In the Heart of the Cosmic Serpent: The 2012 Scorpio Solar Eclipse

 

We woke this morning to a cosmic mandate: shed your dead skin. As day broke over the Eastern time zone in the U.S., tomorrow’s total solar eclipse in Scorpio was less than 36 hours away. Luna prepared to move simultaneously into the deepest portion of her Dark Moon phase and into Scorpio, the portion of the sky that is saturated with the serpent power of regeneration and renewal.

The Dark Moon is the time of shedding, and this one has special potency. The power of the cosmic event it precedes,Tuesday’s total solar eclipse, is all about transformation. This is a time to take with utter seriousness our obligation to release the outworn and outlived–so that Life itself may be renewed. For what we can’t, or won’t, do willingly, the Universe is likely now to step in and do for us.

The ruler of this eclipse is Pluto, the cosmic shaman who lives in the Underworld like the snake power he represents. That snake power is greatly magnified by the eclipse’s alignment with the great orange star Unukalhai, known as “the heart of the serpent.”

Reclaiming Your Serpent Power

We’re in a cycle that’s all about Scorpio’s key themes of desire, surrender–and power:

  • Scorpio reminds us that our most authentic power is bound up in the deepest desires of our hearts and our willingness to embrace them. No other sign is so in touch with what it truly wants than Scorpio. This authentic desire is profoundly creative. Hindu cosmology tells us that it’s what brought the world itsel into being.
  • At the same time, Scorpio confronts us with the necessity of surrendering our will to a greater will and wisdom, that of Life itself. Paradoxically, this is the almost magical key that lets us access the power to realize our deepest desires.
  • That includes the cosmic power that’s not given to us, but is us. It also encompasses the power we’ve given away. When we relinquish our innate power, whether to our fears or to authorities of church, state, corporation, tribe,or family, we’re ratifying a thousands-year-old belief in power as domination.

Wherever this eclipse falls in your birth chart, issues of power are asking to be confronted and transformed.Take your true power, the Universe is now telling us each one of us. Use it to renew Life.

Co-create With the Cosmos: Your Invitation from the Heart of the Serpent

Of all the ways the Universe creates change in our lives, none is more potent than the solar and lunar eclipses that occur in pairs twice a year. When the solar light that illuminates our world is externally blocked, even for a few minutes, by the Moon, the lunar energies are powerfully enhanced.

Ancient astrologers believed that eclipses created energetic tunnels to higher realities. This is when focused intention through prayer,meditation, and visualization can bring big results. The creative feminine powers of intuition, imagination, and gestation have maximum strength. As the light goes out on familiar patterns, our logical left brains go to sleep and lunar, right-brain reality holds sway.

What is it that you want to heal, to create, or to release? This is the time to communicate your intention to the Universe–and then to surrender them now to the greater will of Life, your most intimate partner. This eclipse is saturated with the power to see the world anew, to envision new possiblities for your life, to transform the past,and bridge to the long-foretold 2012 Winter Solstice:

Your Serpent Power: Seeing Reality Anew

Throughout human history, the serpent has held great mystical and shamanic significance. From India and China to Egypt and Greece, the snake has been associated with the core powers of life–death and rebirth, creativity and sexuality, wealth and spirituality. In the marvelous book Animal-Speak: The Spiritual & Magical Powers of Creatures Great & Small, Ted Andrews describes the serpent qualities that shamans, alchemists, and mystics have regarded with reverence—as should we. “Before the snake begins to shed its skin, its eyes will begin to cloud over,” he writes. “. . . as the skin begins to shed, the eyes begin to clear as if they will see the world anew.”

We’ve already been given a startling example of this power. The energetic window of tomorrow’s eclipse opened on November 6, the U.S. Election Day, just as Mercury went into his retrograde vision quest. The events of the election carried the classic eclipse signature—seeming to come out of nowhere and transforming our lives in ways we did not expect, yet later could see were right before our eyes all along.

