CW: Emotional Abuse
I’m an extremely self-aware person. Lately, I have noticed something that, in spite of all the inner work I have done, keeps circling back with opportunities for me to address, but I fail at it.
My ex and my family believe I have an anger problem, but the most common trauma response I have is fawn. That they believe it’s fight is because of the specific way in which they trigger me. I get angry when I’m trying to be heard.
But most of the time, I find myself in a pattern of “consistently abandoning your own needs to serve others to avoid conflict, criticism, or disapproval.” Or ghosting people because I don’t have it in me to have the conflict, and I’m behind the scene seething and resenting the demands put on me while also having no compassion for myself because I know better, I should do better. And yes, I am self-aware of what I’m doing wrong there, too.
The other day, a long-time friend said that they know me to be “far too good and kind a person to endure bad behaviour” with regards to my ex. The thing is, I’m not sure I am. I know why they, and others, think that way, and that’s because they have met a version of me that lived from a trauma response, and accepted things that are abusive from the people in her life because she had to. Ever since beginning the journey of deconstructing Catholicism and, broadly, Christianity, I have had to come to terms with what it means to be a good person outside of a given moral construct that defines goodness in a way I rejected.
I had to face the darkness head on. It wasn’t pretty, but it was liberating, and it has shown me how I can be kind from a genuine place. I end up borrowing from the language of Human Design a lot, lately, but it truly has helped me narrow down the way in which the archetypes of Astrology show up in my life.
One revelation was that a major way in which I was living out of alignment was to be devoting so much of my energy seeking to influence the collective. Ironic to say in a newsletter on a major online platform, but the majority of my channels and gates in Human Design are from the Tribal circuit, including the one that makes me an Emotional Authority. And the etymology of the word kind is, you may guess, the old Germanic route for Kin.
The original meaning of the word is “nature, the natural order, also innate character, form, or condition” from which we get the idea of “a class or race distinguished by innate characteristics”. While, technically, all of humanity is my kin the way the Church demanded of me under this definition, I do have kith and kin (after all, I am an Aquarius IV House at 29°, a placement known for the chosen family vibe).
One thing that I have internalised from Catholicism that had to be among the first things to go is the expectation of caring for people very far removed from our lived experience. From my grandmother pushing me to eat beyond what my body needed because of the starving children in Africa, to the coworkers at a pro-life charity always going on about how we should be praying this novena or other for the souls in Purgatory and so on…
I’m a firm believer that if something genuinely speaks to you, that’s a beautiful calling and I desire to support you in following it. If you genuinely have your heart on fire at the idea that you can free a hundred souls from Purgatory with a specific prayer because this saint said they received it in a vision, more power to you. Here’s a coffee and protein bar to keep you going, but I don’t fucking care to devote my energy to the same cause.
And can we also stop telling people to “offer it up” when shit happens? It’s just spiritual bypassing our very valid and legitimate feelings. It’s okay to hold space for someone to feel. We experience an emotion for 90 seconds. And if we feel called to transmute it by giving it back to the divine, great. But a) feel it first, and b) shut the fuck up if it’s someone else feeling it instead of being dismissive of it with that phrase.
I mentioned it before that the whole of my personality, my last quarter Scorpio Moon at 2°, is in Gate 28 in Human Design.
As for Astrology, aside from being roughly conjunct to Nobuhiko Okamoto’s Sun, it’s at Taurus’ degree (as is, in fact, my Pluto also). To quote Dani (That Witch Next Door), Scorpio needs the gentle practicality of Taurus and it appears to be inbuilt in me.
According to my practically codependent neverending Discord chat about metaphysics and dubious seiyuu content with my bestie, Taurus is one of the top degrees in my chart.
And then there’s that II House Stellium and Jupiter in Taurus which probably impacts me more in life than my infamous crush on a Taurus Sun months away from his 2nd Saturn Return.
Gate 28 is The Game Player. Or, as Christie Inge calls it, **The Darkness Whisperer. When I first heard the name, I felt “Ugh”, because the Catholic conditioning was that we are expected to bypass our problems by being altruistic. Offer it up, or focus on what good you can do for others. Are you sad? Go volunteer at a soup kitchen.
