#59 | Jason Holley | Part Two | Artemis & Orion

This story is etched into our stars through the two oppositional constellations of Scorpio and Orion . The Greeks saw this as a scorpion summoned by Artemis , chasing down Orion for all eternity .

It was a punishment for Orion's depletion of nature through an insatiable desire to hunt until all wildness was gone , something that violated Artemis' code as a huntress who , though herself a killer , is dedicated to protecting and perpetuating the species that she hunts .

If Orion's behavior was to continue , it would have led to a mass extinction on the planet , something that Artemis is unwilling to accept , and so the necessary poison of the scorpion is unleashed to correct the imbalance .

The story is , of course , complicated , however , by the fact that Orion is the first and only man that Artemis feels an attraction and affinity for , and , as such , it's the first time she drops her vow of chastity and virginity and joins the human to human world of love .

This betrayal leads to the tragic story of Actaeon , who has the misfortune of stumbling into a grove where Artemis is bathing naked years after the event . Stay tuned to hear of his fate and what it all means for us modern humans and our ways of being in the natural world .

Today , jason and I also explore the tension point between Aphrodite personifying love and connection and Artemis' rejection of such things through chastity . I hope you enjoy the show . Remember that if you'd like to support this podcast , you can easily do so with as little as $5 a month by joining the growing number of patrons at patreoncomcom .

Much love and respect to all those patrons who make the podcast a little more viable and prevent me from going down the path of nasty advertising . And now let's hear part two of my conversation with Jason Holly . I wanted to explore a little bit today . I know we're deep in here , but I just we're not over yeah .

But I did want to explore because , when you know , the first time I found you was through our mutual mentor and friend , brian Clark , who had sent me some audio recordings , and one was in an Australian . The FAA was running something I think it was 2019 , something like that .

I think it was like I had these 12 different files and one was kind of like something like creative process or creative astrology or something like that . I was like that one and I went in and there was your thing .

So it was a bit like you know , going through these files and finding you there , and you were elaborating on Scorpio using the Artemis and Orion story , and I mean you've mentioned already earlier in our conversation about hunting becoming the animal , these really nice images that you've already kind of dropped and planted for us .

And so , firstly , you know , it's something that I , it was a , it was a talk that just really pulled me , pulled my own soul forward in a major way as far as just watching , what just listening and hearing and how much fun you were having with it .

But it was such deep stuff , you know , and you would be able to talk to things that are really uncomfortable for people to think about or talk about , but yet you could do it in a way that invited people in , made it friendly in its own unique way , even though the material was like really hard and pretty hard .

Yeah , really hard stuff and and you would elaborate through the use of people's charts and so lived symbol as . But but particularly of course for me that the work that you were doing within the myth and having it speak through you was was beautiful , you know , and so I .

In my Scorpio episode I just focused on Medusa , but part of that was because I knew that you and I could talk a little bit about the this component you know the Artemis . Orion , maybe Actian a little later . But you know , I wonder if you'd be up for going there for a little bit .

Oh , many parts of it , yeah , and one of the things that I'm looking at right now I'm going to try and show you and I don't know if it's going to work , but I don't know if you can see , like a stag with candles on the camera .

It's a Christmas one and it's left out but , but it's hard not to want to go over there and I think , metaphorically , we're lighting . We're going to be lighting the candles on that while we're chatting .

You know , I was wondering why I never actually went ahead and wrote that . But maybe it's still a book to be written , because the the Actaeon story in particular puts a whole another spin on Stag . Nation so that's really interesting . But anyway , at the moment the audience probably doesn't know what we're talking about . So how do we enter the characters ?

There's a lot we could say about her . She was , but maybe what we'll say for now is that she was often called the , the lady of the beasts , the mistress of the animals . She was very connected to the natural world , you know , to the wild , and , and so she became friends with Orion , who was kind of a demigod and giant , and the two of them .

The main thing that it looks like they did together was hunt . You know they were in this sort of , you know I always . You know they talk about relating , that's , you know , looking at each other and relating side by side .

