To have Scorpio rising (i.e. on the Ascendant) in one’s birth chart is an essential dilemma.  Why is that?

The Rising Sign, or Ascendant, represents how you present yourself to the world. If you were a house, your Ascendant would be the front door.  It’s like skin, because it is at once superficial (describing only a surface layer of your personality) yet crucial, (holding you together).  Because the Ascendant is your interface with the world, it shows not only how you let others in, but also how you shut them out, i.e. how you hold your boundaries and defend your perimeter.  It shows how you maintain a sense of self in a world that is constantly presenting you with foreign influences.

Scorpio is a water sign, and as a water sign, it poses certain challenges when it appears as the Ascendant in an individual’s chart.  Water signs do not by nature have very good boundaries.  Water flows into and around things, water connects but does not defend strongly.  Water is sensitive and feels powerfully, thus is prone to being taken advantage of—and taking advantage too.

If you have Scorpio rising, there’s something you should know which you won’t find in astrology books (at least, I’ve never seen it in one), but which I’ve discovered in my twenty-eight years of involvement with astrology, and it is this:  Scorpio is not really the tough-as-nails, James-Bond-like, crusty and pushy sign it’s said to be.  No.  Scorpio is sensitive, tender and feeling.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Scorpio is the most tender and vulnerable sign in the entire zodiac (yes, moreso than Cancer).  But if this is so, why don’t the astrology books say that?  Because they write about Scorpio as experienced from the outside, by people encountering Scorpio in others.  I’m talking about Scorpio as experienced from the inside; I’m talking about what it feels like to be Scorpio.

How do you think Scorpios became so tough and crusty and cynical to begin with?  Because once they were little baby Scorpios and they quickly discovered that the world was too much for them.  They felt everything so intensely and were so passionately drawn into life and love and pleasure and pain that they had to build walls in order to become a person at all instead of a bundle of passions, tossed like a tiny boat at sea.

Every adult Scorpio should take a moment to congratulate himself for building those walls, for creating those boundaries, for becoming a person.  Then, he needs to begin the work of dismantling them.  Why?  Because creating boundaries is only the beginning of the life-work of Scorpio, and because the Scorpionic crusty exterior repels the very thing Scorpio longs for the most.  Scorpio’s fondest dream is to be intimately related to the world, to themselves, and to at least one special other.  Intimacy is the most powerful need Scorpio has.  But intimacy requires vulnerability.  To really connect with another human being, you have to be willing to get hurt.

As a human being matures, she gains emotional skills and learns how to be vulnerable and open to life’s experiences, feeling them without being hurt by them and thus experiencing them more fully.  A truly mature Scorpio rising person has learned to be soft and emotionally available without feeling raw and unprotected, and to connect without behaving like either a victim or a victimizer.  With the development of emotionally intelligent, permeable boundaries, the crusty walls can come down without a loss of selfhood, making intimacy possible.

Intimacy is not the same as symbiosis, a state where one being has taken over and contains the other.  Intimacy is a state of closeness between two independent individuals, a state entered into by choice.  For Scorpio, life is empty without intimacy, but with intimacy, life is interesting, absorbing and compelling.  Intimacy provides a fit stage upon which a Scorpio rising person’s rich inner life, with all its color and feeling, may unfold.  To gain access to true intimacy, not symbiosis, you must learn to possess yourself and not others.

A self-possessed Scorpio rising individual is the most attractive person imaginable.  Any Scorpio riser who does the work of forming healthy (not reactive) boundaries, will become positively irresistible.  I guarantee it.

Let me tell you a little story about the phoenix.  The phoenix was a mythical bird who built itself a fire, then allowed itself to be consumed by the flames until it died.  It then rose from its own ashes, shining and new.  Fans of Harry Potter will recognize the phoenix because Dumbledore had one named Fawkes.

To be Scorpio is to be a phoenix.  The Scorpio part of us is drawn to experiences which undo us, which destroy us.  This is out of a need to burn away everything that is not truly essential, everything that’s dross, everything that’s not us.  The key is to train this “death urge” (Freud named it “thanatos”) to destroy our negative personality traits and not our most tender heart.

But can you take conscious control of this ability?  Can you die on purpose?  Can you hold onto what is essential and be reborn?  Can you, with the courage of the phoenix, build your own funeral fire, climb into the flames and endure the pain of your own destruction—on purpose?  Can you let yourself be burned down to nothing, trusting that there is something in you so essential that it will continue beyond death?  The phoenix offers knowledge of that essence.

Tired of being drawn again and again into the same kind of bad relationship, dead-end job, addictive downward spiral?  Scorpio says, “if you’re falling, dive!”  Maybe you haven’t really felt all there is to feel there.  Maybe the pleasure still outweighs the pain.  Maybe you’re dampening the pain with transitory pleasure.  Do you need yet more pain before you will allow the thing to be burned away?  Then get it.  If you don’t reach for it on purpose, it will come to you when you least expect it.

Pretending you’re a victim of the process only slows it down.  For Scorpio, sometimes the only way out is through.  Embrace the pain, clasp it to your heart, feel every mote of it.  Let the sobs rack you at midnight.  Let it burn you until only what is essential is left.  Then see yourself, reborn, shiny, new, as if for the first time.  That’s the gift, hard-won, of Scorpio.

There’s a new James Bond movie coming out next week (Quantum of Solace), which reminds me how very much James Bond exemplifies the nature of the sign Scorpio, which happens to be the sign we’re in right now (kudos to the movie studio for their timing).

In what ways does Scorpio resemble James Bond?  To begin with, Scorpio, like Bond, has a reputation for being sexy.  Bond is a seducer, a womanizer who can control others—or be controlled by others—via sexual passion.  Bond radiates masculine magnetism.  An emphasis on Scorpio in a person’s chart can cause them to radiate sexuality in a similar way.  Hopefully most individuals are more intimate in their sexual expression than Bond is.

Scorpio is also highly intuitive, sometimes in ways that are startling.  Scorpio’s brand of intuition is sharp, incisive and not easily tracked.  Bond, like Scorpio, has a particular talent for reading the motivations and desires of the people around him.  Scorpio has the instincts of a spy, a person who must always be hyper-aware of his surroundings and the possible presence or actions of the enemy.  If this sounds like paranoia, that’s because it sometimes is—to the detriment of Scorpio individuals who become overly preoccupied with the responses of other people, even to the point of obsession.

Scorpio, like Bond, has passions that run very hot and very cold, with not a lot in between.  I’m reminded of Billy Joel’s lyrics: “darling, I don’t know why I go to extremes.  Too high and too low, there ain’t no in between.”  Joel is an honorary Scorpio, having Pluto (Scorpio’s ruler) squared his Taurus Sun.  And if he doesn’t know why he goes to extremes, it’s probably because no astrologer ever told him to read the Scorpio section in addition to the Taurus one.

But back to James Bond.  Scorpio, like Bond, can be sneaky, secretive and private.  That also goes along with being a spy.  In fact, the Scorpio in us sometimes likes being sneaky for its own sake, purely because it’s fun.  And sometimes just because we feel we have something to hide or protect.

And finally Scorpio, like Bond, we suspect is soft on the inside, but hard on the outside.  This is part of the fascination.  When we see hints of vulnerability or emotion behind that armored exterior, we are intrigued.  We want to know more.  This is why Scorpio is so seductive.

But what is actually going on behind these rumored traits?  What is behind the spy’s mask?  What is it like to be Scorpio?  More on this in my next post.