But in Human Design, Gate 28 and its programming partner Gate 27 (Altruism) are about how, when our problems aren’t overwhelming us, we become altruistic without effort.
Gate 28 (and I dare say, Scorpio as a whole) is about what Carl Jung said when he said ““I would rather be whole than good.” We spend so much of our time trying to manage ourselves to meet a standard of goodness rather than expressing the truth of who we are.
One main criticism of New Age type spirituality from Christianity is the idea that they’re wrong for talking about there being “my truth” and your truth, because there is only “The Truth”. I have grown to see that as a misguided understanding of what individual truth means.
Even assuming there is such a thing as The Truth, we still all have our individual truths. It’s not a question of moral relativism, or making up heretical ideas, or personal gnosis about the nature of the divine. Even if we were all made in the image of the big-g god as described in the Bible, we are not all the same.
We are specific individuals. We all show a specific facet of the truth of who god is. In that respect, our experience of it matters. For the mystics like the Desert Fathers and the Carmelites, their truth is ecstasy and divine union. For the Franciscans it’s poverty and service. For the Dominicans it’s intellectual understanding and preaching of the Word. For the Benedictines it’s discipline and hospitality, and so on.
Even within a community formed around a shared understanding, each individual brings its own gifts.
And one of my gifts is that I know how to sit with pain and hold space for it. I’m not afraid to face the shadows, which is probably why I have always attracted an assorted bunch of unhealed people to myself.
Napoleon Vier, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED
I’m semi-facetious when I talk about being a Lyran starseed (I can’t prove it and it doesn’t matter), but the signs would be there.
First of all, let me preface this: I know there’s a lot of racism in the Starseed conversation, especially when it comes to the alleged appearance. I think that’s gross, and if some of us truly are souls from other constellations incarnated on Earth we are incarnating in all and every race.
Obviously the first and my favourite sign is the cat-like appearance. It is The Truth that I am in fact a humanised cat. Loyal to myself first and foremost, then my people, and fiercely independent in the way this manifests. I’m around you because I want you rather than because I need you. And always landing on my feet, taking risks like I have 9 lives 😅
According to an article on the subject on SpiritNomad.com “Lyrans are here to help us realize our true nature.”
In order to achieve this purpose, “Lyran starseeds are confident and fearless (…) because they have a deep understanding of the transient nature of physical reality, based on their ancient wisdom.”
And this, to me, is the key theme of gate 28, which is located in the Spleen and revolves around the fear of death without having found our purpose.
Most people distract themselves with focusing on petty preoccupations, while major Scorpio placements talk about death with their Uber drivers.
Leaving Catholicism was liberating in many ways, and I’m not talking about sex or the freedom not to have to wrestle with whether I’m sick enough to miss Mass without sinning.
It’s difficult to live in the present when your worldview hinges on it being mere preparation for eternal life. Paradoxically, the idea there may be nothing after death makes it easier to detach from it, and as such I was able to carve a space for genuine connection rather than forcing myself to stick around out of charity (which is what happens when you threaten suicide if someone leaves).
I’m a more moral person by the standards I was striving so hard to meet now than I was when I carried that burden. Well, aside from the sex. And witchcraft. Ok, fine, but you get what I mean. When I care, I care out of genuine interest and energy to invest into the situation. Not out of a sense of obligation.
I guess that’s part of why the idea of “offering it up” bothers me so much. It’s not the idea itself, if that was still not clear, I think it’s a beautiful thing if you can find meaning in suffering. It’s the cultural expectation, and that we normalised saying it to others, creating a culture that is not really capable of sitting with pain. Not other people’s, and often not our own.
It’s not exactly the best kept secret that my favourite time of the liturgical year as a Catholic was Holy Week. To this day, one of my favourite pieces of classical music, for all my jokes about Yoshiki’s music as a religious experience, is Allegri’s Miserere. As you’d expect of someone who’d turn out to have major Plutonic influence on her chart, I was quite intense about the whole meditating on the suffering and death of Jesus part.
