Scorpio

SCORPIO

October 24-November 22 Birthdays

Birthstone: Topaz

Best day: Tuesday

Element: Water

Type: Fixed

Your sign is sometimes called "the home of the har­nessed Mars," and this is as good a description as any of the strength, determination, persistence and concentra­tion that are so characteristic of Scorpio. Your controlled energy is so intense that people sometimes find you hard to get along with; and if they are weak they may actual­ly be afraid of you.

You know what you want and you go after it as ruth­lessly as the other Mars-ruled sign, Aries, but your meth­od is better (or worse, depending on the point of view) because you are not put off by opposition. You enjoy meeting obstacles and overcoming them; you can get as much pleasure from the fight as from the final result.

This does not mean that you start a fight for the fun of it, as Aries sometimes does. That would imply an outer direction, even if an aggressive one; you are inner directed, and when you fight you are merely being true to the goal you have decided on in the depths of your subtle nature. You have such energy and power that they have to be expended on something, and by choice, for you, they will be expended on getting over, around or through whatever is keeping you from your goal.

Scorpio is also considered the sign of extremes—either very good or very bad, but nothing halfhearted. One of your worst qualities, harmful to yourself almost more than to anyone else, is that once you have decided some­thing is true you can be extremely bigoted about it, and convincing arguments that are supposed to change your point of view only make you angry but do not move you at alL You have the courage of your convictions to the highest degree; you would rather do yourself serious injury by sticking to what you believe in than take a conciliatory attitude or hide what you truly feel behind a socially approved front. It has been said that the scor­pion, the symbol of your sign, will sting itself to death when surrounded by a ring of fire. You will do the same thing, figuratively speaking, and would rather be a mar­tyr to a cause you believe in than give up and accept an easy, face-saving compromise.

The Scorpio-bom religious reformer Martin Luther is a perfect example of this kind of thinking. Given every opportunity to recant and return to the arms of the Church, he is reputed to have said (and it is true in spirit, though probably untrue in fact), This is what I believe; here I stand." And he refused to budge an inch in his expression of his beliefs, though he knew he was in danger of being burned at the stake for doing so.

This refusal to give up anything that comes into your hands is a Water Sign quality that you share with the other two Water Signs, Cancer and Pisces. It applies to ideas, to people and also to material things and money. With people, you are intensely loyal; once you have made up your mind you like someone you rarely break the attachment completely even when you are separated by circumstances beyond your control. With money, you ding tightly, and it is seldom that a person born with Sun in Scorpio (unless the rest of his horoscope is badly afflicted) will be short of cash. You like to hide small sums of money around the house so it will always be available if needed. You are not apt to give away your possessions, either, and Scorpio children have to be taught to share or they will tend to become very selfish as they grow older.

The two signs of the zodiac most concerned with money are Scorpio and its opposite, Taurus. But while Taurus is the bank teller, who gets a sense of satisfaction out of handling actual cash, Scorpio is the financier who may buy and sell thousands of dollars' worth of securi­ties each day without seeing a penny. Taurus likes to ac­cumulate bit by bit in a savings account; Scorpio likes to play with the idea of money, the power it brings and the ways in which it can be maneuvered.

A fondness for maneuvering, either people, material things or situations, is a basic part of your nature. It was mentioned previously that you are Mars ruled; actually your sign has a double rulership, the other piling planet being Pluto. In Roman mythology Pluto was the god of the underworld, and there is much of this subtle, secre­tive, beneath-the-surface quality in your nature. There­fore your Mars qualities do not operate in the direct manner of Aries, but rather take the form of behind-the-scenes manipulating.

With your shrewd mind you are well able to grasp all the factors of a situation and interweave them in such a way that they wfll work to your advantage. Many Scor-pios enjoy playing bridge, a minor application of this j absorbing and manipulating all the factors in a situation. A more important application of your talent can make you an excellent manager of a business or a political campaign manager.

All Water Signs are intuitive, able to sense what peo­ple are dunking, able instinctively to grasp things be­yond what you actually see, hear and touch. You of Scorpio are as intuitive as either Cancer or Pisces, but, being the Fixed Sign in the water group, your intuition is grounded in a firm sense of reality and is steady, rath­er than coming in upsetting sudden flashes. So you may not even be aware of your intuitive powers, or realize that much of your deep understanding of human nature and reactions is based on instinct rather than conscious reasoning. Whether you realize your powers or not, though, you do use them in your favorite game of ma­nipulating situations to your own advantage.

It is almost impossible for anyone to put anything over on you; you see through them with no difficulty and can sometimes be amazed at the obtuseness of other people in falling for a dishonest scheme that was ob­vious to you from the very beginning. You reinforce your intuitive understanding with an immense patience for going beneath the surface and prying out details. Secretive and not very talkative yourself, you have a great capacity for getting others to talk and revealing more than they intended to.

