Abandon Hope! New Moon in Scorpio & Mercury Rx Cazimi

I want to share a couple of paragraphs from the Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chodran’s book When Things Fall Apart because it feels like helpful Scorpio wisdom for this strange new moon:

“The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth. Suffering is part of life, and we don’t have to feel it’s happening because we personally made the wrong move. In reality, however, when we feel suffering, we think that something is wrong. As long as we’re addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience down or liven it up or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot. 

In a nontheistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put “Abandon hope” on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.” 

Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what’s going on, but that there’s something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world. 

Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. That’s the compassionate thing to do. That’s the brave thing to do. We could smell that piece of’ shit. We could feel it; what is its texture, color, and shape? 

We can explore the nature of that piece of shit. We can know the nature of dislike, shame, and embarrassment and not believe there’s something wrong with that. We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better “me” who one day will emerge.” (When Things Fall Apart, "Hopelessness and Death," page 53)

I say this quote is Scorpio wisdom because I think there's a lot of deep meaning and insight in the traditional connections between Scorpio and shit. According to zodiacal “melothesia” (the correspondence between particular parts of the body and signs of the zodiac) Scorpio rules the lower intestine, the rectum, and the anus (in addition to the genitals). Scorpio is the nocturnal sign of Mars. As the ruler of the anus and defecation, it's the sign that cares for what’s rejected by or hidden from society; it’s moved by gut instinct, a deep knowing that comes from the body before the mind. It also teaches us about the value of purging—without the “disgusting” act of taking a shit (or vomiting when we need to) we would literally fill up with toxins and die. 

This is a remarkable new moon in Scorpio for a few reasons. For one, the new moon happens to coincide exactly with the moment Mercury is both retrograde and “cazimi” or “in the heart of the sun.” In the ancient astrological perspective, the sun is so hot that when planets are very close to it they become “combust” or “burnt up by the sun.” The beams of the sun outshine other planets and make them invisible (for better or for worse; see my article last month on the Louvre heist for an example of the better). But for a moment, when a planet is right in the center of the sun, it’s said to be protected or “in the chariot” of the sun, a powerful position of calm in the eye of the solar storm. Ancient astrologers considered a planet within a degree of the sun to be protected, and that range was whittled down to a miniscule 17 minutes in the medieval period (many astrologers still use that smaller range, but I use a full degree). At this new moon, Mercury is cazimi by any standard; it’s only 15 minutes from exact conjunction. Despite Mercury’s three week fugue of confusion and disorder (it’s moving backward in the sky!), despite the scorching, blinding heat all around it, it sits for one safe moment in the chariot of the Scorpio sun. 

Additionally, the sun, moon, and Mercury are in a grand water trine with Jupiter in Cancer and Saturn in Pisces. Grand water trines are powerful formations that connect all three forms of water energy (ie all three modalities): Cancer (cardinal water, the beginning of summer), Scorpio (fixed, the middle of fall), and Pisces (mutable, the end of winter). Water—the fluid, emotional, and intuitive element—is dependent on a container for its form, so each water sign expresses something different about boundaries, and a different way of managing the inherent unboundedness of water itself, which naturally flows, connects, and osmoses if it’s not limited by something solid. 

I like to say that Cancer builds boundaries that allow for intimacy (like the four walls of the home), Pisces dissolves boundaries between ourselves and others (melting those emotional defenses for broader connections), and Scorpio IS the boundary (the extreme, the edge, the deep end). Scorpio refuses to romanticize emotional connection — real connection is exposing, but without the vulnerability of showing our inner selves to each other, we’re left with something shallow, harmony at the cost of meaning. To Scorpio, fear is not an obstacle to intimacy, it’s the very foundation of it, the willingness to show someone the parts of ourselves that we worry are scary, disgusting, or undesirable, and there is transformational force in doing so with others who aren’t afraid of reality, who value us not in spite of those things but because of them. 

Sometimes it feels like Scorpios are too intense, too pointed, too direct, but that’s exactly what is needed to draw out the poison of repression, avoidance, a compulsive fixation on the “good” experiences of life. Do we want to mourn the fantasy of a perfect life where only beautiful moments happen, even knowing that it’s not real and will rupture eventually? Or do we practice caring for, even loving, the averse, gross, or overpowering moments?

