Full Moon in Scorpio:
While You're Making Other Plans
by April Elliott Kent

The Sabian Symbol for this Scorpio Full Moon is "A dentist is hard at work," and I think it speaks eloquently to the deep, difficult, often painful nature of Scorpio and its ruling planet, Pluto. I started going to dentists at the age of five, and I've never feared them. I've been fascinated by the fillings and root canals they've given me; they've saved my teeth, all but one, over and over again. I'm grateful there are people willing to devote their lives to dental search and rescue missions, who can find the evil that lurks in your mouth and fix it - even as they themselves are reviled, feared, and made the butt of jokes.

At this Full Moon in Scorpio, it's a good bet that something in your life has deteriorated, and needs you to play dentist - to drill deep down, removing decay, and rebuild. It will take a little bit of courage, and might not make you particularly happy or popular. It may be a neglected molar that needs your attention, but it might just as well be a relationship that's soured, or a job situation that's grown toxic.

It might even, as I recently discovered, be your pet's rotten diet and beleaguered pancreas that need an intervention.

Since the beginning of the year I've been watching a transit of Pluto opposed my natal Venus with some wariness, waiting for my marriage to collapse and my bank account to vanish. Thankfully, my marriage and income are in good shape. But in my birth chart, Venus rules the sign on the cusp of the 6th house (traditionally the house of health), and while my own health has been better than I deserve, I've certainly seen Pluto's sinister hand at work on my cat, Bodhi. She fell ill with a mysterious ailment that's taken weeks to diagnose. In the end, just last week, the verdict came down on the side of diabetes, almost surely brought on by a lousy diet of (vet-approved) high-carb kibble.

Now my days are a haze of insulin injections, blood glucose tests, high protein diets, and general monitoring of Bodhi's bodily functions. Interestingly, since blood is associated with Mars, Aries and Scorpio, at this Scorpio Full Moon I find myself pricking my poor tabby's ear about six times each day and smearing the blood onto a test strip. My Pluto/Venus transit has manifested after all, in a most unexpected, but astrologically articulate way.

It's ironic that a little creature that was brought into my life to be an undemanding companion would come to require so much help for her day to day existence. Already, my schedule has had to be adjusted to accommodate timely insulin dosages. Certainly, this is small potatoes compared to the other difficulties I feared I'd face during this Pluto transit. But this turn of events has certainly gotten me thinking a lot about people whose lives are overturned, often suddenly, by more serious problems - the diagnosis of a terminal illness, the destructive power of a fire, the death of a loved one killed by a bomb or accident.

As John Lennon once said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." An astrologer might paraphrase that to say that transits - especially transits from the Big Boys, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto - are what happen when you're making other plans. And at the Scorpio Full Moon I'm thinking specifically about the ways Pluto transits can interrupt our lives already in progress. Even the strongest of us have tiny chinks in our armor - cracks through which fear and jealousy and rage can pass and cause infection and decay of the spirit, and portals through which enters the terrible vulnerability of love. It's Pluto's job to find our weak spots, to poke at the termite-bitten infrastructure of our lives and give us a chance to make needed changes before the entire structure falls apart. Pluto transits make us stronger than before, by first exposing what's weak.

This particular Full Moon in Scorpio has a challenging chart, with the Sun in Taurus and Moon in Scorpio in a tight t-square with Mars in Leo; people who are looking for an excuse to get angry will find plenty of opportunities in the next few days. Mars in Leo square the Full Moon represents the catalytic nature of ego, either motivating you to make the changes you need to make, or causing you to dig in your heels and refuse to adapt to new circumstances. But the Sun and Moon also make harmonious aspects to Pluto at this Full Moon, symbolizing the ability to make deep and permanent transformations if we just let go of the need to be right, the need to be in control.

Scorpio symbolizes the mysterious, unseen forces that periodically back us into a corner and force us to transcend a difficult set of circumstances. Most of us live each day in blissful denial of the fact that the landscape of our day-to-day lives, the quality of our characters, all can be changed in the blink of an eye. Sometimes our lives are changed by forces completely beyond our control. But sometimes what appears to be bad fortune, an unfortunate fate, is a consequence of neglect, indulgence, ignorance, or bad choices. It's your job at the Scorpio Full Moon to face the consequences, survey the damage, and change course - to become the person that your life needs you to be.

© 2010 April Elliott Kent
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