Welcome to the first instalment in my Scorpio Season series, where I will be exploring the deconstruction of traditional Catholicism and what it means for me as a woman, sharing insights that are not making it into the Hierophant chapter of the book I’m writing.
At present I have 3 themes, one for each Sunday after Oct 23rd leading up to the first anniversary with the Sagittarius newsletter. It may change as things come to me in the process, so just keep the specifics loosely.
A beautiful friend of Irish descent gifted my ex-husband and I a year of intentions at the shrine of Our Lady of Knock and, it may surprise you since I’m writing this 5 months away from being able to apply to the courts for a conditional declaration of divorce, but it still is one of my favourite wedding gifts.
The reason for that is that it showed a deep consideration for the spiritual component of a marriage. One that was deeply lacking despite my best attempts, but that it’s still deeply meaningful to me.
As I journey towards a deeper understanding of the realm of sacred sexuality (Scorpio Moon challenge, learn a word other than deep…), which was already a big part of my spirituality at the time as I learnt about the theology of the body and idealised what my wedding night (that never came, while I chose a divorce in the civil courts I am eligible for an annulment) would unleash, it becomes clear to me that I was seeking the same thing all along.
The Catholic understanding is that the sacrament of marriage would sanctify the bodily union, rather than the bodily union sanctifying the people involved by facilitating the access to higher states of consciousness as it’s the case for other traditions, but the underlying craving that both approaches seek to satisfy in me is a craving for a deeper meaning of the human experience.
A craving still to be satisfied, although there are ways in which I have started to shift, but the “failure” of my marriage to meet my expectations of divine union is one pain that I carry among the others, although perhaps not one that most people would think is important when looking at all the other scars left by this battle.
I started this musing with Our Lady of Knock because, if you have ever seen the iconography based on the description of the apparition, Mary looks like a Celtic goddess. And that’s unsurprising, in my knowledge of apparitions there is always an element of inculturation that speaks to the people of the specific land. Our Lady of Walsingham looks like a Medieval English Queen, Our Lady of Guadalupe looks like an indigenous Mexican woman, etc.
A sceptic might think that all the prayers from the religious community at this place of pilgrimage for over 140 years did not work. After all, the marriage fell apart pretty much from the get-go (or even before it happened), and the bride is writing a Substack talking about the mother of Jesus in reference to the Triple Goddess in a whole other religion.
And I don’t mean to do so in a way that is disrespectful of anyone’s beliefs, just one that shows how much of the rhythm of being a woman survived across cultures. The Triple Goddess is a reference to the stages of life of Maiden, Mother, and Crone.
We know from the gospels that Mary was a maiden and then a mother, and then a matriarch of the early church in the Acts of the Apostles. It is easy to see why she remained an example of the highest potential of womanhood for over 2000y even if fully human, just a vessel for the divine to dwell like the Arc of the Covenant.
But I’m experimenting with the idea that things happen for me and not to me, and so what if the prayers of this devout community brought me to where I was meant to be?
Like many Catholics, I have always had a soft spot for Mama Mary, although I’d often feel a disconnect with the way others appeared to venerate her so much they made all the accusations protestants threw at us become true. But I had a huge heart for talking about Mary to people in denominations where appreciation of her example of femininity had fallen by the wayside in favour of exalting male saints and preachers.
I used to own a necklace themed after the Magnificat. I think I donated it a while back in hope it’d find its way to a devout Catholic who'd wear it with pride. The prayer it references holds a bittersweet place in my heart nowadays.
On the one hand, it’s a delightful expression of Mary’s own pure mystical devotion, which I love. On the other hand, it signifies an impossible standard of humility that I have suffered from being unable to reach.
At my core, I am a selfish being, and the promise of grace transforming me in the grandiose way that the Apostle Paul recounted in his writings never manifested into my life. Unless you see this witchy expression of myself as a transformation from grace healing the depths of my suffering, I won’t dismiss that argument if you make it.
Lately, I have been meditating on the Gene Keys as some sort of secular mystical writings (thanks to Spotify Premium making the audiobook available in the UK earlier this month).
The theme of humility came to me as I sat with my Core (or Vocation) key in the Venus and Pearl sequences (which TLDR are the paths to love and prosperity). In Human Design it’s my Unconscious Mars, 25.5.
If having a core wound was not bad enough, I have the core wound. The gate of The Spirit of the Self, which is in Pisces, in the G-centre (our core identity and direction in life), and in the Gene Keys it’s the path from the shadow of contraction to the siddhi of Universal Love.
