The Full Moon in Scorpio, Death and the Phoenix

XIII:  Death
Shadowscapes Tarot; Artwork by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law

The "Death" card in the tarot is an appropriate message to meditate on with the recent full moon in Scorpio.  Full moons can represent illumination or realizations in our lives but also completions.  The cycle of creation, the wheel of life, requires destruction to sustain creation.  Death represents transition.  The highest expression of Scorpio is the Phoenix - death and rebirth.  Scorpio is a water sign, a karmic sign, and a sign of the deep desires and fears that drive us.  Because it represents our deeply ingrained and subconscious motives, Scorpio can also represent the potential for deep transformation.  If you are brave enough to swim in these deep waters, your reward could be phoenix-like transformation.  Letting go of the familiar, no matter how detrimental, and moving into the unknown - the chaos of creation - is never comfortable, but sometimes the energetic cycle requires that one door fully closes before the next can open; that one energy, attachment, pattern, job, relationship, is fully released before the new will take form and present itself.  The phoenix must first actually die (and fully accept the transition) in order to be reborn.

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 "It is said that the swan is mute its entire life.  Upon the threshold of death, however, it sings one achingly beautiful song that steals the final breath from its chest, and then it expires upon that ultimate sigh.  It is the most heartbreakingly wrenching song of ending.  

But the song of the phoenix...ah, the song of the swan cannot compare. When the phoenix sees death beckoning, she lifts her voice in a tragic song of pain, of rending, of sorrow...that yet cannot mask the most intense joy, for she knows that as the flames lick at her heart, the heat is quickening the egg in which her successor sleeps.  Her deathflame is its lifespark; one is linked inextricably to the other. And thus she was tied to her predecessor, and she hers, and then she hers, to the beginning of time.  She sits in her deathbed, upon her nest, and she submits to the inevitable hand of fate.  As the fire burns searing hot and white, she spreads her wings and breathes her final song of expiration.

Meaning:  Closing the door to the past and opening a new one, going through transition, changing status, shedding the old and excess, bowing to inexorable forces and sweeping changes. The old must be set aside and burned away to make way for the new. The ancient story of the phoenix is one that is echoed and repeated in dozens of cultures.  She is death and rebirth and life, encapsulated in a single symbol.  Irises are associated with death, as Iris was the Greek goddess of the rainbow, which she used to travel down to earth with messages from the gods and to transport women's souls to the underworld.  Deadly nightshade is a highly poisonous plant, symbol of deception, danger and death.  And sumac, in the Victorian language of flowers, says, 'I shall survive the change.'" ~Barbara Moore, Shadowscapes Companion