In some ways they were a side by side , you know , like they were out there doing it together and and they were not doing it together .

So it's an odd , odd but meaningful and something to be explored with Scorpio , right , this dynamic of the wild and the chaste , or the you know instinctual and the you know sort of shut down in some way .

So Artemis and Orion were great friends and you know where the stag is taking me is that at some point there's a betrayal , and the betrayal is described in many ways that one of the stories is that Orion rapes Artemis . One of the stories is that Orion rapes the priestess in Artemis's temple .

But the stag where the stag takes me is the story that's told that at some point Orion boasts . You know we talked earlier about the archetype of the hunt and how . You know it was a matter of profound relatedness with the natural world and you know you were not . It's not trophy hunting , right ? It's not looking for .

You know it's really being part of the cycle of life and death . You know that's how she can be a huntress and also be the lady of the beast . There's no contradiction in that mode right .

But Orion , who has a very interesting girth story , you know , born of men pissing on the hide of a , I think of a , I don't remember what kind of hide , but it might have been a stag's hide .

And I thought about it with the stag here because , you know , at least like in Colorado , near to where I live , or have lived for a long time near Santa Fe , you know when people hunt they want to get the biggest rack . They call it right .

That's called a rack , the antlers , and you know those are the strongest animals in the herd , right , if you've lived long enough to grow those antlers , you're one of the most genetically you know strong creatures , and so when those hunters hunt , they actually really deplete the genetic diversity of the species .

You know , because they're going for the one that's the biggest and the , you know , most magnificent trophy , rather than , you know , hunting the least of them . And you know which . Any which all other hunting animals do , right , I mean the leopard goes for the one that can't run as fast as the other ones , right , and it's a very different , you know it's .

So it's out of balance to do what Orion said , I mean to do the modern hunting , and it's even further , of course , out of balance to do what Orion proposes . But this the betrayal .

And there is one other version of the betrayal , it's a lot longer and Apollo gets involved in , but this betrayal is so angering to Artemis that this is where our scorpion comes in and she calls for the scorpion and and the scorpion , you know , attacks Orion and they are in epic conflict .

And it's a conflict that is seen in our sky because , essentially , in the sky , in the living sky , whenever you see Scorpio rising , you see Orion setting , and whenever you see , you know , orion rising , you see Scorpio setting and , and you don't ever see them together in the sky . It's like an ongoing experience .

But this is , you know , there's , you know there's more to the story , as you know , and if you want , if you want to share it , that's , that's the part that I am drawn to At the moment , because it is , it is the .

In other words , the scorpion has been called because things have moved out of balance and you could see that as Scorpio following Libra , you know the scales and is called as revenge . You know it's , you know it's , it's , it's , it's too , you know it's , yeah and anyway , that the necessary poison is coming .

So , that's the , you know , that's the , that's where I go . What about you ?

The scorpion is that's what I really want to focus on that the scorpion is invoked and called forward by Artemis to to basically correct things , but , like you say , through the through , the faculties of revenge or , you know , the violence or whatever is is required of the scorpion to come this .

Obviously we're talking about a massive scorpion , that's , that's feeling the sky . Right , we're talking about a scorpion . Oh huge yeah .

Even first reading it in Ovid's Metamorphoses I found that it was so heartbreaking in a way you know , it's like such , such , such tragedy in what occurs there . You know , I think it's something that you talked about was betrayal and return to innocence and some of these stories that sort of take us along that path .

But maybe we could speak to the betrayal component of it .

And yet , you know , if we look at a scorpion's body , it even just shows us like the whole body was made for war . You know it's a . You see scorpions , it's all Telsan or Telsan , I can't remember what they call the tail , but you know it's all that thing and huge claws .

Often it's like the whole creature is there , and they're often in very dry environments , you know , and you get the feeling all that armor's probably a drop of water inside that thing that it's holding onto .

And I think that's a very Scorpio reality and our Dimesion reality is that you know she is deeply in touch with wildness and with connectedness and you know the spontaneity of life and just really alive .