You never shrink from reality, no matter how ugly. Whatever is hidden beneath the surface, you can find it and drag it out into the light of day. It is this quality that makes Scorpio people the best detectives or investi­gators of any sort. Or this talent for digging beneath the surface can be turned in another direction, to learning tile secrets of the body or mind—in which case you may become a doctor or a psychiatrist.

If your mind turns toward religion or philosophy, you may become a mystic or an occultist, someone who un­derstands that there is far more to the meaning of life than outer appearances would indicate. You are, in any ease,deeply attuned occult influences, since Scorpio rales the Eighth House in the natural horoscope—the boose of death, sex and regeneration.

ft may seem strange that astrology combines sex and death in this way. Actually it is not so strange when you consider each sexual mating as the death of two individ­ual people as they combine into a single whole; then they are born again, or reborn, regenerated and re­newed, through the children who are the result of the sexual union.

Born under the sign of the zodiac most closely connected with sex, Scorpio people are generally virile and magnetic and very attractive to the opposite sex. Oddly enough this does not mean that your chances of being happily married are exceptionally good; as a mat­ter of fact they are not even as good as average, especial­ly for women.

Strong and efficient yourself, you have little patience with others less able to cope with life. You are passion­ate and intense, extremely possessive, and have a great tendency to try to dominate everyone around you. A Scorpio man finds it easier to get a weak and submissive wife who is willing to lean on him; a Scorpio woman may frighten away any man unless he can either match her in strength or is very weak and willing to be domi­nated. Ocassionally she can find an outlet for her strength in intense preoccupation with her career; the great scientist Marie Curie and actresses Katherine Hep­burn and Vivien Leigh represent this type of Scorpio woman.

Yours is the sign of extremes and this is especially true of your attitude toward sex. Depending on the strength or weakness of other parts of your personality, you can either commit all sorts of excesses in your drive for sen­sual gratification, or you can be completely self-sacrific­ing and turn your tremendous drive into a love for hu­manity as a whole. This love can be expressed through a desire to heal physically—as mentioned, Marie Curie was Scorpio bom; so is Dr. Jonas Salk, discoverer of the anti-infantile paralysis vaccine. It can be expressed through spiritual healing—or religion—as in the case of Billy Graham and Martin Luther. The drive sometimes turns strongly toward the arts, with painter Pablo Picas­so, sculptor Auguste Rodin and the great Renaissance sil­versmith Benvenuto Cellini numbered among the Scor­pio-bom people.

 

If you are familiar with the works of those Scorpios who have turned to art as a method of expression you will see that none of them are light, gay, superficially clever. They are thoughtful and deep, demonstrating the strength and power of your sign. Crime and Punishment, the great masterpiece of the Scorpio-bom Russian au­thor Fyodor Dostoevski, is as good a showcase as any­thing ever written of the personality and preoccupations of Scorpio people. In this book the crime, a murder, is almost incidental; the plot follows the murderer through the mental and emotional turmoil he feels about the crime, and his eventual regeneration through suffering to a renewed faith in God and self-sacrifice for his fel­low men.

But not all members of your sign are able to subdue the feelings of the Scorpio nature and turn them by strength of will into assets. The intensity of your feelings makes you develop sudden and fierce likes and dislikes, and, as in everything else, it is very hard to move you once you have made up your mind. If you like someone you can be the best possible friend, generous—even lav­ish—with money, practical help and understanding.

If you dislike someone you can be a terrible enemy, because you do not fight fair; no consideration of ethics or morality keeps you from attacking in any way that can do the other person harm. There is a vengeful streak in the Scorpio nature and always that tendency to ex­tremes; you will not be satisfied merely to get your own back but want utterly to destroy the object of your dis­like. It does not matter to you if the original quarrel was over a trivial difference of opinion; once someone has of­fended you, even if they soon forget it, yon will keep after diem relentlessly, doing them all the harm you can in any way you can.

One of your weapons in any fight is a biting sarcasm that stings like the scorpion which is your symbol. Gen­erally you do not talk much, are reserved and taciturn and have difficulty expressing your feelings. When you do talk, your conversation is honest, frank, brief and to the point, occasionally humorous. But when you are angry the honesty and frankness can become a brutal at­tack on your enemy's weaknesses, and you usually say things that, for the maintenance of good relationships would be better left unsaid. It hardly matters to your purposes, though, since you do not forgive easily and do not get rid of your grudge by putting it into words.

