reason that Leo speaks to leadership concerns is because of its innate expectation of respect, because like any lion, Leo wants to be admired. Thus Saturn in Leo creates a test of leadership, the pull of the Leonine fire is toward exaltation, like the fixed flame of his genesis, it is a wondrous sight to behold (think “the eternal flame!”) but with Saturn the desire for that divine state is turned into a life-challenge; people will not admire the Leo configured with Saturn even though the native will demand it, this creates (often) arrogance and pomposity – which is merely a state of demanding respect which has not been earned. That is Saturn in Leo. Similarly, Leo is the creative principle; ruled by the Sun, creator of all life, which is exactly why Jupiter in Leo so loves children and Saturn in Leo struggles to love them. Moon in Leo is instinctively commanding, when put under pressure the Moon in Leo native will try to take charge. All of these insights are underpinned though by the fixed nature of the sign. Yes fire is warm, fire draws people to itself, but the fixity of Leo proclaims itself as a fire that cannot be put out, thus it cannot be extinguished, managed, controlled or argued with, Leo is an ‘always on’ type of energy that like the Lion will not stand down.

And then there is the cobra. Here is an entirely different animal. Cold-blooded, deadly, hard to properly see and generally feared, but not feared out of respect for its magnificence like the lion, feared because it will leave you for dead as soon as look at you. The cobra is not mighty in that divine and kingly way that the lion conjures, but just as deadly, just as implacable. Now if you think about the cobra (or the Scorpion: another facsimile for the Scorpio energy) you will understand right away that they are small, almost insignificant, but they can kill an animal many times their own size and what this really underlines is the key power of the sign of Scorpio: survival.

There are sub-plots with Scorpio of course, but they all boil down to the essential foundation of the sign’s nature, which is the survival instinct. The major sub-plot is the idea of penetration; that is a sexual imperative (via the penetration involved in coitus) as well as a mortal one (since penetration of the flesh by sword, sting or venomous fang will destroy the life), but essentially, this penetration is always at its core a survival issue; sexual penetration ensures genetic survival while combative penetration ensures physical survival; thus the essence of Scorpio is always survival. I have written about this in the past in context of Moon in Scorpio, but consider Mars in Scorpio; here is a placement that is ideal for the warrior type. It is not the chivalric, noble warrior code of Mars in Leo for whom honour and glory on the field of battle are possibly held in higher regard even than survival, but it is instead the kill-or-be-killed mentality of the pit-fighter, it is the secret, stealthy mentality of the assassin, it is the merciless and ruthless killer who, without hesitation strikes down his foe and doesn’t look back. There is no consideration of honour, but neither is there any attempt to bathe in the glory of an act of violence, it is merely expeditious; it is a doing what must be done, without a great fuss, in order that life can go on.

This understanding gives a powerful insight into the Leo-Scorpio square. Both signs are in their way implacable, both are fixed, both will not give way and a head-to-head between the lion and the cobra is going to make an uncomfortable contest. The lion cannot give way because he would be dishonoured to do so and his dream of respect and leadership would lie in tatters if he were seen to ignobly baulk at the offer of battle. By the same token, the cobra will not turn his back on the fight because his survival instinct is too strong, turning his back would leave it open to attack and so a stand-off ensues.

There is therefore an inability to compromise in any square between the signs of Leo and Scorpio, both want to go their own way and neither is prepared to back down. The result of any square is tension and ultimately inertia, but with these signs the tension is multiplied and magnified both; neither sign too understands the other, inextinguishable flame and stagnant water have little enough common quality, it is an irresistible force and an immovable object combination that simply creates a peculiar form of paralysis. Actually, as we are beginning to understand it is actually very much a stand-off; neither can feel it is able to win the fight, but neither – for entirely different reasons – feels comfortable with the idea of backing down.

Let us consider a few informative examples.

How about Ted Bundy, the American serial killer, estimated to have murdered between 29 and 100 young women between 1974 and 1978?

