She carries you into the depths of the soul. She guides you on a transformative journey through shedding skins and dissolving identities. She ushers you into the underworld. You burn with her. You die and decay and become an epic composting pile of fruit and leaves and outdated ideas. She teaches you that death is not the end. Scorpion symbolism is rich with the power of cyclicality, release, renewal, and reintegration of self and society.
The Scorpion is strong, ancient, and resilient. The spirit of survival runs deep in the marrow of their mythic power. They are the part of you that can overcome difficulties. They are the wisdom hiding within the sand of life’s struggles.
Serket: Scorpion Symbolism in Ancient Egypt
In ancient Egyptian mythology, Serket, the scorpion goddess is a protective power and a dangerous force. She guides souls into the underworld, guards the dead, and heals the bites and stings of scorpions, snakes, and other venomous creatures.
Goddess Serket in Your Life
I think about how we go through experiences that feel like venomous bites. How in certain cases, rejection can feel like the hovering threat of death, and failure can sting with poison that spreads through your body pretty quickly.
Those experiences can be identity deaths that we may have a hard time recovering from. They may leave marks and scars that weave through our connective tissue forever. And they can also become thresholds that pulse with the potent power of transformation.
The mythic presence of this goddess invites us on an alchemical journey with venom and poison. She shows us that the poison is often the medicine. She reminds us that the wound is a portal. The very sting that hurts also draws the map of relief and revitalization.
The Scorpion Goddess is the Queen of Shadows
Sometimes we’re the ones with the venom. Serket shows us that she’s a scorpion woman. She’s a dangerous force just as much as she is a healing one. She’s venomous, and she’s medicinal.
As a guide into the underworld she’s a guardian of mysteries. She rules the spaces that are mostly obscured. Beware of her sting; she can cause death. Dying with her will become an alchemical journey.
She sits with you through grief, protecting you from drowning in it.
Serket often accompanies Isis – the great goddess of Egypt and beyond. Together they embody the ability to be with grief as a teacher. Isis is also a goddess of resurrection, and Serket’s Scorpion symbolism is intertwined with the rebirth that is ever woven with death. She is the energy that can support the soul’s dark night.
These goddesses whisper to us from the shadows, wailing and lamenting and massaging their messages of complexity into our bones. They ground us into a process of integration
We must make room for death, and loss, and failure. We must make room for our fear of death, our fear of loss, our fear of failure and rejection. We must integrate the parts of us that carry poison and venom and harm. We must make way for the medicine held in those hidden, dangerous places in us, in dark tombs, in desolate deserts, in landscapes of unknowns.
The Story of Isis and Serket’s Seven Scorpions
There’s a story of Isis hiding in the marshes from her dangerous brother, Seth. This is part of a much longer, deeper, more complex and tangled story, and I am not getting into it in this musing.
You can read about Isis and her beloved Osiris in this Death Archetype Essay. And you can read a poetic mythic reflection of Isis magic here on my substack.
When pregnant Isis hides in the marshes, Serket sends her seven scorpions to protect her. Isis asks a rich woman for help, and the woman refuses her. The scorpions are enraged. They gather their venom, and one of them takes all of it to the woman’s home, and stings her baby.
Isis is a protective goddess of all women and children. She rushes to the scene, and holds the dying baby in her arms. She whispers incantations in his ear all night long. She casts a spell of healing, chanting the true, hidden names of all seven scorpions, pulling the venom out of him with her magic. The baby is restored back to life.
We must learn to speak out loud about our shadows. We must weave a tapestry of self that doesn’t exclude the hidden names of our venomous aspects. We must tend to the soft, vulnerable parts of us – the little baby in us. We have to learn to work with danger, protection, vulnerability, and magic within the whole of who we are.
Scorpion Symbolism: The Shadow is the Key to Our Transformation
The shadow that wants to protect us is also the sting that can destroy us. The destructive powers that we carry also contain the spell of recovery and restoration. Naming the shadow, speaking its true name, not demonizing it – the scorpion came to help Isis – not killing it or sending it to exile.
All the parts of the self come together in this story. Each has its role, its place, its purpose. And it’s up to us to chant it into meaning. To speak of it in ways that weave it into the tapestry of soulfulness.
We can take that into the collective too. How would you do that??? I’d love to know what you think! Comment below please.
In this video about Scorpion symbolism, we explore Serket, the story about the seven Scorpions, as well as the fable about the Scorpion and the Frog:
If you’ve been feeling stuck, and you are looking for a sacred container for being with yourself in the dark, tending to the shadow as a doorway, and building a temple for the spark of inspiration to guide you through these times, join me on the journey From Stillness to Spark.
From Stillness to Spark is made of five sacred sessions, prompts, mythic reflection, contemplation, and archetypal alchemy through embodied practices. This is a space for you to breathe with yourself right where you are. And let where you are become your holy transformation. Go here to learn more and to sign up.
I am sending you love through the sacred sting of the Scorpion – the sting that ushers you into the underworld to dissolve and decompose the parts that constrain and poison you, and reconstruct who you are ready to become.
XOXO
Hagar