Maybe not as intense as the saints who felt that pain physically with stigmata and crowns of thorns, but I truly took the idea of sympathy, in its original sense of suffering with, to heart. When we tell someone to “offer it up”, do we also make space for them to be with that pain, and us with them? It’s like the superficial hope of hearing that god has a plan, and everything happens for a reason. A quest to attach meaning to the situation because we cannot comprehend the reality of senseless suffering.
But we have some credible enough evidence that Jesus of Nazareth, whether he was the son of god, a prophet, an ascended master, a madman of 1st century Judea, or whatever sat with that suffering. Long before the garden of Gethsemane, he did not stop Lazarus’ death, nor resurrected him right away when he eventually got to Bethany (Luke 11). That always interested me. Someone with the power to reverse death mourned the death of his friend and was moved to pity for the emotional distress of the mourning sisters (Luke 11 verses 32-40).
Now, if you think about it from the perspective of the agenda of the early Church, it makes no sense to recount this story in this particular way unless it matters. After all, while they couldn't get away with brushing aside that Jesus did not go before Lazarus died, they probably could’ve got away with shortening the passage down to getting there 4 days late in order to have a bigger miracle than healing his sickness, and just going straight for it. That it mentions his interaction with both sisters and his reaction to them strikes me as peculiar except if I look at it from the perspective of modelling how us, too, should approach the hard things in life.
And that is, not brushing them off, although perhaps the emphasis he put on warning them of his intention of resurrecting Lazarus may come across that way. Still, he wept (v25) even knowing he was mourning a death that was about to be life again. That’s why I’m inclined to see the verses about whether Mary and Martha believe that he is the son of god and telling them their brother will rise again more like what he was really saying is that they shouldn’t regret what could’ve been done, which in itself could be a way to warn against the very human tendency to try and find something on which to pin the blame to make the pain sting less.
Some people in the Witchcraft space think of Jesus as a magician and a necromancer, and the argument is an interesting one. Many people work with him in their practice, some considering themselves Christians while others just relying on him and the angels as any old spirit with the wisdom of being beyond the experience we call reality. That’s not something that interests me, but at the same time I don’t feel like there is nothing there for me to learn from this enigmatic figure.
It could be easy to try and severe any connection with my past because of the things that no longer serve me, when in truth everything that I ever learnt has brought me where I am. I may be deconditioning 30 years of life but it’s deeper than just me vs Christianity. It’s the very specific way I used to relate to it in my lived experience, with the people I encountered on my journey, and with the baggage of familial relations and our ancestral line. As I said before, I am not so much grappling with The Truth as with my truth.
As my teacher Lindsay Mack put it in the course I’m taking with them, the High Priestess (which was my tarot card for the year, and a recurrent one also in the spreads I pulled as part of the course) is about us saying yes to ourselves, and landing in the present moment with an openness to receive. That’s somewhat in contrast with the direction of the devotional discernment of the Hierophant, which oversees a mystery religion instead. For me, the Hierophant then becomes a card about what it is that we allow to enter our mind and energetic field, and an invitation to hold boundaries and initiations.
And it’s not accidental that the tradition of the Tarot, long before the Golden Dawn, sees the High Priestess come first. We move from the clean slate of the Fool to absorbing all the spiritual knowledge we come across (because, to me, everything is inherently spiritual) in the High Priestess, to coming to maturity and becoming our own veil to the beyond in the Hierophant. To be closed to begin with would prevent us from learning anything at all, and that would not do.
This brings to a close my Scorpio Season mini-series on deconstructing some aspects of traditional Catholicism through the lenses of the Hierophant. Business as usual will resume on the 19th with the Sagittarius Season newsletter and the first anniversary of Witchy Musings 😲 I greatly appreciate your continued support. Some of you I know personally and some of you I don’t (yet, at least), but none of you is just a number on a dashboard. I am humbled and honoured that you let me into your energy and entertain the thoughts I have to share, as rambly as they can be. From the bottom of my heart, thank you! 🖤