Poppy Fields

Post by Jane Lewis

Not long after the equinox the equal balance of day and night tips over into the dying year, daylight hours shorten and nights lengthen. Symbols of Scorpio pop up everywhere in the form of pumpkin-skulls and macabre spooks that delight children's natural ghoulishness, and not long after Halloween comes the wearing of red poppies to mark the time of Remembrance. The poppy is the flower of sleep and oblivion, the common opiates heroin and morphine come from it. In mythology, the God of Sleep made the poppy for Ceres because she couldn’t sleep after she’d lost her daughter Persephone. Persephone is herself lured down into the Underworld with a poppy. It’s been a symbol for grief for millennia, and in the 8th century BC a dying warrior was compared to a poppy in Homer’s Iliad, and still today it symbolises those fallen on the battlefield, its blood-red colour inviting us to remember the war-dead.

Mars and Pluto rule Scorpio, the sign of death, rebirth and resurrection. Whether we like it or not, war and death have their place in the zodiac circle which contains everything. Mars the Warrior. In the Hindu epic the Mahabharata, Krishna himself gave the warrior Arjuna the Bhagavad Gita to help him overcome his moral scruples when he realised that he must slay some of his own relatives who were among his enemies. War and peace are both parts of the lila, or divine play, we must play our part in order to gain the entire gamut of human experience from which wisdom springs. War in the outer world is a projection of the war that rages within us, is an outer manifestation of the human shadow symbolised by the malefics Mars, Saturn and Pluto, although none of them is wholly bad or good, simply agents for the generation of light from the darkness within and without.

Image by Henry Be

The glyph for Libra, when night and day are balanced, depicts the sun hovering above the horizon at daybreak and nightfall, reminding us that the sun rises up out of the darkness and goes down again into it.  And we need to befriend the dark, not shun it.  Scorpio is the time of year when we must face our inner demons, those negative traits, thoughts, feelings and behaviours we obsessively hide from view and especially from ourselves, and so projecting the dirty nastiness within onto others and disowning it until it rears up its ugly serpent head and bites us.  Scorpio invites us to confront these horrors and abominations, those within and those without. 

We must engage in practices of white magic that initiate the process of inner change and transformation, for only inner change has the power ultimately to effect change on the outer level.  Like St John who knew the secret of drawing the serpents out of the poisoned chalice, thus transmuting the serpent into the higher form of the eagle, or hawk-headed falcon.  There are set stages to the process, none of which can be skipped, each one must be rigorously gone through in order for the magic to work.  The alchemists knew that, paradoxically, the gold is contained within excrement and must first be released from it.  The process is fraught with danger of death, and it requires the Scorpio qualities of courage and steely determination to tread that razor-edged path that is not for the faint-hearted or lily-livered.  In any one lifetime we are probably only ready to go so far along that path, but in a certain incarnation the soul reaches a crisis point when it is ready to face the inner battle head-on, which is externalised into critical events or circumstances in their outer life.  The potential for this is shown in the horoscope usually through an accent on Scorpio and its planetary gods, Mars and Pluto.  The exact timing of events when the crisis becomes acute is shown by such things as transits and directions.

Image by Aaron Burden

Halloween and Remembrance invite us not to look the other way when confronted with blood, guts and gore but to stare them squarely in the face.  Not only are we remembering those soldiers who have fallen in some corner of a foreign field, but we are also invited to remember those parts of our psyche where unreformed parts of ourselves have been left to rot in some corner of our inner field that has become foreign to us through our refusal to claim ownership. 

In honouring our ancestors at this time of year, we’re not just thinking about people from our community or family who have died, heroically or otherwise, but our personal ancestors including those people we have been in past lives.  They gather round us, watching, interested to find out how we’ve moved their story forwards since they passed on, looking to us to find solutions to the problems they grappled with, keen to know if we’ve found an answer yet to the question their life left hanging when they passed on the baton to us.