Here the square aspect connects a conjunction of Saturn with Pluto in Leo on the 12th with Jupiter in Scorpio riding the Imum Coeli; this is significant especially. Saturn combined with Pluto is known for its brutality; it was known bt Ebertin as “hard labour” and indeed wherever it is found it makes life very, very difficult; it is for this reason that esoteric astrologers consider it to be a deeply karmic aspect, and whether or not you choose to believe that, the reality is, it makes something of a prison sentence of the life. With the ruler of the 8th – Neptune – itself being the ruler of the 12th, then it is little surprise that Bundy’s life ended in prison at the hands of the legal system (Neptune in Libra!). This aside though, consider the ruler of Leo, the Sun and place that brutality in context; the Sun is in the fourth, so the brutality implied by the Saturn Pluto conjunction is enacted through increasingly sadistic sexual tendencies (Jupiter in Scorpio negated) in private (the 4th). The majority of his attacks were carried out in his car or in the homes of his victims, (3rd/4th houses). Jupiter configured with Saturn creates an enormous oscillation; it is a stop-start, hot-cold aspect that generates debilitating tension; Jupiter and Pluto bring leadership and dominance issues to the fore; especially across these signs; here there is tremendous potential for abuse. Consider the near-peregrine island of Mercury and Venus in Scorpio; here is somebody who thinks about sexual or power issues, who possibly confuses love and sex and who is sexually dissatisfied (implied by the Venus quincunx deviant Uranian thinking in Gemini). The mix is difficult and dangerous.

The key however is Jupiter in almost partile square to Pluto; which itself combined with Saturn in the suppressed 12th gives near-fanatic sexual dominance issues that conjunct the IC, are carried on in secret. Anyone born in the years 1946 and 1947 with this particular square (and more generally the Sa/Pl conjunction) will probably display some measure of fanaticism in their outlook; I have seen it time and again in this subset of the Pluto in Leo generation and it nearly always combines power and money issues in some way (and how else explain how that generation ushered in the most debilitating era of pointless and soulless capitalism since the days of European feudalism?) Here is a further example:

Consider this identical aspect in the chart of the well-known actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Here the fanatic impulse is found in the Sa/Pl conjunct in Leo too, but now in the earthy 2nd, there is therefore a financial connotation, and Arnold is truly wealthy, but the house (and the sign of Leo too) is now dominated by the Sun, partile to the cusp in its domicile; creating an enormous ego and huge personal and physical power. The square to Jupiter in Scorpio creates a leadership issue too, but the Ascendant is trine Jupiter giving an easy outlet for the tension into the body itself. Arnold’s physique becomes a channel for all that power, leadership and dominance; he can quite literally manifest the tension into his muscles. In the 5th as well, Jupiter introduces an element of joy into proceedings, Arnold enjoys flexing his biceps and showing off his great power. But let us not forget too that Arnold has a peregrine Venus, he really wants to be beautiful and admired for his physical perfection (Venus rising) and in the sign of Cancer and with Moon quindecile to Mars in the 12th, he probably feels compelled to do that because his mother didn’t nurture him very well.

But despite all of this, there is a combination of Leo and Scorpio that is respectful to both. It is the Spartan. Here is a warrior that retains honour and respect, but fights for survival. The key to transforming the Leo-Pluto square then is to fight, not like Richard, Coerr de Lion, but to stand your ground, like Leonidas at Thermopylae. That is the archetypal compromise for these two difficult energies. It is not so much a winner and loser scenario, but instead it speaks of finding the very narrow common-ground, the perfect balance between the two, where their energies can be combined in the person of the Scorpion-King (who bears more than a passing resemblance to Conan the Barbarian, the role which first catapulted Arnold Schwarzenegger to the A list. Another example of just how succinctly life imitates art!)

Moon in Scorpio and the Myth of Mithridatum

Have you ever heard of Mithridatum? Probably you have not, but it is important to at least one in twelve of all human lives, because they ingest Mithridatum each day, and by it they thrive.

