Look into the dark: a creative toolkit for Scorpio season
Plus, this month's free tarot journal password
Hi little coven, happy Scorpio season.
Before we dive into this creative toolkit for Scorpio, two things:
Upcoming Free Workshop: On November 10th I’m facilitating a tarot journaling workshop about navigating and creating change in our lives with the tarot. This workshop is available for free to everyone. Sign up here, and invite your friends!
Daily Tarot Journal update: every month I pull cards for the whole month ahead and make them available to you through my free digital tarot journal. In true Scorpio fashion, this month’s password is: Death
Intense and cunning, Scorpios are often stereotyped as the Slytherins of the Zodiac. But this sign is only destined to be a villain if the rest of us lazily cast it that way.
The truth is, we all have a lot to learn from Scorpio’s willingness to acknowledge and own the sharp, sanguine edges we all possess on some level.
It’s a skill to be open to darkness — our own, and the world’s. Making space for the scary, sharp things that hide in our depths is part of the rich texture of creative living; it begets self-awareness and empathy, opening the imagination to the full spectrum of possibility — both light and dark.
Consider Scoprian creatives like Robert Maplethorpe, Sylvia Path, and Margaret Atwood whose willingness to look into and reckon with darkness elicited some of their most enduring works.
This season — especially the new moon in Scorpio moment we find ourselves in now — offers an opportunity to acknowledge and own the darkness within us and around us… to dig into our depths and do some Shadow Work.
What we draw out of the depths during this period — what we reckon with — may be uncomfortable, but will also be a source of inspiration and creative depth.
For more Shadow Work resources, check out the Shuffle library, where you’ll find recordings from our Season of Shadow journal club events. Consider also pre-ordering my next book, The Shadow Path, available in all formats (print, ebook, audio) in the UK in Jan 2025. The audiobook (read by me!) will be available globally in Jan 2025, with a US/global print/ebook date forthcoming.
To help us understand, and acknowledge those dark and crucial depths within us, we can look to two Scorpian archetypes: the Scorpion and the Death tarot card.
Scorpio season, and the constellation that rules it, takes its name from the mythic scorpion that stung and killed the Greek hunter Orion. Orion’s own constellation fades out of view in the sky as Scorpio’s rises.
Already, the links between Scorpio and Death have formed: a hunter becomes prey; Death doesn’t discriminate, even heroes have to fall eventually.
The tarot’s imagery speaks to this: as the skeletal, scythed personification of Death advances, it steamrolls over characters we might recognise elsewhere from the tarot: we see the trampled blue coat and fallen crown of a king (I see the King of Cups, or perhaps one of the figures leaping from the Tower). A child in the same blue smock as one of the figures in the 6 of Cups kneels at the mercy of the Death horse’s hoof. The Strength maiden turns her cheek, accepting Death’s blow. Meanwhile, the papal figure, so reminiscent of the Hierophant, tries to bargain. The horse looks ahead, past him: Death comes for us all.
But in the tarot, Death is not the end; it lingers in the middle of the Major Arcana, followed by a new dawn in the Temperance card. And in the Greek myth, the scorpion and the hunter are both reborn as stars.
This season teaches us that confronting Death, looking into darkness is not an ending, a failure, a sealed fate. It’s a necessary new beginning. An illumination. A critical reckoning with what we fear, so that we can understand what sparkling potential lies beyond it.
The story that first enters my mind when I think about scorpions, when I think about death, isn’t the mythic Greek drama, but a fable you might be familiar with:
A scorpion asks a frog to let it ride on its back to cross the river. The frog expresses concern: won’t the scorpion sting and kill him? The scorpion, desperate to cross, promises that he won’t. After all, if the frog dies, the scorpion will drown: it would be a lose-lose. The frog agrees, and halfway across the river, the scorpion stings him. “But you promised not to,” says the frog. “I’m sorry, I can’t help it, it’s just my nature,” replies the scorpion, and they both meet their demise in the river’s depths.
The version of the story above was popularised in the 20th century, apparently thanks to its inclusion in two Russian novels. For decades, it’s been referenced in films, novels, business books, and interpersonal relationship advice. It’s used as a cautionary tale, extrapolated to offer advice along the lines of: “get involved with the wrong person and you’ll pay for it” or “if you sense a threat, don’t ignore your instincts,” or even “some people were just born to be bad.” This brand of guidance manages to be simultaneously victim blame-y (the frog should have known better) and fatalistic: “‘bad’ people never change.”