If we truly want to be present for our lives, one of the best practices we have available to us is to sit with “undesirable” feelings like disgust or fear. Fear is one of the best teachers and quickest pathways to the extraordinary, the magical, the meaningful. When we feel afraid, our little logical mind dissipates or disappears altogether and it seems anything is possible—an effect that we dread if the impossible thing made real is a ghost or a phobia, but that same collapse of the real makes “unrealistically” sublime experiences possible too.

Think about the level of intimacy you’ve experienced with those whom you shared disgusting or frightening moments. Whose puke have you cleaned up? With whom have you faced real death or terror?

Incredible things can unfold when we practice just sitting there with fear and not running away. If you feel afraid, but know you’re probably physically safe, try to let your body go through all the reactions of fear without starting to tell a story about what that fear means, or what might happen next. Just feel the fear itself. 

The other night I was lost for a moment in the woods just outside my house because it was pitch black and I no longer knew which way the house was. Even though I knew I wasn’t really lost, and the coyotes I could hear were pretty far off, I felt my heart start to pump harder. Instead of flailing, I stood there and felt every bit of the fear, every contour of it, very much “getting curious about the shit” like Pema recommends. And something remarkable happened. It was as though there was some kind inversion where the thrill of fear in my chest became pleasurable, and the more fear I felt the more it came through as an ecstatic hum, a sublime vibration. 

The word thrill expresses it exactly—a word that means both terror and immense excitement. I was suddenly reminded of a piece of advice the brilliant artist and teacher John Mandel gave me years ago when I was suffering through unbearable episodes of panic. He said that the physical sensations of a panic attack are almost identical to those we experience on a rollercoaster or during an orgasm. That he never had another panic attack after he realized this because he could just feel the bodily sensations themselves, divorced from the story of disaster that would otherwise come with them.

I knew exactly what he meant by this when I was standing in the dark—he was talking about thrill. It’s one of the most sublime and powerful feelings, and the only way to truly feel it is to stay present with fear, to let it engulf you and penetrate deep into your being. It’s not some great mystery how to reach this kind of ecstasy—you just need to be truly afraid and not run away. This is the magic of the Scorpio, a kind of courage to stay with holy terror that the nocturnal war god embodies. 

The refusal and rejection of “ugly” facets of life is what I think of as an “excess of benefic energy” — too much Venus and Jupiter untempered by the harsh realities of Mars and Saturn. So many of the most abhorrent things humans do to each other stem from this desire to avoid pain, disgust, and death, to “purify” our environment of anything, or anyone, that confronts us with them. As much as we may want to avoid doing this ourselves, it literally takes practice. 

We can start with something small and build from there. Work with either fear or disgust. Disgust is easy to find (just let something rot, or even stare at your own shit). If you want to work with fear, choose anything that gets your heart pumping without triggering you or putting you in danger (like standing in the pitch darkness in the woods or a basement or a closet, or watching a scene from a horror film that gives you a real bodily reaction). Now, choose a single sensation in your body that is more neutral—the feeling of your tongue in your mouth, or the bottom of your feet touching your shoe or the ground, or the feeling of your chest rising and falling as you breathe. Keep pulling your attention back to that more neutral anchor to help you stay present with the feelings of disgust or fear, and observe how they develop and bloom. What are the bodily sensations that unfold when you don’t try to escape or eliminate these emotions, don’t tell a story about them or dissociate from them? 

This is the darkest new moon we could be having—symbolically since the new moon is in fall in Scorpio, and literally because it’s at its apogee i.e its farthest away and darkest point. What an invitation to let fear or disgust wash over us, to try and radically accept the entire emotional register, even just for a moment of practice. And like Pema suggests, rather than struggle against the more potent suffering we feel, thinking we could or should do something to suffer less, there’s a profound relief in abandoning hope, in renouncing the fantasy of a life without pain, or the pressure to force life into a shape you think it should take. It’s just the kind of potent inaction that might please the fixed nocturnal watery Mars that rules this pitch dark moon.