The confusion/vexation surrounding Scorpios stems from not understanding their core motivation which is to touch the Infinite. Scorpios relentlessly pursue clues to the universal mystery.

Our intensity and many behaviors stem from this compulsion to find Infinity.

I'm in a constant search for synchronicity which I define as the Universe whispering in one's ear.

Take for example astrology's eighth house, home to Scorpio. How curious is it that the number '8'  placed sideways is the symbol for infinity? I don't know the history of how how scorpio and the eighth house became linked or how the symbol '8' stands for eight or how somebody settled on a sideways eight to represent infinity, but in my view of the world it all fits deliciously well together.

This is lucious writing!  Of course we do.  What other reason for being is there?????????

"I don't know the history of how how scorpio and the eighth house became linked ..."

Greeks, and therefore Romans, celebrated the beginning of the year on the vernal equinox (roughly Apr 21, like the sun moving into Aries).  Count forward to OCTober -- eight months, right?  Seems logical to me, and the Greeks were inordinately fond of logic.

One time I was standing on the side of a high hill that was flooded in sunshine and caressed by a gentle breeze, looking down on a huge lake whose surface was like glass and I was all alone so I sang a prayer song in our language and . . . the world just stopped and let me look and look and look, and I saw for the first time in my life how each of us really is an integral and necessary part of the web of life, that indeed there are sparkling lines of energy that connect every living thing one to the other, and how just one action on our part (singing a prayer song and really meaning it and offering it up with a true joy and a heart full of gratitude, say, as opposed to just going through the motions) can make that web vibrate with stillness and a doorway opens up and lets you look and look and gain a new understanding.  All you need to do is change your wavelength, it's like switching stations on a radio.  For me, joy and gratitude are what makes the radio's tuning knob move.

I don't think I was ever more alive than I was at that moment, and yet there have been other times when I experienced the same exact thing in other circumstances, to me that's one of the things that makes me keep on searching for the Infinity you're writing about, Julian.  I have Moon and Ascendant in Scorpio and it seems like the older I get the more I'm in tune with those features of my chart and less in others, like my Leo Sun.  Weird.

I tried to communicate what that experience felt like one time, saw my listener tuning out and gave up.  It's nice to write this here knowing it will be understood.

Hi Julian - cool topic!

The figure eight on it's side (the cosmic lemniscate) is the symbol for infinity (eternity) because that is the path of the sun traced on the eastern horizon as it moves throughout the year (aka the analemma). Basically if you took a picture at the same spot everyday of the sun at the moment of sunrise, you will notice that the sun moves its position through the year and the seasons, being highest at summer, lowest at winter and also shifting east/west, because the earth's axis is tilted and its orbit around the sun is not circular. If you superimposed all the pictures together, the suns path is the sideways eight. Over and over, year after year...thus eternity, infinity. Thoughtcha might like the poetic perfection of this - I always have found it very moving.

http://www.uwm.edu/~kahl/Images/Weather/Other/analemma.html

a rare picture of the phenomena described above

OMG, PON1ES!1!!!1!!1!!!!!1!

Vajra, that is so amazingly cool and a fabulous piece of trivia.  I can see myself using "analemma" regularly from now on...  *lol*

Analemma + Ouroboros + Mobius = holy crap we've found (thought up) lots of infinite things!

SaDiablo I LOVE the Ouroboros, lol! (No, seriously, I do. Obsessively.) And the Mobius, yeah man, infinity in two dimensions rocks

When I was three, before I even knew what it was and waaay before tattoos were mainstream, I decided I wanted a tattoo of two snakes intertwined biting each others' tails around my left wrist when I grew up.  Later, I learned the easiest way to describe this was "a dual Ouroboros in an infinity (now analemma! *lol*) weave."

Still have yet to get it (financial constraints), but it's always going to be the first tat I get.

Peppermint, beautiful post. I grew up in the Dakotas and can relate to your experience. You feel Native American to me, yes? (sorry if the term offends you, my Sioux friends used to point out to me that they weren't American or Indian).