The mighty empire of Rome was under almost continual attack throughout its great history, usually at the barbarian frontiers, far from the Aventine, far from the Forum Romanum and the sacred Dionysian groves beneath the seven hills; in some benighted Northern heath, or desolate Mesopotamian dust-bowl, and usually, those seething discontented tribesmen and goat-herds were like the annoying buzz of a mosquito at the lion’s ear, but once in a while an enemy of Rome surfaced that turned out to be formidable.

We all know of Hannibal, and the Punic Wars perhaps, but what of Mithridates? He was the King of Pontus, a region of what is now Northern Turkey on the shore of the Black Sea, and he fought Rome in three separate campaigns, taking on the Mighty Sulla and Pompey the Great, the latter of whom brought about his downfall in 63BC. Rather than face capture, he attempted suicide by taking poison, which failed, and at the last his friend Bituitus ran him through with his own sword.

Accounts after the fact tell of how Mithridates took a large quantity of poison and “stamped about” in order to try and have it take effect, but he did not seem remotely fazed. The truth though is that Mithridates was obsessed with poisons, he feared that an assassin might take his life by poison and so he spent many years experimenting on his prisoners by feeding them poisons and then trying to cure them with herbal antidotes. The end result of these protracted labours was that he eventually created a panacea for all poison, a silver-bullet cure that he took every day of his life, an “almond-sized” pellet of this mystical substance that became known as Mithridatum, so that he might never be unwittingly poisoned by his enemies.

The Greeks were intrigued by Mithridates great cure and they created their own that was said to even be effective against viper-venom and they called theirs Theriac, from which the English word treacle is derived. But this article has nothing to do with treacle. Marcus Aurelius (as played by the late Richard Harris in the Ridley Scott movie Gladiator) was said to have ingested theriac every day of his life also.

There are two more legends concerning Mithridates that are pertinent to this article, firstly, it was related that he had a prodigious memory and could speak all 22 languages of his kingdom fluently and secondly, it is told that he spent seven years of his boyhood living alone in the wilderness following the assassination of his father Mithridates V – by his attendants and members of his own family.

Any scholar of the classics will already suspect the truth, these archetypal stories from antiquity reverberate in the subconscious because they reflect key truths that we relate to at a primal level, and the story of Mithridatum, of Mithridates himself, is a story of Scorpio Moon in its distilled and undiluted form. Think on it! An ancient warrior-king that even royal Rome struggled to suppress, a hero resistant to poison, who could not be killed by any normal means, who had a powerful memory and who was forced into a protracted period of intense self-sufficiency in his earliest years; Mithridates is the mythic keystone of the Moon in Scorpio placement!

Getting away from this profound talk, what is Scorpio Moon? The Moon talks about the mother archetype, it is the lunar principle, the nurturing feminine, but it is not so easy, in the midst of Solar society to grasp its import, it is instinctive, it is how we have learned to sustain ourselves; if our Moon then is in Leo, we require some drama in our life, and we like to have a little praise; and because we learn our most sublimated behaviours at mother’s knee, there is no question that mother was proud of us, she was warm, affectionate, something of a dramatist in the drawing room; we learned then how to nurture ourselves in a Leonine way, because that was how mother made us feel safe and loved when we were small.

So what of Scorpio? Moon in the sign of the venomous Scorpion is an entirely different affair. Where Moon in Virgo is precise and fussy but essentially nutritive and therefore practically sustaining, Moon in Scorpio actually has a less-is-more philosophy of motherhood. Scorpio withholds, it withdraws, hides away under a rock, Moon in Scorpio is instinctive and protective, but deadly and seriously dangerous too, if that little blighter stings you, then you’re in serious trouble.

