The star sign Scorpio

Scorpio is the eighth sign of the zodiac, from 23 October to about 21 November.

Where it belongs

• Element: water — cold and moist, receptive
• Mode: fixed — in the middle of a season, holding
• Ruler: Mars (classical). The modern assignment to Pluto dates from the twentieth century.
• Fall of the Sun? No — but the Moon is in fall, and Venus in detriment.

The combination explains the character of the sign better than any description does: water gives the sensitivity, the fixed mode the holding on, Mars the sharp cut. A sign that takes things in deeply, does not let go, and cuts sharply all the while.

That Venus is in detriment here and the Moon in fall belongs to the picture: softness and the urge to even things out have a hard time of it in this sign.

What has been handed down

Persistence, depth, mistrust, a long memory; the capacity to bear what is unpleasant, and the tendency not to forget it. In the older literature Scorpio belongs among the violent signs — a technical classification used in the interpretation of violent death, which says nothing about the people born under it.

On the question of the “most powerful sign”

There is none.

Astrology knows no ranking of the signs. It knows the strength of a planet in a sign — Mars in Scorpio is strong, Venus there is weak — and it knows the strength of a planet by house and condition. The sign itself is neither powerful nor weak; it is a section of thirty degrees.

The notion of the powerful Scorpio comes from the popular literature of the twentieth century and has no counterpart in the technique.

And the sun sign alone

It is the position of a single planet. Six others, the ascendant and the twelve houses belong with it — and a person with the Sun in Scorpio and the ascendant in Libra has little in common with the usual description of Scorpio.

See also: all twelve signs, the planets.