October - November 2001
Death
One of the great mysteries of existence is where existence
originated, and what happens when our own personal existence
ceases to be. Both are attributes of life, or you could say that
birth, life and death are all attributes of one another.
Cut off from nature as we so often are, and cut off from our
own nature and from the cycles of the natural world, we forget
this basic fact of existence. Though our scientists are pretty
smart, we would appear to be losing the knowledge of existence
faster than we're gaining it.
We all face death daily, both as a possibility and as a constant
reality of letting go from one idea to the next, one experience
to the next, one relationship to the next. As George Harrison
and many other mystics have reminded us, all things must pass.
To the extent that people are things, we're all on the same ride.
Yet in order to be truly alive, one must be in a relationship
to death, and willing to change, willing to release. Suppress
that relationship and the willingness to grow, and we join the
living dead. It is in this sleep of forgetfulness that most of
our culture is now enveloped.
One place where knowledge is preserved even in dark times
is the occult, a word which means hidden. The image above is
of the Death trump from the Sacred Tarot, an ancient occult system
of preserving knowledge, and of passing it along to initiates.
This is the card associated with Scorpio, which is the sign representing
the mysteries of birth and death, and the surrender to the process
of release and creation.
The three symbols of Scorpio appear: the scorpion (lower right,
according to Crowley, representing suicide where the strain of
the environment is intolerable and the attacked element willingly
subjects itself to change), the serpent (lower left, which represents
the principle of male energy, the undulating lord of life and
death, and change by the shedding of the skin) and the eagle
(upper left, representing exaltation of life beyond solid matter).
The grim reaper appears, but he is, of course, you and me.
We know this because he's the working end of the double helix
of DNA that extends to the upper right, the chain of all life,
extended by sexual reproduction and ending in death but really
continuing eternally. This solves the mystery of how, associated
with Scorpio, we have such mysteries as orgasm, conception, surrender,
physical death and transformation. The money issues enter the
picture because sex and reproduction are sold via marriage, which
involves a dowry or a business deal, and because money changes
hands via inheritance at the time of death. These issues were
added on later.
But don't let the money aspect distract you from the deeper
meanings of erotic surrender, surrender to the reproductive process,
and the release of existence into what we call death.
We might think that these subjects fall together under the
heading of Scorpio as a result of social science or philosophy,
but there is a sex-death connection in biology as well. According
to UCLA immunologist William R. Clark, in his 1996 book Sex
and the Origins of Death, in order to have the many benefits
of sexual reproduction (such as reproductive diversity), animals
that reproduce sexually must eventually die. Each cell -- with
the exception of sperm and egg cells -- is genetically programmed
to end its life; in this way, the whole organism eventually dies.
So in sexually reproducing animals, death is a necessity -- but
it's also the form that immortality takes in this world, as we
pass our genetic code down the generations.
Crowley's inclusion of the DNA helix is a little clue that
this knowledge was known to the occult long before it was "discovered"
by science.
But it gets more interesting. It was, says Clark, at the time
in evolution when sexual reproduction entered the genetic coding
that programmed cell death manifested as well. So if we seek
mysticism or immortality in sex, this makes it fairly clear why.
Perhaps most interesting, Clark writes that it's when humans
become sexually mature in their early teens that the process
of programmed cell death begins on an individual level. So, in
our genetic legacy, we carry a deep memory that sex and death
have one cause and one effect. In our individual memory, we have
the experience of programmed death beginning just as we are reaching
sexual maturity, and thus contained in the reproductive experience.
In deep moments of surrender, what you might call Scorpionic
sex, this blending of realities of sex and death is recalled
instinctively. I believe this is why surrender in deep bonding
so often throws us into crisis, and why death often becomes the
subject matter of lovers who reach a real point of sexual intimacy.
We are now at the midpoint of Scorpio, known across the cultures
and millennia as the days of the dead, or Samhain.
This is the time when the veil between the worlds is the thinnest,
a time of surrender of the memories and experiences of the peak
of the year, Spring and Summer through harvest; a time of darkening,
change and inevitability. In many strange ways, this is a moment
when the impossible is possible, and the often-unknowable mystery
of being, and surrender to being, arise to meet us.