This speaks very much of the evolution of Scorpio consciousness, because undeveloped, it is a self-destructive energy. Scorpio Moon is the emotional Spartan who learned that mother was probably just a little dangerous, that you had better leave her alone in case she stung you and so, taking all these archetypal lessons on board, Scorpio Moon ingested a little of mother’s poison every day, until, like the secret of Mithridatum, they became immune to her lethality.

Moon in Scorpio is in its fall, because the lunar principle is all about nurturance, but the Scorpion does not know how to nurture, it is ruthless and careless of life – even its own – and so it will soldier on in the face of the most incredible hardship, wandering the emotional wilderness for years, learning self-discipline and self-control by reasoning that: “if I need less, then I can cope better.” For Mithridates, who spent 7 years (or a Saturn quarter-cycle) wandering the wilderness as a child, this is a fundamental experience of the Moon found in the 8th sign. Then too, there is his remarkable memory, and this is one true gift of the Zodiac’s most tenacious (excepting Cancer) placements, Moon in Scorpio gives a profound power of recall, an ability to retain information.

But most of all, Scorpio on the Moon is tough. Tough emotionally for sure, but the native is able to endure all manner of austerities and hardships, they can survive, if not happily, then reasonably unscathed in the harshest of environments, and as a result they learn to be self-sufficient, usually because they have no choice. Most of those born with Moon in the Scorpion sign experienced some measure of parentally enforced deprivation as a child. One person I know always had to make do with the cheapest shoes, which he would wear until his feet hurt, and such was his parent’s reluctance to ‘waste money’ on his feet, he arranged to have his shoes “stolen” after football practise. Another person was sent away to boarding school and while other children’s parents would collect their laundry and return it sometime later, washed and ironed, this unfortunate had to manage on his own, doing his laundry in the school bathroom and ironing all his own clothes at age 11. These are the kinds of tales that are commonplace for those born with this difficult placement. Yet another young man was the son of a prostitute, who frequently had to make do with whatever food he could find for himself in the kitchen while his mother was out working, or sometimes, he lamented, while she was upstairs working; and here the sexual themes of Scorpio associated with the maternal principle are found.

So is there hope? Yes, there is always hope. Scorpio Moon, like Mithridates is mostly immune to poison, so they can be very good at being unriled by insults (with practise) and they rarely resort to comfort-eating; actually if anything, the Scorpio Moon, in a direct contradiction of Taurus Moon, actually resorts to comfort not eating, or comfort starving when they are feeling depressed. Contrary to popular opinion, Scorpio Moon is profoundly compassionate, once the evolvement is complete and the higher sense is activated; and of course, loyalty – even unto death – is one of the most remarkable features of this placement, if you are looking for a kinsman to stand shoulder to shoulder with you before the rush at Thermopylae, then consult your ephemeris. Discard all those witty Moon in Gemini types, forget showy Leo and flip-flopping Libra or wishy-washy Pisces; Moon in Scorpio will be there, until the very last gasp.

Scorpio and Taurus, the 2nd and the 8th

I have been working as an astrologer for a long time now, although it is only very recently that I have felt any confidence at all about making an accurate analysis of a particular chart and whilst my skill has increased proportionately with my reading and study what I have found that is most marked and intriguing, is that as my understanding has improved, my theories have gradually simplified. Thus my understanding of astrology is now much more basic than it ever was 25 years ago when I first read extensively on the subject.

As an example I once understood Jupiter to be analogous with a raft of Jovian concepts, from tinned foodstuffs to the law and the judiciary, but this kind of disparate list-making rather obscured the point of it all, Jupiter in my mind now governs the principles of expansion and preservation; thus all things that broaden the mind and spirit, that exalt and dignify human life and community are good candidates for Jupiter’s benefic domain, but equally, Jupiter can broaden and preserve less desirable traits also, and too it can over-broaden and over-preserve, thus giving rise to dissolute and self-indulgent modes of behaviour at the same time. Thus, the clarification of astrological concepts depends on getting into the very heart of the matter and extrapolating out from that kernel, rather than the opposite (and much more commonplace methodology) of starting from the full viscera of all possible connotations and attempting to find which one fits the bill. You could say then that a Piscean rather than a Virgoan approach is better suited to the art of synthesis, but really the one is dependent upon the other for sustenance and put together they become a chicken or egg proposition, because the many and the one, microcosm and macrocosm are but sides of the same coin and the truth of astrology, as much as anything else in life, lies in the polarity.

