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The Scorpio Ascendant

general summary for a Scorpio Ascendant (rising sign)

What the tradition reads

A Scorpio Ascendant is read as intensity held under visible control. Scorpio's old rulership is Mars and its modern rulership Pluto, and the tradition, following Alan Leo's delineations for the rising sign, describes those with Scorpio rising as bold, strong willed and quick to be drawn into disputes, given to extremes in both work and pleasure, with a penetrating, almost investigative mind that Leo credits with an eagle's eye for what other people would rather keep hidden. The manner is direct, watchful and guarded at once, a first impression that gives an immediate sense of will without giving away much else, and a temper that, once roused, is read as very difficult to resist. The tradition reads this Ascendant as ambitious and secretive in roughly equal measure, someone who keeps their own counsel and studies a room before committing to it. As with any rising sign, the intensity is rawest early in the sign and most disciplined late in it. The shadow is a suspicion that reads as hostility before any has been offered; its ease is a loyalty and depth of focus that, once earned, very few other signs can match.

The story

The Ascendant's role as the seat of physical bearing rather than of inner character goes back to Hellenistic astrology's decision to fix a horoscope to an exact hour, the ecliptic's crossing of the eastern horizon at that moment giving astrologers a point the Sun's sign, tied only to the month, could not supply on its own. Scorpio, the sign that can occupy this door, carries the Greek story of the hunter Orion, who boasted he would kill every living animal, and of Gaia, the earth itself, who sent a scorpion small enough to hide in the ground to sting him once, low, and end the boast for good. Zeus set both figures in the sky afterward but at opposite ends of it, so that as the scorpion rises Orion is already fleeing below the horizon, a chase that never fully ends and never fully closes. Long before the Greeks told it this way, the Babylonians had already called the same stars the scorpion, and in Egypt the scorpion goddess Selket stood guard over the dead and the newborn alike. A rising sign built on a small creature that ends a great boast gives the tradition its picture of Scorpio's own quiet, guarded power.

Written from

Corpus key ascendant:Scorpio.