The cybercafé, two blocks away from my apartment, is always full of people soaking up world culture. And so it figures that a few people will be celebrating Halloween here in Ecuador. Not too many. But tonight the bars will be full of young people vying for the prize for best costume or sexiest witch.

In the States, meanwhile, there’s a burgeoning movement that proclaims Halloween as an evil, anti-Christian holiday. One website tells us that the roots of Halloween go back to Druids sacrificing children. Nobody knows too much about the Druids, so this is clearly Roman propaganda that’s been going around, like a bad Internet petition, for a couple of millennia. Meanwhile, little kids in the US will still be dressing up and going door to door tonight.

At this time of year, the sun is always in Scorpio, and Scorpio is the sign of extremes, of life and death. Halloween emphasizes the archetypes that are buried deepest in the human psyche, the things we hate and fear and are fascinated by. It’s said to be a time when the veil between the worlds is thin, and this brings us face to face with death, the thing we all turn from on the deepest and most instinctive level.

In Ecuador, educational pundits frown on the foreign holiday Halloween, and instead promote the Day of the Shield. It was on October 31, 1900, that then-president Gen. Eloy Alfaro designated this Shield as a national symbol. It’s placed in the middle of the Ecuadoran flag.

As I sit here at my computer, I look out the window and see the street named after Eloy Alfaro. Taxis and motorbikes go by, quite peacefully. Eloy Alfaro was vilified by the Catholic Church in his time, considered the “atheist president” because he broke the stranglehold that the Church had on Ecuadorian society.

The sign Scorpio is also about power. In the Latin America of the 19th century, the Catholic Church had that most basic power, the power to name what was evil and what was good. Over the centuries, religious authorities have relegated everything they considered evil to the depths of the human psyche. And so, on some level, it is a revolutionary act for a child to dress up as a ghost or a vampire, resurrecting some part of her forbidden self, if only for one night.

The Ecuadoran Shield itself features a condor, wings outspread, a bird that is now endangered in Ecuador. It is fitting that the condor should be honored today, so close to the Day of the Dead, because it’s a bird that lives by eating the dead. One reason that it’s endangered is that there is less carrion lying around than there used to be. Everything is tidied up too quickly.

November will give us many opportunities to go deep, down into the unfamiliar caves of our own psyches. With five planets in Scorpio, there is an intensification of energy that’s already intense. There will be power struggles on all levels, both evident and subterranean.

Right now, there’s an amassing of money and influence in the US, leading up to the midterm elections. Sex and death are both associated with Scorpio, and both of these forces have caused public opinion to shift away from the Republican Party. The normally apathetic voters of the U.S. smell something a little bit off.

At the full moon on November 5, two days before the election in the US, there are eight planets in fixed signs. All this fixity seems to suggest that the status quo will prevail. But fixed signs are also the signs of most abrupt and cataclysmic change. The struggles involved in these changes are prolonged and hard-fought, and this is definitely the case here.

Mercury is also retrograde during the first half of November, and Mercury retrograde gives an urge to go back and fix things from the past. You can’t go forward until you have mended, healed and made retribution. When Mercury is retrograde in Scorpio, this can mean dredging up old dramas, especially around sex, death, or hidden money. When these things are exposed to the light, they aren’t pretty. This is when we need the condor to come and eat the dead, turning corruption into power.

On November 17, Mercury is direct again, and has to retrace its steps. There is a resuming of ordinary life. It’s as if everybody has woken up from a deep trance. Venus enters Sagittarius on the same day, moving from the brooding emotional energy of Scorpio into a more active, buoyant Sagittarian mode.

But at the new moon on November 20, there will still be a great deal of Scorpio energy. And Saturn in Leo will be squaring Mars, the moon, the sun, and Jupiter, all in Scorpio. This is inhibiting, restrictive, even depressing. Mercury, newly direct, will want to move forward. But this planet will be like someone who has lost her leg in a war. She hobbles on, resolute, with a desolate landscape behind her.

War is not just theoretical these days. People are dying every day because other people judge them evil. Who decides these things?

We all decide for ourselves. But to do that, we have to dare to traverse our own forbidden zones. We need to go down into the depths of ourselves, to see what lives and what doesn’t, what gives power and what only perpetuates hate. Each one of us carries her own shield in these terrifying places, but the carrion-eater is a worthy mascot.

Index of Jenny Yates' Writings on Lesbian.com