An excellent candidate for this approach is the difficult 8th house. I frequently despair of the amateur astrologer’s rather benighted insistence that the 8th is the house of death and the attendant portents of doom and disaster that are implicated in transits and placements to its cusps. The insistence comes from the association of the 8th with those fundamental states of existential transformative powers, the so-called “birth, sex and death” triplicity so favoured of ‘planets by house’ textbooks. Of course, it might be fair to say that with the ruler of the 10th in the 8th there might be some possibility of a career in probate, but that is merely a mundane side-effect at best, it certainly does not describe anything about the core polarity.

This polarity is derived in its entirety from the Taurus-Scorpio axis, and if we are to assume that the 8th is the house of death then we should be equally comfortable with the notion that the 2nd is the house of life. But actually, nobody ever made that claim, because (quite rightly) it is not a factor in the polarity.

The polarity covers a number of themes, and if we consider the mundane side-effects of the 2nd then we might get some insight into the 8th as well. The 2nd is the house of money, of material resources and wealth. Thus the 8th has some affinity, not with death but with resources and values. Now let us dig a little deeper and understand that the 2nd has this association with resources, not because it was just decided thus at some point in history, but because it is the natural house of Taurus and this actually informs the concerns of the second and by extension forms the resonant polarity with the 8th. The 2nd then is nothing more than the mundane and natural area of concern of the Taurean principle. You might even say that it is the area of interest that a true Taurean might most closely attend. That is why the 2nd is about money, because Taurus, fixed earth, is a lover of the finest material joys of earthly existence; it enjoys good food, good wine, the finest and most sumptuous silks, the tactile sensations, contact with the earthy stuff and there is no more accessible means to realising fixed earth than through money.

The polarity of Scorpio, and thus the 8th, is also concerned with resources, but because Scorpio is fixed water the resources are emotional instead of material. Now we are not concerned with food for the body, but actually with food for the soul, now we need to discover what sustains us that we cannot touch. If Taurus is about having enough to survive, then Scorpio is about having little enough to survive. Taurus is about wealth and Scorpio about austerity and this informs the 8th house because it contains a lesson of Scorpio at its heart and by its polarity that lesson is tied up with Taurus. This is why the 8th is frequently concerned with legacies, because these are bequests of other people’s resources and astrologically other people are contained within the opposition and if Scorpio tells us to be self-reliant in a non-material manner then our money is likely to come from others simply out of necessity. A strongly Scorpionic individual, or one with many 8th house placements is just not going to be motivated to amass wealth in the way that a Taurus/2nd house native will be and so a legacy might well be their best bet for material comfort in this incarnation. Of course, this matter of legacies goes deeper still because the essence of Scorpio is ‘loyalty unto death’, and this level of devotion that is aligned to an ideal higher than mere financial improvement makes a powerful ally; actually the type of ally that one might consider worthy of reward when one is composing one’s will.

So the 2nd then is about having enough to be self-sufficient and the 8th by contrast is also about not needing so much to be self-sufficient. They are both powers with the same objective: self-sufficiency but with diametrically opposed methods. The 2nd says “wealth buys freedom” while the 8th says “less is more”. The 2nd represents life only in the sense that it clings to the earthly vibration with a vicelike grip while the 8th transcends the earthy fixation of Taurus and finds sustenance in the emotional consistency of such ideals as loyalty, self-reliance and above all Spartanism. Taurus then is Louis XIVth while Scorpio is Leonidas.

If you understand this, Louis and Leonidas, then you understand the 2nd and the 8th.