Sun enters Scorpio

The Sun enters Scorpio once a year, in late October, and stays about a month, until late November.

The Sun is the vital principle: will, the creative drive, the need to exist fully and to be recognised for it. Its sign colours the self, and its house shows where in life a person most comes alive. It gives strength of character, loyalty, truthfulness and fearlessness. It also gives pride: the wish to dominate and always be at the centre, until a self that answers only to itself ends up alone. In transit the Sun acts as a timer. Each natal planet it reaches, and each house it crosses, receives a charge.

Scorpio is water, fixed and negative. Its theme is transformation, change reached by going down into physical and emotional life. It would rather live one thing fully than touch many lightly. It digs into a problem or a person until it reaches the bottom, which ties it to research, investigation and psychotherapy. Because it is fixed, its feelings run deep, resist being put into words, and fade slowly. Its traditional ruler is Mars. Modern practice sets Pluto beside Mars as co-ruler, and we read Pluto as a second colour for the sign: change that grows out of the thing changing, and the question of power.

Put together, the will of the Sun enters water that does not move easily. Any planet in Scorpio tends to become an agent of transformation and to act with emotional intensity. The Sun, as the centre of the self, carries that into the whole person.

At its strongest, this placement gives intensity of purpose and a presence felt before a word is spoken. It brings a sharp sense of right and wrong, the power to rise again after every reverse, and a readiness to stand up for the weak. Turned the other way, the same will dominates. It repays ill for ill, and, misread, it falls silent. Scorpio's name for vengefulness is larger than it deserves: the sign is slow to anger, and what looks like a grudge is often feeling that takes longer than most to leave.

In the kabbalistic reading, the Sun stands at Tiphereth, the heart of the Tree. That is the centre of consciousness, and its work is to carry its harmony into everyday life. Scorpio carries the letter Nun and the faculty of smell.

Pluto's kind of intensity turns dangerous when it serves only the self. What this pairing asks, then, is to put its depth and persistence at the service of something larger than oneself: a group, a piece of work, people who need a champion.