I had just come home from an afternoon and evening out with a friend, and we were talking about emotions. I have been thinking about feelings particularly the last few months, as several people have brought up issues to do with feelings in discussions we've had with each other during this period.

I was spending six months travelling and lecturing, and I read a book on the plane on the way over to Australia, called, "How We Die". It's a powerful book, it's very uncomfortable to read, as it's all about the processes our bodies and psyches go through from birth to death. It graphically depicts the breaking down of the body with descriptions of the disintegration and deterioration of our systems as we die from cancer, heart trouble, stroke, diabetes, etc. For instance, in one section the author describes how people used to die from breast cancer, where the breast just turned black and oozed as it rotted. In another there was a description of how untreated uterine cancer would simply grow out of the vagina. The author also wrote about the attitudes of the doctor to the dying, and the families, and the dying themselves.

I mentioned the book to a friend several days ago, and he recoiled, saying he didn't want to read it - maybe when he's ready to die I could tell him about it, he suggested. Several other friends and relatives have responded similarly to my mention of this book.

This past Sunday my son flew back to the United States. He had been travelling with me for the last two months. Now he has gone back, and I won't see him for over four months - the longest separation I have had from him since he was born. My other son is in college, and I haven't seen him for two months, and won't see him either for another four months. I was given fair warning by someone who would be seeing me later on the day when my son left, that she didn't want to see me in tears about his departure. This is a person with the Moon conjunct Saturn and Uranus.

A friend talked to me today about how it's best not to feel things too deeply - best to find ways to armour ourselves from events like war, etc. One of the Rambo-like movies was on TV tonight, and when I said I didn't want to watch it because of the violence, he said that the movie "is a classic of it's genre" - as though that somehow made it worthwhile.

So frequently, in astrology, we hear negative references to Scorpio and to intensity of feelings associated with Scorpio. We have come to worship reason and self-control so much that we no longer honour feelings, and we wonder why there is such shadow hysteria rampant in the culture.

We aren't allowed to miss our children too much, or to show powerful feelings for them, and then we wonder why they're committing suicide. We support violent movies and icons like Rambo, and then wonder why our kids think it's heroic and manly to pack a gun and kill each other. We don't want to deal with death, or examine the process, so we ignore the books and kill ourselves with cigarettes and fat, etc. We don't want to feel vulnerable, so we keep our distance from each other, relating through artificial social conventions, and then we wonder why loneliness is so endemic.

And when everything goes wrong ...when our kids die, when we find ourselves dying, when we find ourselves out of control emotionally with crumbling relationships and disastrous situations in our lives, whom do we call? We call the Scorpios. We ask them to counsel us, to help us understand our emotional depths. Having given Scorpio a hard time for their supposed "obsession" with the psyche, with asking questions and analysing human nature and the meaning of life and all the giant questions, suddenly we want them there to help us access what we've been avoiding and ignoring and hoping we wouldn't have to deal with in our lives, in our psyches. Scorpio spends a lifetime being berated for its intensity, until someone needs a Scorpio to help him or her access his or her own subconscious motivations - at which point we hope a Scorpio will be there to focus that intensity on "our" problems, to help us get at the roots of what's going wrong, or is making us dreadfully miserable. We want Scorpio to do that work for us - we don't want to have to do it ourselves. We are afraid of our own emotions - afraid we might lose control, or that the feelings might make us too uncomfortable - so we ridicule feelings and dump their care in a Scorpio's lap.

And in the meantime, even we astrologers tend to dump all the garbage of life on the Scorpio. The Scorpios are vicious and mean and back-stabbing and vengeful and cruel and over-sexed and obsessive and too intense and emotional - or so we tend to say about them. We are afraid to be emotional. There is so little respect and reverence for emotions, for feelings, that we block and deny almost any strong expression of feeling. We are afraid that strong feelings will overpower us, that we will lose control.

And yet, we know that tears are one way the body has to release many toxins. The release is not only physical, of course, but also emotional. The feelings we bury don't go away. The buried rage drives the guy with the gun, the rapist, the abuser. Buried rage and depression can also manifest in dis-eases - they burst out in the bodily organs. And as astrologers, the organs or parts of the body affected give us clues to what area of the life is distressing us. Buried anger or disappointment with a partner, issues left undiscussed or unresolved, come out in lowered sexual interest, passive-aggressive actions toward each other - like "accidentally" breaking some precious possession of the partner.