Vajra, yes poetic perfection. I created this post months ago and nothing happened. I was just waiting. Your explanation is the piece I was missing i.e, a lemniscate is the elliptical orbit of a celestial body. Of course...

As a kid I'd create large figure eights on the frozen stock ponds we ice skated on in the winter. I always wondered why we automatically selected that shape.

SaDiablo, thanks for picking up on this. Beautiful symmetry.

NP, Julian.  It's always interesting and welcome to think about connections like this.  As you can guess, I was a big James Burke fan when he was on.  *lol*

Because of the way they teach history here in the US, it's really only been in the past couple of years that certain things "clicked" for me.  For example, part of the Puritan distaste for plays and drama was directly related to Shakespeare's plays and the robust (and ribald) humor he wrote.  Makes sense now (if anything the Puritans did can), but until I made the connection it was just a "Huh" kinda thing.  :)

JulianWinter have you ever noticed the "spiral"? It's everywhere. Ancient petroglyphs like this one that I have been to in Arizona:

http://www.womanastronomer.com/Signal_Hill_Spiral_1.jpg

You can see them in galaxies, hurricanes, shells etc. I see them everywhere.

Yes, the spiral appears to be a universal motion. It seems that every object as it degrades or loses energy follows a spiral path. It's some variation of orbiting a center and falling inward like into a black hole or the flight of a moth into the flame.

I'm reading guys and I just can't get enough. Please go on....

The Celtic spiral is one of my favorite images. Very important symbol to the druids.

The spiral in nature comes from the Golden Section aka Golden Ratio

 http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMT669/Student.Folders/Frietag.Mark/Homepage/Goldenratio/image19.gif

 which is the perfect proportion found in everything aethetically pleasing, from a beautiful face to the interlocking spirals in the seeds of a sunflower head. It has been utilized in the construction of the pyramids and most of the great artists of history have consciously used the ratio in the composition of the world's best know paintings (for example DaVinci's Last Supper)

I did a painting using two mirror image golden ratios, of phoenixes, called Guardians of the Pylon II

http://docs.google.com/File?id=dhc55v32_1cn9678dg_b

I tried inserting it to a google doc as I don't have online photo storage set up & can't load picasa at work. Hope it works!

I also think Metatron's Cube is way cool:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metatron%27s_Cube#Metatron.27s_Cube

It is formed from 13 (my favorite number) interlocking circles and contains two dimensional (flattened) versions of all of the platonic solids. It is a component of the ancient symbol the Flower of Life.

I did another painting Guardians of the Pylon I with Foo dogs, based on two grids of metatron's cube. Don't think I have a pic to post at the moment tho.

Anyway I could talk sacred geometry all day but I'll spare you all cause I may be going on. Tis one of my absolute favorite things.

BTW SaDiablo I love your tattoo idea. If I were to ever get one, it would be something like that! I love serpentine things. I'm not a Scorpio but I have chart ruler in the 8th conjunct pluto, and neptune in scorpio on the MC, so I can relate to the energy I guess.

peppermint your comment made me cry. in a very good way. thanks for starting this discussion, julian.

BTW forgot to mention that the golden mean that creates spirals in nature comes from the Fibonacci sequence which starts with 0 & 1 and then each number is the sum of the two numbers before it (0,1,1,2,3,5,8...)

This sequence determines galaxies, spirals, nautilus shells, sunflower seed heads, and even...the sex of bees!

from Wiki:

The bee ancestry code
Fibonacci numbers also appear in the description of the reproduction of a population of idealized bees, according to the following rules:

If an egg is laid by an unmated female, it hatches a male.
If, however, an egg was fertilized by a male, it hatches a female.
Thus, a male bee will always have one parent, and a female bee will have two.

If one traces the ancestry of any male bee (1 bee), he has 1 female parent (1 bee). This female had 2 parents, a male and a female (2 bees). The female had two parents, a male and a female, and the male had one female (3 bees). Those two females each had two parents, and the male had one (5 bees). This sequence of numbers of parents is the Fibonacci sequence.[43]

This is an idealization that does not describe actual bee ancestries. In reality, some ancestors of a particular bee will always be sisters or brothers, thus breaking the lineage of distinct parents.

