Outcast Incarnate
Hypomaniacally tying together recent igthemes, it occurs to me that the transition from Libra to Scorpio has to do with casting out. In the case of Neptune's transit through Libra, the dream of victory of one alliance over another 'axis' underscored the need to group together to act as one. In the alliance mode, individual states, like organs or cells, retain their individuality supposedly while acting in concert harmoniously. Under fascism, the states are theoretically absorbed...Borg'd together under the dominating central ethos.
As the victory in the West began to foment the Beat generation whose culture begat the Hippies, the Eastern culture closed their iron curtain and kicked off an era of secrecy and surveillance - met by our own McCarthyite hysteria and Cold War monster culture. UFO's, The Blob, The Red Menace; it's all about keeping ourselves and each other in line, about conformity and heretics.
I was thinking about the wich/witch thing, and although it appears to be only a homonym, the idea of Lot's wife being turned to a pillar of salt in defiance of God's order not to look back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, seems directly wiccaphobic. Defy the Patriarch with independent thought and interest in wicked things...in sex for pleasure and autonomy and you are toast, bitch.
Another bible connection from the etymology of the word witch: In a c.1250 translation of "Exodus," witches is used of the Egyptian midwives who save the newborn sons of the Hebrews: "Ðe wicches hidden hem for-ðan, Biforen pharaun nolden he ben." Similar themes, only this time women who are doctors are referenced in a positive light, but again in the context of the Exodus story...a kind of positive casting out.
Scorpio is the sign of both the asshole, the cock, and the cunt...of shit and cum. What it can't use for pleasure or immortality, it gets rid of. It can be said that Scorpio personalities tend toward the saintly or Satanic, as it's symbols of the Eagle and Scorpion (serpent) connote. Scorpio has to do with incarnation and mortality. Things like masks and Jack O'Lanterns illustrate the embodiment of the disowned aspects of self. Jung of course was very into literal masks as revealing archetypes (persona, from the Latin for mask).
So all these themes are floating around, integration of the shadow with society, fitting into it with your persona, the idea of banishment and concealment, witches, witchdoctors, masks, midwives, Exodus and Jews (there's a whole village vibe too - shtetl and pogrom, Frankenstein, small town innocence vs cosmopolitan corruption), birth and carnality, sex and death, Hell and the Devil, sin, outlaws, witch hunts and puritanism, purgatory...
(from this page) - The 'ego' which identifies with the 'Self' becomes inflated, dangerously 'God-like'. It will project its own irrational shadow onto others and identify them as evil. Jung regarded the mass psychosis of Hitler's Nazi Germany and its genocidal atrocities as occurring because the German 'ego' became inflated through its identification with the pure Aryan race and projected its collective shadow onto the Jews.
I never even knew the folklore behind Jack of the Lantern:
...his life had been too sinful for Jack to go to heaven; however, the Devil had promised not to take his soul, and so he was barred from Hell as well. Jack now had nowhere to go. He asked how he would see where to go, as he had no light, and the Devil mockingly tossed him an ember that would never burn out from the flames of hell. Jack carved out one of his turnips (which was his favourite food), put the ember inside it, and began endlessly wandering the Earth for a resting place. He became known as "Jack of the Lantern", or Jack-o'-Lantern.
The pumpkin with a face is literally a three dimensional mask, revealing the shadow incarnated in, and carved out of flesh. The light of consciousness radiates from within, forming the immortal face of the concealed character, half humor and half horror. It also has simulacra aspects - the superimposed image as in puppetry (simulacra are also the visual artifacts of apophenia - faces in wood patterns or religious icons in grilled cheese sanwiches).
from the same page: "Since it was man's unfitness - his being an outcast and an outsider on this planet - which started him on this unique course, it should not seem anomalous that misfits and outsiders are often in the forefront of human endeavour and the first to grapple with the unknown. The impulse to escape an untenable situation often prompts human beings not to shrink back, but to plunge ahead; moreover it is in accord with the uniqueness of the human pattern that the misfits of the species should try to fit in, not by changing themselves, but by changing the world "