From journalists to astrologers to Mitt Romney’s campaign leadership, many in the U.S. were completely taken by surprise at the outcomes of the election. What most of us could see was shaped almost completely by what we expected to see. We were blinded by our past experience, a kind of cultural trance induced by millennia of white male rule.

Creating Your Life Begins With the Possibilities You See

Two planets color the energy of the eclipse with the vibrations of nearly exact contact: Mercury the Messenger and Neptune the Dreamer. They meet in the challenging, dynamic energy of the square. Expanded awareness is what this contact makes both possible and necessary. Over the next six months, events will push us to integrate Neptune’s imaginative, intuitive, empathetic, and deeply creative powers into the way we perceive reality itself.

The red planet Mars carries the vibrations of the Galactic Center into the Heart of the Serpent Eclipse. As he aligns with the massive matrix of creation and destruction at the center of our galaxy, Mars brings us the power to bring visions and ideals into material reality.

Creating the Future by Transforming the Past

Eclipses fall in centuries-long series called “Saros series,” first observed by the great astrologers of ancient Babylon and Chaldea. Thus they bring the opportunity to experience– and to transform–karma. Key events in the Saros series to which the 2012 Heart of the Serpent eclipse belongs illustrate the compelling opportunity we now have to  transform the energy of domination, or “power over,”  into empowerment:

  • The 2012 eclipse belongs to a series that began on July 13, 1219, seven months before Egypt fell to the Crusaders. The domination of one of the ancient world’s great centers of knowledge by the worldview that would shape the modern West was one of the turning points of history. Yet 800 years later, astrology—one of the great wisdom traditions that flourished in Egypt—is experiencing an extraordinary renaissance.
  • The longest total eclipse in this series occurred in August 1850, the month before the Fugitive Slave Act made it illegal to harbor a fugitive slave anywhere in the U.S. The precursor to recent punitive immigration laws in the U.S., the Fugitive Slave Act required that officers of the law hunt down and capture fugitives and return them to slavery. It became a tipping point in America’s ability to tolerate slavery—just as the immigration laws helped tip the vote. The 2012 Heart of the Serpent Eclipse holds the potential to be a similar tipping point for a regeneration of compassion and wisdom in our world. In an astonishing synchronicity, 1850 was the last time that Neptune the Dreamer was in his own sign of Pisces—until now.
  • These principles apply to our own times as well. The last eclipse in the series occurred on November 13, 1993. The issues that dominated news headlines remain relevant today: Bill Clinton was inaugurated as president in January of this year and the poet and playwright Vaclev Havel was elected president of the Czech Republic.  A Liberian oil tanker ran aground off the coast of Scotland, causing a masive oil spill. IBM announced the single largest single-year corporate loss in U.S. history to date–$4.9 billion. This was the year that the European Economic Community created a single union.
  • Think back to the events of your life between November of 1993 and May of 1994. What were your own personal headlines?  In a profound way, the energetic themes are now returning, for a fresh look and the opportunity to make a fresh choice—to see the world in a new way and to bring it into being through our actions.

Heart of the Serpent: Bridge to the 2012 Winter Solstice

Eclipses come in related pairs. Tomorrow’s solar eclipse will be followed by a powerful lunar eclipse on November 28. Aligned with Aldebaran, the star of illumination who is also known as “God’s Eye” and “the Buddha Star.” Our ability to receive the gifts of illumination is directly connected to our willingness to meet the challenges in the Heart of the Serpent.

After the God’s Eye Lunar Eclipse, we will head towards the final cosmic event of this fabled year of 2012—the Winter Solstice. This is the event foretold by Mayan prophesy, the ending of a great cycle of time and the beginning of another. Key energies in the November eclipes,the Galactic Center and Aldebaran, are star players in the 2012 Solstice.

Many have seen in this Winter Solstice the long foretold return of the great protector of the Maya, the feathered, flying serpent known as Quetzalcoatl. Perhaps the greatest of all the gifts of this Scorpio Total Solar Eclipse is realizing he is already at our side. We are bringing him into being, one breath,one meditation, one cosmic event at a time. We are in the transformative heart of the serpent.