I love me some sacred geometry and Celtic knotwork!  Although I'm fascinated by it, I've never been able to "see" the patterns, even when I know about them.

For instance, one of my favorite Tool songs, Lateralus, uses the fibonnaci sequence: video and wiki.  Of course, Tool is totally progressive math metal, so...  *laughs*

But Celtic knotwork is just entrancing.  I can get lost drawing and coloring them, it's like a personal mandala.

Excellent painting, Vajra!  I'd love to see v2 with the Foo dogs. 

SaDiablo - thank you for posting that video! I always loved that song, and never knew that! Tool rocks!

"progressive math metal" - nice!

http://labyrinthlocator.com/locate-a-labyrinth-results?action=locate&country=&state=TN

World-Wide Labyrinth Locator

Wow, thanks for this great post, Julian, and to you too, Vajra, SaDiablo and Vespa Chick, for sharing what you know about sacred geometry - very deep and fascinating.  And wow also to Vajra about your painting, I just wanted to flow right into it!  Beautiful.

Fibonacci numbers, Celtic knotwork, Metatron's cube, these are new things for me which I know I'll enjoy investigating.

And yes, Julian, I'm Native and no, I'm not offended.  I usually refer to myself by stating the name of my tribe, but refrain from doing so here because it might mess up my anonymity (Scorp. Moon/Asc., and you know we like our anonymity!).  And I know you're from the Dakotas if you skated figure-eights on a frozen stock pond!  And it is cool how kids instinctively know to do that.  And how cool is it that a post you wrote on synchronicity some time ago just sort of germinated until the synchronicity was right for it to come to life?  Amazing, that's all I can say.

But to take the sacred geometry further, or to bring it home, as it were:

Where I live (and probably where you live too, if it's where folks who have an earth-based spirituality once/still live(d) and/or practice it) there are lots of sacred places that our ancestors made, like the ones Tam spoke of, that are marked by spirals, effigies, circles, and I've even seen one that looks like Metatron's cube!  Each of these have a specific sacred purpose, and I was taught that the ones we have around home here are connected to the constellations too (as above, so below).  Makes me wish I had one of those power-packs I could wear on my back and fly all over around here, so I can see them and how they're connected.  As it is, I just walk them and look and look.

And kashmiri, thanks for what you said.  I know what you mean.  Just for the symmetry (no pun intended) of the thing, here's how that song loosely translates:  "I am standing here just the way that I am ... I am standing here and I am praising, all over the universe" 

Thanks to all of you. This post developed into far more than I could've imagined. The Guardians of the Pylon II is one of the coolest images I've encountered in a long time. I really like it.

I hope Elsa knows she's created a beautiful 'watering hole' with this blog. Remarkable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq3s0u73Oes&feature=channel

This was posted, I think by earthtokirk, in another post. It is long - 14 parts. I mention it because parts 3,4, & 5 have some cool info about Fibonacci sequence.

The coolest thing to me was how it proves an equation that states:

Past + Present = Future

I guess you gotta watch it to understand, but thats the Fibonacci sequence...

0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13...

If the present is "3", then the preceding number (the past) is 2, which predicts the future (5)

I dunno for some reason this strikes me

BTW thanks Julian

both for your comment on the painting and for starting this thread!

Really Beautiful painting Vajra!!

Interesting thread! A bit over my head  but I enjoyed it anyway

http://docs.google.com/File?id=dhc55v32_3cmrvt5c8_b

oops - there it is! Guardians of the Python I (foo dogs)

not the best quality pic tho

the eyes & teeth are painted with glow in the dark paint :-)

Vajra,

Both Pylons Guardians are cool. Also thanks for the Youtube Mayan calendar link. Very interesting.

Ooh!  Shiny!

I think I may prefer the Foo dogs just a tad more, which is strange because I'm entranced by phoenixes.  *lol*  Must.  Reasearch.  FOO!  *off to wiki*