I have a predominately airy chart, with four personal planets in Aquarius (Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars); I have no planets in water, but I do have a Scorpio ascendant. One of my most vivid alien encounters occurred when a small version of the creature from the Alien films landed on my bed and started scratching and biting me, but also attempting to mate. In the midst of my fear, I somehow managed to associate this creature with the dissociated energy of my poltergeist. It is quite a feat to remain lucid when you are wrestling with an alien—and the casual way I am telling this story fails to convey the terror of that night. But the fact is that a side of me did remain detached, and I tried to calm the writhing figure by holding it close—perhaps in an attempt to ‘embrace’ the dissociated rage.

And then, for some bizarre reason, I swallowed it! The sensation was akin to ingesting an automobile tyre—or at least how I suspect consuming such an object might feel.


Bite me!

It is not a great leap of the imagination to see how my psyche might have fastened on the creature from the Alien films as an excellent representation of the side of my nature that is “scorpionic” rather than “aquarian”. And from this vantage point it is hard to know whether I was attempting to digest the dissociated energy or once more attempting to repress it.

But I do know that in the years that have followed my spate of ‘alien encounters’ I have come to value having a Scorpio ascendant; I am also much more in touch with the assertive and self-protecting qualities represented symbolically by Mars.

Many years ago I came to realise that my visionary dreams and experiences fit into the general pattern described in literature on shamanism. The healers of their particular society, shamans often recount experiences of abduction by the ancestors and of subsequently having their body cut up and boiled in a pot. Hence, when I had my first ‘alien’ encounter, I naturally compared it to such paradigms of initiation.

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