I’m more interested in a Persian version of the same tale that offers a more complex read on “it’s just my nature”. The scorpion asks a tortoise, not a frog, for a lift across the ocean. Where the scorpion’s nature dooms both the scorpion and the frog, the tortoise’s nature — its protective shell — saves them both.
In this take on the story, we can reconsider how we think about the scorpion’s nature. After all, a scorpion evolved to sting to protect itself, in the same way a tortoise’s shell evolved to protect the tortoise.
When the scorpion kills Orion in Greek legend, the sting is necessary for survival — not only the scorpion’s own, but the ecosystem as a whole: Orion, a famed hunter, was on a mission to prove his prowess by hunting and killing every animal on earth. Some legends say that Gaia, the primordial Earth power pre-dating the gods and the titans, sent the scorpion to kill Orion and end his selfish, destructive, power-hungry hunt.
The truth is that it’s not the scorpion’s ability, or instinct to sting that creates the problem for the frog, the tortoise, or the scorpion itself. It’s the scorpion’s refusal to reckon with its nature. The sting is not the flaw; the ignorance surrounding its potential consequences is.
If, when asked whether he might sting and kill the frog, the scorpion had been willing to deeply consider and reckon with the possible negative outcomes of his instinct, the pair might have approached their collaboration differently. Knowing the sting was a risk, they might have built a raft the frog could pull along, or, asked another more suitable creature for help: say, a tortoise, whose nature better complimented the scorpion’s.
Our baser instincts, dark proclivities, and violent natures are not our problem: our refusal to look at them and be honest with ourselves about how to manage them is. Scorpio season invites us to commune with our nature, to look deeply into ourselves and confront what’s hard to see, so that we can live more honestly, and ultimately, be more kind and generous to ourselves and others.
Creatively, doing the hard work to understand our nature, our sharp parts, our sometimes inconvenient survival instincts, can be a boon to our process.
My own protective sting can manifest as procrastination — my misguided nature tries to save me from the death blow of self-consciousness: I can’t confront work I’m unsatisfied with if I don’t do it in the first place, right?
But knowing this about myself, I can adjust to accommodate it. I don’t go into projects blind, and find myself surprised by my own self-sabotage. I plan to circumvent it (app blocks, short focus sprints, body-doubling), and sometimes, to even honour my procrastinating nature (intentional hours or days off to do nothing).
Beyond the practical benefits of understanding ourselves and our inconvenient, sometimes dangerous parts better so that we can get to work, it’s true too that diving deeper into ourselves, holding space for the negatives seeds the authentic expression that turns creative efforts into real art.
I’ll leave you with the words of Scorpian writer Margaret Atwood, who so perfectly sums up what our dark depths have to offer us, if only we’re willing to look:
I wish to show you the darkness you are so afraid of. Trust me. This darkness is a place you can enter and be as safe in as you are anywhere; you can put one foot in front of the other and believe the sides of your eyes. Memorize it. You will know it again in your own time. When the appearances of things have left you, you will still have this darkness. Something of your own you can carry with you.1
Creative Prompts for Scorpio Season
Use the following prompts as jumping-off points for your own creative exploration of Cencer season. These aren’t homework — try what feels good or interesting to you, and know you have my permission to ignore the rest.
Journal about the scorpion and the Death card
How do these archetypes make you feel?
What memories, desires, and questions, do they bring up for you?
What similarities and differences do you notice between them?
Write your own version of the scorpion and the frog/turtle
Adapt it as freely as you want. You might ive it a new literal translation where the scorpion and the frog or turtle work together before their crossing to acknowledge and prepare for the scorpion’s violent impulse, or write story or script loosely based on the fable, that casts two people in roles adjacent to the scorpion and the frog or turtle.
Reflect on your own “nature” and try to capture your own impulses to sting, to sink, to swim in a visual art piece (the tarot spread featured later in this tool kit may help!)
Use color, collage, or design software - whatever feels right (and creatively compelling) for you
More creative resources for Scorpio season (including a tarot spread, a creative ritual for Scorpio season, a Scorpion playlist & more) are available below for paid subscribers.
If you’d like to dig deeper into what creative gifts Scorpio season has to offer you, and get access to future creative tools for every Zodiac season, you can become a paid subscriber to The Shuffle for just £1/$1.25 a week (annual subscription rate). Subscriber support means that I can keep regular resources like these coming, and continue to focus on developing quality writing & resources at the intersection of spirituality & creativity.