You know she's shown as a huntress , she's all in , and yet she's also very controlled , very controlling , cold , chased , rigid , remote , you know , punishing , sadistic , you know , and literally untouchable .

So she's totally in touch and she's also untouchable , right , you know , and it's like I think that's the Scorpio dilemma is that the capacity for connection in Scorpio . I mean , there's almost no one you can feel so fucking met by than a Scorpio person whose Scorpio is forward and as a reminder to people , we all have it in us .

You know planet , no planet , but you know Scorpio . Planets , when they are present , can reach so deeply into the reality of the other and connect so profoundly and yet also come with a real recognition of how bad it can feel if you're all in like that .

Yeah , I mean , imagine you're this virgin goddess and you have this male best friend , all for you know , eternity , almost until this goes away . It's like exquisite , right . I mean you're really all this life and yet also now and that energy , you know it's what I feel is like .

There's just such relational capacity in Scorpio and yet you know such recognition that it could all . If it goes wrong , it'll really hurt .

You know they're in this hunt together . There's something . So yeah , I hadn't really drawn on that image before , but it's something really sexy about it .

Whether that's whichever version of the story , but ultimately it's about that . He has no limits and he wants to kill everything .

And it reminds me of how we always say you know , the fixed science cannot abide in , you know , being controlled , like that's utterly unacceptable to all of them and , and you know , artemis and Scorpio included , you know it's like right , because he , he's not , you know , staying in the , in the , in the , in the pair bond .

You know that he's moving out of relatedness and into , you know , some other mode that is destructive .

You know again , another thing people might often feel with Scorpio planets and people who are really strong in their Scorpio is the feeling that that's who you want when life goes to hell .

You know you want that person with you because , they aren't going anywhere , they they can handle it or anything you know a little like when I was describing discovering with Susan that I didn't fear . You know everybody's saying you're going to get better , you'll be .

You know you're going to beat this and all that , and I certainly , you know , wasn't the killer of hope or something like that , but I I really felt no pressure at all to pretend that that is where we are . You know it was like maybe that'll happen , but it was likely .

What we're in the presence of is death and and you know it was we were able to have all these conversations at two or three in the morning , you know , in the dark Scorpion time .

You know that couldn't be had in the daylight , with people who really wanted to hold on to a pretty picture of what was going to happen here , and you know that was probably my . You know what's one of my earliest Scorpio moon initiations , you know was was was realizing , like you know , this moon is one that shines in the darkest of nights .

That's , that's this one , mrs Artemis . You know , keeping it real , so to speak .

That's also part of why it's hard for people to be with Scorpio energy , because it tends to attune to the dark . It tends to attune to that which might do the betraying and perhaps overly attunes to that and misses other things . Right , you know .

You know Scorpio is usually , you know , you know I just went to something I'm remembering this time when my ex-partner and I walked into a grocery store and a dog came towards us and I don't even know what the dog was it's Stanafe and people take the dogs everywhere but and the dog sort of runs towards us and we simultaneously have a response and my response

is like what is this creature doing ? You know , like what ? You know what is he going to do next ? You know something , really you know , like I can't . I wish I could remember exactly what it was . Meanwhile my Libra Moon , I'm Scorpio Moon , meanwhile my Libra Moon partner is saying hey , puppy , I'm sorry .

It's like completely , you know I'm ready for vicious attacks and I think it just it was such a we just started laughing at . You know , and you know , of course , his Libra Moon would often not see threats when they were there right . And accommodate to things that were actually dangerous , but so it's not to .

You know , it's not that Scorpio is more wrong than others , but you know they all can see what they can see . You know they all have most perception . Scorpio is very good at seeing the dark but of course will also err in the direction of seeing the dark and it's highly sensitized to that part of things .

But again , that's really useful , like for me as a therapist that was incredibly useful to be able to hear the darker places in people , their own sages and their own , you know , anger , that they didn't want to have Knowledge , which would often be the gift right , anger is so frequently helpful Life and death .

But a lot of times people don't want to acknowledge it and I could say you sound really fucking pissed off , you know , and just you know , and so I think that's a lot of that . You know , energy to me .

