In If Women Rose Rooted, Sharon Blackie recounts the myth of Mis, who goes wild with grief at her father’s death, becoming crazed and flying off to a mountain where, “trailing fur and layers of feathers … she grew sharp claws with which she attacked and tore to pieces any creature or person she met.” After years in the wilderness, she is healed of her wild woundedness by a harpist named Dubh Ruis. He uses no weapons and makes no attempt to control and dominate her. Instead, she is healed through pleasure and tender care. Hearing him playing his harp, she’s attracted first to his music and then to his nakedness. “And so it was that Dubh Ruis the harpist made love to her, crazy Mis, wild woman of the Sliabh Mis Mountains. And once it was over, she asked for more, and more loving she received; and then she asked for more music and more music she received.”
It is such a wonderful expression of Pluto in the fifth house, the House of Pleasure. When woundedness has cut us off from our own sense of joy, the pleasures of the arts and the pleasures of the body can be healing paths.
It also reminds me of Sethe in Beloved, who is worn out by the terrible cost of oppression and slavery and her own Mis-like, wild and violent reaction to it. At the end of the book, Paul D, like Dubh Ruis with Mis, offers Sethe tenderness and compassion. “His holding fingers were holding hers” as he reminds her that although she’s lost her daughter a second time, she hasn’t, as she believes, lost her best thing. “You your best thing, Sethe,” Paul D tells her.
Both Dubh Ruis and Paul D are demonstrating one of the highest expressions of Scorpio, which conditions us to look with compassion into darkness, pain and woundedness, both our own and that of others. We don't know Dubh Ruis' story-or at least I don't know it - but we do know Paul D's. He's looked at the deep scars of the past (literally when he's looking at the chokecherry tree patterned scars on Sethe's back from where she was whipped), and when Beloved seduces him, Paul D opens to all the dark trauma of the past and, in doing so, he finds his "red heart," and a deep compassion that he's able to offer, eventually, to Sethe. This is the gift of Pluto and Scorpio - they open reservoirs of power within us when we face the trauma we've locked away. With "more yesterday than anybody," Paul D and Sethe, we hope, will be able to live another high destiny of Scorpio - the deeply intimate, nakedly honest bond between two people.