At times when you are not angry, most of your feel­ings are beneath the surface and you want to keep them there. You despise gushiness, sentimentality or demonstrativeness of any land, and are not inclined to talk about yourself much. People who chatter a lot, and who like to share every thought and feeling, can be very trying to your nerves. When other people have a real problem you can be very sympathetic and helpful, and you are excellent at keeping secrets; but you are not very receptive to the kind of person who tells everyone his troubles or who complains all the time.

CAREER POSSIBILITIES

Your unusual energy and shrewdness, your practical, realistic viewpoint and your talent for digging beneath the surface make the fields in which you can be success­ful many and varied. As mentioned previously, Scorpios make good detectives and investigators of all kinds, and often find use for this talent in the police department, in government agencies and in private industry—as insurance company investigators or department store detec­tives, for instance.

If your talent for investigation tarns to science, you can fit in such vocations as doctor, psychiatrist, dentist or archaeologist. Or you may want to turn your tremen­dous energy to seeking truth by patient research in chemistry, bacteriology, pathology or countless other fields.

Your shrewdness plus an inborn intuition for handling money make you excellent in any financial vocation. You are especially good at handling other people's money, and can be a banker, trust officer, estate manager, in­vestment broker or auctioneer.

With Mars ruler ship, you are bound to have some con­nection with the army; and Scorpio's talent for seeing all factors of a situation and appraising them shrewdly makes you an ideal army commander. General George Patton and President Theodore Roosevelt, who first won fame in the Spanish-American War, are both Scorpio born.

You may be interested in mechanics, in any capacity that allows you to use your practical mind and your Mars-ruled talent for handling machinery. Since Scor­pio's other ruler, Pluto, rules things of the dead, you might also want to be a funeral director or embalmer.

In public affairs you do not do very well, since your manner is not diplomatic and you do not know the meaning of compromise. You do not often seek public office for yourself in any case, preferring to stay out of the limelight; you may, however, be as resourceful a campaign manager as you are an army commander. The two require the same sort of skills, and you are a master of them.

HEALTH

As a rule you enjoy excellent health; the typical Scor­pio is not wiry, lithe and active but strong, muscular and enduring. Ton arq as powerful in resisting physical and mental strain as in anything else; you can do as much work as would make a half dozen ordinary people drop from exhaustion and normally your health will not suffer from it.

When you do get sick your practical realism makes you take immediate and, if necessary, drastic measures. If surgery will help you are in favor of it, since you want to get the problem over with once and for all If surgery is not called for you will attack the problem in other ways with characteristic energy and concentration; you will go to bed, get a doctor and use any remedy he sug­gests. Usually your fight against illness is as successful as any of your other combats.

Scorpio rules the organs of reproduction, the digestion and all internal secretions of the body, and it is from these sources that your health may suffer. The most im­portant thing you have to beware of is a toxic condition •of any of the organs dealing with these secretions, since this can produce diseases that can make even your strong physique collapse.

Fortunately, you do not have to be warned to take care of your health, since you do that instinctively; and your powers of recuperation are exceptionally good. Generally speaking, Scorpio people have few health problems and can look forward to living to a ripe old age with no troublesome chronic diseases to worry about.

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

You have strong likes and dislikes, and this plus your shrewd realism make it unlikely that you will get in­volved in an unsuitable match. It is said that Scorpio people often recognize the person they will fall in love with the moment they meet him or her, but if this is so the attraction must be based on an infallible instinct.You do not fall in love on the basis of looks alone, as Libra, for instance, often does.

On the other band, Scorpio marriages are often unhap­py ones. You are intense and jealous and find it difficult to forgive an injury. You do not want to be married to someone who gives in all the time, yet you uncon­sciously try to run the lives of everyone around you and your marital partner may have to fight to retain his or her individuality—or may simply walk out on you. You are very demanding, wanting to know everything about the other person, but you are often uncommunicative about yourself.

If you do find a marriage partner with whom you can get along, or if you can manage to keep your more ex­cessive emotions under control, you can make a very ro­mantic husband or wife. All your thoughts are focused on the partner, with home and children distinctly sec­ondary. You are intensely passionate; you are faithful and do not give up a relationship easily, and if the mar­riage is failing for any reason that you can cure you will go to great lengths to do so.

An individual horoscope is necessary to determine the proper marriage partner for any particular person, but generally speaking you would find your most suitable mates in the other Water Signs, Cancer and Pisces, who can match you in emotional depth and surpass you in unselfishness, or the Earth Signs, Capricorn, Taurus and Virgo, whose deep, quiet devotion and commonsense stability is soothing to your intense nature.

The Air Signs, Libra, Aquarius and Gemini, would find you too demanding, and you would find them rather superficial and overly interested in talk and ideas; Gemini types are especially annoying to you. With the Fire Signs, Aries, Leo and Sagittarius, it would be a fight for dominance all the way, which one or both of you would soon tire of.