The Catholic symbolism is deep with this siddhi, that is the “frequency band relating to full embodiment and spiritual realisation”, as it’s nicknamed The Chalice and the Rose. And the time of the year where the sun transits this gate is around the Spring Equinox, and so Lady’s Day, the Annunciation.
The I Ching 25th hexagram is “Innocence – The Unexpected.”
When the movement (Thunder) follows the law of Heaven, man is innocent and without guile … starting out with the idea of the natural, the train of thought in part goes somewhat further and thus the hexagram includes also the idea of the unintentional or unexpected … in springtime when thunder, life energy, begins to move again under the heavens, everything sprouts and grows … innocence frees itself from mistakes.
The wisdom of the I Ching universalises the experience that Christians hold to have been unique to that one human girl in the town of Nazareth. An experience that involved a key player of the story of the 25th Gene Key, breath. Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit. Ruach ha-kodes. Holy breath. A word that in Hebrew is both the masculine and the feminine.
In the Babylonian Talmud, it is both Divine Inspiration and Divine Voice. It is believed that it was the presence of god in Mary that prompted the utterance that we repeated as the Magnificat. Magnificat anima mea, magnificat dominum et exsultavit spiritus meus in deo. Of course it continues on a path that I can’t, in good conscience, recite myself, but my soul still finds resonance with the first sentence.
What if, what if, my soul magnifies the divine after all? The shadow of the 25th Gene Key is constriction, and I know from sitting in front of therapists for years by now that I have a tendency to breathe shallowly even if I trained to sing in a choir, so I know how to breathe in the diaphragm. This shadow is the shadow that underlies all of our core wounds as humans, the illusion of separation that the mystics tell us is a byproduct of the mind. It is one of the keys in the Ring of Humanity, our Hero’s Journey from woundedness to triumph, of which I’m only missing 2 keys out of 6.
It’s extremely uncomfortable for me to write this. All the old conditioning about humility, and how true saints have awareness of their lowliness so any thoughts of being on this planet for a purpose is vainglory and therefore a sin, is flooding back to me. I’m typing, so not using my throat, and yet it’s constricted and my breath is being held. But if we are just the divine having a human experience, as many spiritual traditions hold that we are, then, it doesn’t matter.
One thing that used to annoy the hell out of my ex-husband is my tendency to give others the benefit of the doubt. While he’d be huffing and puffing and whining about how people are idiots for every behaviour that is a minimal inconvenience in the grand scheme of things, attaching all sorts of narratives to the motivations of why someone would act the way they did, I’d usually be compassionate about it. We don’t know what battles people are facing every day, and why they are crossing the red light or whatever, and even if we did does it even matter?
So it’s not like I’m in my villain era, as much as I like to claim I am. I’m simply adjusting to being able to have a worldview where my kindness is conditionally given based on my capacity to hold space energetically for others, and not out of fear for the eternal future of my soul. And where unconditional love does not mean an excuse for others to abuse me, but a deep acceptance of what it means to be human in its pain and in its glory, no need for something external to ourselves to grant us a gold star for being good. The hero and the villain all have a role to play on the stage of life, and often in one plot line we’re one and in another we’re the other, and even the hero is more like an anti-hero anyway.
Acceptance is humility, that is being grounded in the deeper knowledge of our intrinsic worthiness no matter what role we are cast to play at any one time. If we’re the lead we take it with an open heart, if we’re in the chorus we do the same. If it’s the villain, how great that we get to explore the fullness of the human condition. It is my not so humble opinion, as a mostly Earth placements Pluto-ruled person, that the language took the wrong meaning out of being “of the earth”.
It’s perhaps amusing, in retrospective, to see how much death has always been a key component of my spiritual practice, in all the forms it has taken over the years. But death is the moment in our life when we most clearly remember that we, too, are part of Nature, and to Nature we will return. The practitioner of magic simply takes this being a part of nature as the basis of thaumaturgy, manipulating the world around us. Rather than debasement, it is our exaltation to remember that we are humans, that we have both body and soul, and a creative life-force that is both ours and our connection to something bigger than ourselves.
Scorpio Season has all the themes that are seen as taboo in our society: death, sexuality, transformation, the occult, things we must leave behind. Such is Nature herself. It teaches us that humility, in its purest sense, is detachment. How little do petty things matter when every day could be your last, and the future isn’t as much of a given as we delude ourselves it is.