This month I have enjoyed many interesting discussions with my peers around Hallowe’en and what it means to them and to myself. It has been fruitful, enabling me to ripen my ideas into opportunities for more healing.
This month we are being asked to find our courage, face our fears and step beyond them into our truth and our strength. Actually, there is never a time when this isn’t being asked of us, but this month is when the work is most powerful and possible.
It is said, that there are eleven signs and then there is Scorpio. It holds the deepest and darkest energy and this is not meant to be seen as a negative, in fact the opposite, it is our chance to wake up and open the door to the greatest opportunity for all humanity. We have the key right here in our hands and it is truly up to us; do we take the red or the blue pill? It is the red pill which will transform our lives and it interests me that in our culture red is for danger and so feared in that sense. In Chinese culture it is lucky. I think this speaks volumes.
We have put a wall between ourselves and our chance for transformation, turned everything that was once seen as beautiful, auspicious and liberating into something that is now beloved to be dangerous, frightening and even evil.
The archetypal story we encounter in Scorpio, Persephone is taken into the Underworld, the domain of Pluto or Hades. Here she is transformed from the Virgo archetype of purity and innocence, to a mature woman in her full power. Here, black is symbolic of the yin, the balancing energy of yang, the full potential to create, and red is the blood, woman’s ability to create life, as a god herself. Neither of these colours are bad or to be scared of, they are powerful and beautiful as are all the other colours of the spectrum. We have just cast them out, put them behind a wall and labelled them as ‘bad’ and to be feared. We have, at the same time, put all things feminine there too
As with everything, we can choose to look at this story in two ways. We can see this as a journey into hell or a venture into the unseen world. In this way, we can grow, mature and become fully human, discover the yin and the yang, the masculine and the feminine. Here we come into balance.
- I am thankful that we are beginning to gain this way of seeing the world as we have discovered and become fascinated by the mycelia networks that are at play which is a wonderful analogy for the positive way of seeing this perspective of the underworld. -
However, this journey isn’t a walk in the park, we face obstacles and initiations, like the butterfly coming out of a cocoon. When we overcome these challenges, however, we graduate from child into adulthood.
Personally, I feel, the tragedy is, that when we, as a society, put up this wall between ourselves and this wider view, we create a limited understanding of ourselves and our truth. We dress the wall up with distracting symbols and make it a children’s festival, (forgetting that we have become spiritual children) with pumpkins and witch’s hats, fake blood and zombie make-up.
Interestingly, all these symbols are all relevant, but the true meanings have been removed. What was once revered and celebrated as being sacred and steeped in wisdom has been reduced to pageantry and superficial scare-mongering.
We used to honour the dead, our ancestors, recognise the power of connecting with them at this time, when the veil was considered to be thin. Now we only fear them and imagine they are returning to harm us rather than to bestow their love through us.
There is so much more I could say, but believe I would only be stating the obvious.
If we took a moment to look at some of the indigenous cultures in our world, learn about their ways and their wisdom, we could turn our world around. We have turned this beautiful festival, Samhain, with all its darkness and mystery into one that insights ever more violence and fear into a society that has already lost its way.
I wish to invite us all to tear down the wall, face our greatest fears, in the knowledge that when we do it together, we heal together (in ways we are only just beginning to discover just how beautiful they are) and we become transformed.
If we take this step it will give us the opportunity to move forward into a world we can hardly imagine.
