Full Moon in Scorpio
aka the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Moon plus one-card tarot draws for each sign
We break things down and forget to tempt them whole again. We deconstruct, critique, analyze; we dose ourselves on “analysis,” fearful of repair, because to repair risks being broken, shocked, terribly surprised.
But “because there can be terrible surprises, there can be good ones,” writes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the final chapter of Touching Feeling. “Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments … she encounters or creates.”
Whenever the Full Moon in Scorpio rolls around, I pull out all my Sedgwick texts and pile them on the floor like an occasion, an altar, a specific point of praise for this ancient-reviled Moon. Sedgwick was born on a Full Moon in Scorpio: Sun in Taurus in the Eleventh, Moon in Scorpio in the Fifth. Her academic, pedagogical, popular, and spiritual work turns on the idea that our shame of the hidden—our not wanting to be “caught out” in our naïvetés, our illnesses, our pleasures, our desires, in any way—can actually be what moves us to connection and wholeness, never mind to intellectual and political bravery.
Weary of Foucauldian nihilism and the academic and popular left’s degeneration into a suspicious mass of intellectuals who achieved name recognition based on their ability to run culture, literature, and art through a post-structuralist meat-grinder, Sedgwick spent much of her final decade insisting on the necessity of doing away with what we’ve come to know today, in its most online form, as the “hate read,” or what Sedgwick deems “paranoid reading” at the expense of pleasure, repair, and amelioration:
What makes pleasure and amelioration so “mere?” Only the exclusiveness of paranoia’s faith in demystifying exposure: only its cruel and contemptuous assumption that the one thing lacking for global revolution, explosion of gender roles, or whatever, is people’s (that is other people’s) having the painful effects of their oppression, poverty, or deludedness sufficiently exacerbated to make the pain conscious (as if otherwise it wouldn’t have been) and intolerable (as if intolerable situations were famous for generating excellent solutions.
I’m thinking, of course, of the silence of tenured professors—many of them super-star promulgates of postcritical, paranoid reading—as their students are arrested for seeking repair, solidarity with Gazans suffering under the genocide. (Here’s
’s excellent essay about this).I’m thinking, too, about the remonstrations against the Scorpio Moon in all the ancient texts—al-Tabari said that individuals with the moon “growing in light” in Scorpio either suffered from or often cast the “evil eye,” Dorotheus said that sailors who set sail under a Scorpio Moon would be safe from external harm but would be besieged by “a fear of what is only confined to their souls,” and, in general, the Scorpio Moon is considered to be in its fall, too intense and poisonous to really provide the nourishment and care the Moon usually signifies in an individual chart.
These interpretations certainly bring a kind of paranoid reading of life, experience, the body to the fore. The Scorpio Moon does tend to inculcate a particular obsession with or fear over exposure. Several years ago, when I was first reading for people from my paranoid, windowless office in Andrews Hall at the University of Nebraska, it occurred to me that clients with a lot of Scorpio placements often approached their chart readings either hoping that we wouldn’t tread too deeply into certain topics or else came ready to bear all with an erudite air of relentless self-critique, as if by tearing themselves down demonstrably in front of me, they’d save themselves the feelings of having someone else catch them out on something they hadn’t considered.
Sedgwick’s model of repair offers another way for the Scorpio Moon today, and in general. It trucks not in exposure but in revelation. In wonder. In risking shame and fear, because, contrary to popular internet memes, these affects arise whenever we’ve created conditions for pleasure, truth, and bravery in our lives. “Only a scene that offers you enjoyment or engages your interest can make you blush,” Sedgwick writes. “Similarly, only something you thought might delight or satisfy can disgust.”
Wishing you the pleasure of being next to another body this week, for whatever reason. Wishing you the bravery that risks shame and disgust. Here’s to good surprises, too.
Below are one-card tarot draws for the Scorpio Full Moon, you can use them as guidance for the next two weeks or six months, depending on how you want to work with the lunar cycle. By the way, now that we’re almost to the end of April, how’d your tarotscope match up with your month? Let me know in the comments!
Taurus Rising: Seven of Wands It’s tempting to take the easy way out. Better to be like Odysseus—his “tricks” of the tongue were built out of years of hard-won learning and relationships. A little prayer and poetry, too. Eucalyptus oil on the neck will help you speak truth as Mercury stations direct this Thursday.