Some men feel comfortable expressing only one emotion - anger. The full range of their feelings runs all the way from mad to madder. The gentler emotions, the less aggressive emotions, feelings of sadness, inadequacy, disappointment, vulnerability - have not been considered traditionally masculine - so some men, those most disconnected from their whole selves, try not to show them. Even further, they ridicule and devalue them in others. Puffed with bravado, they glorify anger, while other powerful emotions, like joy, passion, deep love, raw excitement, are also denied or belittled. Even women, although they may express more feelings, are condescended to and humiliated and made to feel guilty and somehow emotionally immature when in touch with or expressing their emotional natures. To be emotional has come to be associated with fears of loss of control. An emotional response is sadly considered less admirable than an intellectual or objective response.

And yet there is really no such thing as objectivity - the person is always subjectively involved in any experience. There is no such thing as the completely reasoning or objective human being. About the closest we might come to such is in the example of the psychopath, who simply plans out what s/he wants to do, and isn't hindered in any kind of violent acts by any emotional or empathetic considerations.

To be divorced from the full range of one's emotions is a serious flaw, and a great fracture in one's psyche, and yet this divorce is one encouraged still by large parts of our culture. We are stuck with Mars as representative of our emotions - Mars, the old ruler of Scorpio. Pluto has replaced Mars, or been added to Pluto, and brings with it a far greater range of feeling than that of Mars' experience. Mars goes directly for the jugular, thinking his immediate and superficial and childlike understanding of the human psyche is all there is.

But it no longer is all there is. We have come to understand that the human being is an extraordinary complex creature, that the causes of actions in life have very complicated roots, and therefore our responses to others needs to be correspondingly sophisticated and many-coloured. Gut-level instinctive reactions are only the tip of the iceberg - there is a whole universe world of extraordinary complexity in our inner worlds.

I wonder if our government leaders had to feel more fully, if they could still engage in all the wars they authorise? I used to wonder, during the Gulf War, which horrified me, if George Bush felt what he was doing. Did he stop and put himself in the shoes of just one of the men dying from wounds in Iraq - whether an American or an Iraqi? Did he feel what that man might have felt as he died, as he felt the pain of his wounds, of his agony not only at leaving his body, but also at leaving his family, his parents, perhaps a wife, a baby? Did Bush stop to feel how the dead man's mother might have felt later, when she received the news her son had been killed? Or the father, the wife, any children, friends ...did Bush feel any wrenches at all? Following the news at that time, the chief emotions expressed by Bush, and reported in the media, were feelings of rage at Hussein, fury that Hussein was not immediately cowed, feelings of vengeance - we were going to "teach him a lesson", etc. Bush was emotionally illiterate, so to speak.

I suggest we and the Bushes of the world are filled with murderous rage because we don't allow ourselves to cry, to be tender, to be joyful, to be thrilled, to feel the softness and sweetness and gentleness and sadnesses and true emotional strengths of our connections. We confuse lust with passion. We don't value the heart, the intuition, the emotions, the feelings - call them what you will. But until we do, and until we recognise the power of our feelings: until we validate the Scorpio in each of us - the intensity, the depth, the range, the potency - and allow ourselves to feel these profundities by connecting to more than only the angry expressions, then we will continue to have to face our repressed violence. That repressed violence is partially an expression of our soul's, our psyche's, distress at not being properly and adequately nurtured and fed - and it will keep pounding us until we face our needs and our darknesses and become brave and accepting and affirming of our deeply and basically emotional natures.

I think this will be one of the main shadow issues of the coming decades, when we will have almost no planets in water. Of the more slowly-moving planets, now that Saturn has left Pisces (April 1996), there will be nothing in water signs until Jupiter goes into Pisces, (Feb. 1998) Then nothing again for a while.

Scorpio is the transformer. It represents the psychiatrist, the therapist. Pluto represents either the repression and control and death of parts of the self, or it can instead represent the bringing to light, to consciousness, the hidden wealth and depth of each of us. How do we do it? Through the feelings - Scorpio is a water sign. Findings in neuro-science are already telling us that the mind, and reason, are not the supreme motivators or key to the human psyche at all. It is the emotions and feelings which are, and these are not represented by functions taking place in the brain, but by neuropeptides which are everywhere, which flood every part of our bodies, and leave psychological imprinting, - "memories" - not just in some brain convolution, but imbedded in the tissues of the body itself.

Reason, which has become a god, and which has been claimed by some seekers of knowledge, particularly some scientists, starting notably with DesCartes, as their God, is not a god at all, but merely a servant, merely a function, a messenger of the gods, merely one of many behaviours which we can employ, when appropriate, to help us learn and understand and analyse. But reason is impotent without the intuition and feelings permeating and impregnating it. The two are needed together - reason and intuition must be wed for us to be psychologically healthy - for us to be collectively, culturally - healthy.