I guess one way of that comes up in the Actian story , or the Actian part of it . I'm actually , my mind is more drawn to Demeter finding her rage , but I'd have to flip stories a bit there to get over there . But , you know that moment in her grieving process where she's turning Demophon Demophon into a God .

She's replacing Persephone with this boy , basically the Ambrosia , by day and putting him in the fires of immortality by night , which is also Achilles' story originally , right .

So she's kind of creating a Demigod and she gets caught by the mother putting this child into the fire and in that getting caught for some reason she's had enough and her rage just comes out in its full form .

Because then everything that has been held , everything that is repressed , everything that came up around the Orion story , obviously filters into this completely unrelated , seemingly unrelated , moment in the Grove .

He's lost his hunting party , his dogs and his crew kind of thing , and he doesn't know where he is , which I think is really important as well . He's not sure where he is . He's got a bit confused and a bit lost and he wanders into this Grove .

Artemis is naked there and I sort of see him as going oh sorry , I don't know , you know , kind of shielding his eyes , backing away , I'm sorry , I don't know where I am . He's seeing a goddess . He's like , oh my God , okay , backing away .

And this is when Artemis is fury and rage just comes through her and she reveals sort of full goddess rage form and immediately turns Actium into a stag and this is in Ovid's Metamorphosis . So there's lots of metamorphosis going on in that many varied book .

And as a stag he runs trying to get away and he can still have some consciousness of what's going on , but then his own dogs pick up his scent and basically dismember him and pulling him apart , which , as you elaborated on , is very interesting because dogs and deer are Artemis' creatures .

So she's ultimately had one of her creatures rip apart another one of her creatures . So we're in some really deep , dark animal beasts , stuff that's going on and of course , actium in this story is innocent , but it's being .

It's a clinical term , I guess , or maybe clinical is not a great word . Psychological terminology . That's just about taking parts of yourself and putting them on someone else . Right and literally . You know this is what she does . And what has been his sin ? His sin has been to see her naked .

It's like too much vulnerability too much unauthorized vulnerability and it's like again , for me it just it goes to that piece of like , you know , really wanting connection and being in this strange situation of again a wild creature who's chased .

You know there's something very odd about that and you know , with scorpio energy I always feel there's a hunger for connection but an inability to tolerate the lack of control that connection requires . You know it's like not always .

Sometimes it works other way , where they really can completely surrender and go for it , right , and really go there in a way that perhaps Pisces is the only one that I can think that can also really just totally go there , right , but there is often a scorpio .

There's a whole dynamic of , you know , I will not be controlled , I will not be , you know right , and there's a way that the defense becomes more powerful than the underlying , you know , desire for closeness or intimacy . So it feels like it often becomes all defense . You know like the scorpion looks like .

You know it's like where's the softness to this creature ?

Well , the second , but you know this figure of the scorpion who as you said is often found in deserts and you know , this water sign that's found in deserts and , as you said , just has that little drop of water underneath that . It's holding onto for as long as it can and it's watching constantly .

You know all of that kind of thing and of course all of that is in response to experiences of betrayal or abandonment or violence or , you know , exploitation . But the problem is that it also recapitulates that you know if you are going around , you know expecting those things to happen . They often do .

You know like people who run around you know dominating , you know all the time , and others are like , oh yes , okay , you know , but of course they are lying because they need to survive . And then you are like , oh , they betrayed me , I need to control them even more , right .

It's got that kind of now replicating thing , like what we were talking about before . Yeah , it's kind of a drama circle there sometimes . Yeah , I think it could go the other way too . I think it can , you know , become something more . But that's , I think the you know , as we know myth is so frequently showing us the you know , the messes we get into .

You know the you were feeling this heartbreak about the tragedy of Actaeon and I feel like that's what the Artemis hasn't done Some level , she hasn't grieved , she hasn't really let go , you know she hasn't really gone through that and it's a little bit frozen in her . And so then it reenacted , it's replicated , you know , it's played through .

There's a feeling that the response to Orion's betrayal has been a revenge , which of course keeps you tied to someone and then also frozen , you know . You know mythic time is always hard to figure out .

