ZORASCOPE

Mars is in Scorpio This Halloween: It’s Time to Salute The Shadow

This fall’s astrological mantra? Honor your fear

On October 31st, Mars will enter Scorpio for the first time in two years. Mars rules Scorpio, so this is a homecoming. Only, there are no balloons, streamers, champagne — this is no celebration of life and all its revelry. Instead, there is dust, bone, tar, and muck. Mars in Scorpio thrives in these conditions, fueling its way forward by summoning up the most tangled parts of a thing, and using it to purify and refine its direction.

This is a celebration of death, our ghosts, and humankind’s most immediate and shared ancestor: fear. How symbolically appropriate that this ingress falls on Halloween. The intended importance of Halloween has been watered down over the years by campy spooks and jack-o’-lanterns. Historically, this was a day when the veil between worlds thinned, and the boundary between life and death blurred. Across many cultures, each with their own specific permutations, this time of the year was for reverence of the dead, whether that reverence came loaded with fear or not. As such, Mars in Scorpio ushers in a six-week period where you can excavate your own graveyards and peer around your own dark corners. Mars in Scorpio wants you to trick or trick, only instead, by daring to knock on the dusted-over and imposing doors of your own life.

Mars in Scorpio ushers in a six-week period where you can excavate your own graveyards and peer around your own dark corners.

In the simplest way, Mars in Astrology represents movement. Both the literal movement of our bodies, and the will, passion, and drive that animates our lives and fuels our direction. Mars oversees what moves us. To get anywhere in life is to activate your Mars. Scorpio is a fixed water sign. Picture a swamp — wet, but also sticky, with root systems, fog, and poisonous insects laid about like boobytraps. Swamps are perilous, almost impossible to navigate except with precise skill and the willingness to do so. Scorpio is the sign attuned the most towards the psychological and emotional boobytraps weaved into the human condition, fitting itself for survival by being…