Full Moon in Scorpio Trine Neptune May 7, 2020—Creative Ritual and Speculative Writing Prompt
The full moon this month is in Scorpio, sign of the underworld, the subconscious, the repressed, the taboo, the shadow.
One thing that I’ve come to love about the cycles of the moon, that at first confused me, was the pattern of where the new and full moons fall. Each month, the new moon is in the current sun sign and reflects the current season (in the northern hemisphere). We are currently in Taurus season (sun sign), the earthy sign of springtime, growth, birth and generation. Taurus is the farmer, the gardener, sowing the vernal seeds.
The full moon that follows (or sometimes precedes it, depending on the cycle we’re in) occurs in the sign opposite the sun, representing the seasonal inverse. This month, the moon reaches its fullness in Scorpio, sign of deep autumn, of decay, of death, of the underworld, the nadir, of transformation. (Scorpio season comes mid-October to mid-November.)
This pattern seemed muddled when I was first learning it—why would the fullness of a cycle, of a season, occur in a sign representing its diametrical opposite? But I’ve come to see it as a lovely, and critical, reminder of the holes in duality, of the collapse of the binary. Of the way a category always also contains its opposite. The yin-yang symbol of Chinese philosophy. Ouroboros eating its own tail. The interconnectedness and interdependence of opposites, the illusion of separation, the falsity of the binary.
And the Taurus-Scorpio continuum is one of the clearest places to witness this integration of opposites. Without the decay and death of the fall, there is no compost to feed the flowers of the spring. As I dig and overturn my garden soil, as I cut away the brown and withered stalks on my rose bushes, I am reminded, visually, sensorially, repeatedly, of death. Of the buried, the repressed, the ignored and avoided.
As we bathe in the light of this full moon, we are asked to remember, to revisit and to release the buried, the discarded—in our own psyches and as a collective culture. To bear witness to the failings of our society, so evident in the current devastation. To hold ourselves accountable to our own personal failings and mistakes—in order that we might fold them into the soil of our current selves, and allow them to feed the futures we hope to nurture in this new spring.
Now is not the time for avoidance. Neither is it the time to wallow in guilt or regret. Now is the time to take the past with honesty and authenticity, and recognize what we need to drop, what withered stalks and skeletons we need to churn into the freshly turned dirt, to layer over the seeds we planted at the new moon, to feed their growth, our growth, into something new.
Ritual for Creativity at the Full Moon in Scorpio
1. Light a candle or incense; set a ritual container in whatever way you usually do, or feels right to you.
2. Remember the seeds you planted for the new moon ritual in Taurus. Choose one seed.
3. Imagine this seed scenario as if it has already come to pass. If, say, you planted, finish my novel, imagine, with as much sensory detail as you can muster, that you’ve finished the book. You’re sitting with the final manuscript in your hands; you’re going out to a celebratory dinner with your writing friends. What does it look like, feel like, smell and taste like? Try to live the experience as vividly as you can in your imagination.
4. Now, pan back a little, and notice what fears, doubts, concerns arise as you imagine this scenario. See what specific narratives or phrases crop up. (I never finish anything. I’m not good enough. Who would want to read my novel anyway? I’m not allowed to succeed. This goal is [in someway] “bad.” I am bad.)
5. Write them down.
6. Try not to judge them, or get too attached to them. They are stories your psyche has conjured up to protect you from getting hurt, by failure or rejection, etc. (But also recognize, that the part of yourself that conjured up these patterns and narratives is an old part of you, probably a child-self, and definitely coming from part of the brain that associates failure with death by saber-tooth tiger. In other words, it’s using tactics to protect you from things you don’t really need this level of protection from.)
7. Take these written phrases and burn them (using fire safety, of course). If you can’t burn them physically, do so in your imagination, and perhaps tear or crumple the paper.
8. Put the ashes in the place where you buried your seeds of intention at the new moon and imagine the ashes nurturing and feeding these visions.
Fiction Writing Prompt for the Full Moon in Scorpio
Freewrite on/consider: What is considered “taboo” in your world? How do taboos vary and change amongst social or familial groups within your world? Which taboos most specifically affect your main characters, and what are their relationships to these taboo aspects of the world?
If you’re not writing speculative fiction, but working within the “reality” of our world, you can still answer these questions and apply them to your writing. We don’t often stop to analyze the social norms and laws of our world, or the smaller subgroups/subcultures of society. Use the above questions to do this.
In our world (at least in the contemporary US/the West), for example, sexuality and death are two major taboos—and therefore part of Scorpio’s realm (the repressed, the taboo; relegated the underworld, the subconscious). How does your world relate to and handle death? What about sex? Which aspects (if any) of these are honored or celebrated, which are avoided, regulated, denied? How does this affect larger aspects of your world’s social, cultural and infrastructural design? How does it affect characters on the interpersonal levels?
What does your main character resist, avoid, fear? (Make a list.) This is their underworld. Continue to explore and expand upon it, in order to better understand their motivations.
Write a scene in which a character is forced to confront or grapple with a repressed or taboo aspect of their society or their own psyche.
Photo by Hugo Aitken on Unsplash