So we can't say , I've always felt , you know , with the virgin goddesses , you know the three big ones , right , hestia and we call Vesta Roman name , and then Athena and Artemis , and I've always felt their virginities are quite different . You know , like Hestia or Vesta , her energy , from my experience it feels like it's just about self .

I am enough to unto myself you know , it's just self completion , it's just like she's the ground of being , like there's no need , there's no because it's all already here . It's that feeling of completeness in the novel and self . And you know , athena's virginity feels like a kind of I'm up to other things , you know like I'm busy , you know , and .

But Artemis virginity has always felt to me like a trauma response . You know , like I want to go there but I can't go there , you know .

That's , you know , and it feels to me at least the feeling of it feels and partly because she's so sadistic and she and Apollo are both quite cold , harsh , not , she's not with the animal world , but with the human world right there's a coolness to her that is very noticeable and we can feel this sometimes with people with Scorpio energy and they can cool the .

Put a knife right through you know an arrow right through you . They know exactly what to say . You know they're very emotionally and to the emotional , to minutes . You know high levels yeah and very psychological and they know just where to put it right .

You know exactly where to put it , and yeah , so with Artemis , I've always thought there's a defensive quality to it's like , to this sort of it's like virginity , of psychic enclosure , like you will not .

like .

But it was such an interesting like mix of where Artemis with Orion is becoming a little bit Aphrodite , where she's making connection to this other , this other man and then , and then Aphrodite becomes Artemis , like she suddenly is like covered in in the mud and she's , she's running through , you know hunting with a Donis , and then she gets terrified that he's

going , that he's hunting is going to get him killed which does you know she's ?

he's speared by a bore or something like this right he's killed and she goes into this huge grieving process , but I feel like it's those , because Aphrodite , aphrodite is so , so hyper related , you know , and and and Artemis not wanting to go there , and the tension that the myths play out between the two of them in multiple different ways .

I found it fascinating to see that that reversal of that literally just found it the other day , discovering that reversal which feels very Taurus Scorpio or you know maybe , maybe , aries , libra , but anyway , the , the , the dynamic that plays between the two and the , because there's something that each of them obviously has , which is why they're pitted against each

other in this way . Right like that they're just representing such different things , the two of them interesting to think of .

You know , just because I have often felt and maybe it's just this is why I see it this way is the Venus connection that often felt like , yeah , the very deep longing , and Artemis to you know , to connect , yeah , in part , because she's so again , she's so connected to the natural world and it just it's like that would be a person who'd be all in you know

and yet she isn't , and the idea that you know again , yeah , that she has this sort of you know , I'm unclaimed Aphrodite , you know , sort of way yeah feels really resonance me thinking about it that way , because it's yeah , because I see that in Scorpio it's a very deep desire to connect .

There's just an incredible realization of how it could really be painful .

are the way that they're described , as detriment and fall and .

You know the dignities just mean good and bad , and you know that's soccer and weaker . But to me they really have qualitative stories that help us understand the nature of the sign and you know , for the moon and Venus to both have their problems there to me speaks of exactly this thing .

Like the affiliates of urge is strong , but it's gonna have to go through something . It's got a journey and I think you know that's what we see with these planets .

Like I , I can look for myself , you know , with my , with each of those two and really see how they you know , my earlier memories of them are highly they were highly attenuated to trauma , you know , to what could happen here and what you know .

And yet you know , by having them go through a process and I don't mean any specific well , I have a lot of thoughts about what those were for me , but they could be many different things , but they eventually became .

I mean , I think my Scorpio moon is the , is this is the masterful therapist in me can really go anyway with someone , track them really comprehensively and , you know , has a certain fearlessness and a certain comprehension or sentience . Yeah , and you know , but it , but it didn't . You know there was something .

She can't be seen that way , yeah , and and so that , yeah , almost like a , there's like a almost a flotation going on . It's secret affinity between Artemis and Aphrodite .

You know the Hippolytus story and the way it plays out between the two of them in there and Aphrodite , even in this Adonis story , you know it's like the only time you really hear of her grieving and going through . That deep , painful loss is a loss of Adonis , you know .

Otherwise you get the sense that she's just kind of like whatever , there's other lovers I'll be fine , but that in that moment she gets a taste of the Artemis .

It's getting underneath the defended responses to the raw vulnerable , you know , and when they do that , then they again they become able to do that with everybody .

But you know , it's not hard to see and I always feel with Scorpio and you know the same thing I feel with Pluto , like after Pluto touches something .

If you survive it and there's no guarantee you will or that your psychic being will you know , as you informally , but you emerge with , you know , a power , a potency that is can only be known by one who has survived it .

They have a knowing that is about having gone to the deepest , hardest places .

You know , in those mysteries there was nine days to go through all of that and that's all that you were doing . But then on the return , you know , very well documented , although we don't know what happened in those mysteries , we do know that people felt free in a way that they like , because they'd met death and returned .

There was really nothing to be afraid of anymore . Right , it was that sense of freedom , like you've gone because there's a freedom , like I have wings like Daedalus and Icarus or these kinds of freedoms .

And then there's the freedom of having met the thing I'm most terrified of , whatever that might be stared it in the face and survived it , which , as you say , the survival of that , is not guaranteed .

And I think of the Torian polarity , you know , that is about , you know , having boundary , having form , having slow , you know moving slowly , and you know , and the grounding , you know , all of these are often not done by Scorpio .

There's often a belief that it needs to be intense , it needs to happen and to go there , we've got to get in there and do the thing and you know , scorpio often has that trick of the mistaking , you know , intensity for intimacy and thinking , oh , it's really intense .

So it must be real , you know , or it's only real if we're and I face a lot of this in the experiential work that we do because , you know , we live in a culture that really wants things to happen and so people want to get in there and it's like , wait a minute , we have to really create the safe mode . Absolutely , I'll go anywhere .

I mean , that is really fucking true and that's the problem . But you know , when we're being doing it consciously , those Scorpio needs to remember like , okay , you know , take a breath , you know , okay , are you really ready for the next thing ? Right , and that slow , contained process allows that journey that is one to happen .

But if you take the drop and you put one drop at a time , there's that fizzing out and then slowly those two compounds become one and merged , which again , and as I think , the deepest longing of Scorpio , eighth house , deepest intimacy imaginable and available .

I think in the whole zodiac that eighth house scorpion world is the deepest intimate experience and that's the deepest longing and yet comes with this much armor and this much no way , and this much related to the animal world but not related to the human world , all these things which I think why Aphrodite is ultimately Aphrodite doesn't want that depth , she just

wants to play and enjoy and be in that field and it's sort of like . but if you could get those two archetypal compounds together , what might be possible , you know ?

The next kinds of possibilities I'll have a couple of retreats in different places in the world next year , although I don't yet know the schedule Going to have a trip to Greece to sacred sites for probably like 12 days in September and then online I do experiential astrology courses and the next one we're in a couple now .

The next time there'll be one is in February , probably open to register in December , and that is going to be on the water science . So you know I resonate with our conversation . Those are small groups .

I have like four sections and they're all like 12 to 14 people , so it's a small group so that we can really go there together and I send material to read and watch and listen to music and imagery and writing , and then in the classes we actually do embodied work with the archetype . We explore , we have discussion .

You know , I knew , like when we did the earth element , I had everybody bring clay and we did . We made clay things in front of the zoom and then we would show our thing and everyone else would make their clay , like that , instead of let earth speak to us , you know . So that's the kind of thing that we do .

You know , just looked at a bunch of people's Gemini collages recently Collage for Gemini , right , it's kind of so .

Anyhow , it's a way of experiencing how the archetype is alive for you and also it's a way of us feeding the field , you know , feeding our stories into this myth , this field of star and story that we are all custodians of , some more consciously than others , but it's our , you know , everybody's land or we belong to it . So I think those are some of the

things . So that's like a 20 week , 10-week , 10-session , thing over 20 weeks , okay , amazing .