Rise and shine, bitches. But only after you descend and reemerge. Jupiter is beginning its 13-month tour of Scorpio today, and naturally, this means growth will occur on strictly phoenix-like terms.

As a planetary energy, Jupiter is frequently misunderstood as being “all lottery wins, all the time.” While Jupiter can certainly bring luck (otherwise known as favorable circumstances that occur independently of our efforts to attain them), it’s much more accurate to call it an energy of expansion. The forces of expansion (Jupiter) and contraction (Saturn) are at the root of all that moves and unfolds, up to and including the expansion of the universe itself — and the eventual contraction of entire worlds into black holes. What goes up must come down, which is why Jupiter is associated with the Wheel of Fortune in tarot.

Jupiter always brings “more,” regardless of whether we’re ready to handle it or not. You want more income? Great, here’s a couple extra shifts per week that may or may not totally burn you out. More money? Be sure not to burn as fast as you earn. Want to see me magnify an already shitty situation? Hold my beer. You want more opportunity? Here, let me dangle several major career opportunities in front of your face. It’ll be up to you to seize them — I’m just the fun party guy of the Roman gods who speaks the language of “optimism and excess.” I never said my optimism was always working in concert with reality. That’s Saturn’s job.

That’s not to say Jupiter isn’t considered the greater benefic for nothing. He’s been known to overdo it at the bar (and maybe escalate a fight here and there), but he’s a vastly benevolent, jolly dude who cares about morality, knowledge, and wisdom. And it’s certainly not unheard of for people to rocket to fame, success, recognition, or material riches during an opportune Jupiter transit.

So how might Jupiter operate on Scorpio’s shadowy turf?

To recap, Scorpio is all about peeling back the layers, arriving at the truth, and exposing secrets — both the secrets of others, and the secrets we’ve been keeping from ourselves. Scorpio is about getting real, and getting intimate. Scorpio is the taboos and the shit that makes us kind of uncomfortable. Scorpio is alchemy. Scorpio is about surrendering to the process of death and rebirth, and it’s about strategy, perseverance, and knowing how to play the long game. Scorpio prevails, and Scorpio stands firmly in its power.

To totally put this into context, though, it might help to reflect on what this last year of Jupiter in Libra has been like. Within just a few days of Jupiter’s ingress into Libra last September, the Justice Department put a temporary block on DAPL construction, the U.S. and Russia reached an agreement to temporarily cease hostilities in order to find a solution to end the violence in Syria, and news broke of a historic peace deal in Colombia with the FARC. The Libran ideals of peace and justice were finally raining down upon the land! Except when they didn’t. Not long after, Colombian voters rejected the peace deal, U.S./Russia relations were back on ice, and we elected an unpolished orange turd to lead our country, which eliminated any hope of permanently blocking DAPL construction (or of “having nice things” in any sense, which I’m sure Jupiter in Libra would have loved to provide if it weren’t for the challenging influence of Uranus and Pluto all year).

Fast-forward one year later, though, and the FARC is now a political party (rather than an armed insurgent group) — and, for what it’s worth, our commitment to justice is perhaps stronger than it’s been in a really long time. Libra is associated with the law, and legal organizations like the ACLU received record amounts of support this year. Jupiter has trained its magnifying glass on all the places where peace, fairness, and justice are lacking, and it brought a cascade of moral attention to those areas.

Now, the dialog between Libra and Scorpio goes something like this: “Play nice!” “I’d rather get real.” “Harmony depends on our ability to meet each other halfway.” “Sure, but now that we’ve gotten past the superficial pleasantries, let’s tell ’em how we really feel.” “The world is harsh enough as it is. Can’t we just make everything beautiful and nice?” “Lolz, darkness IS beautiful.”

This next year-and-change of Jupiter in Scorpio is sure to bring out the authenticity in all of us, but it’s also, in many ways, a year-long initiation into the intense shadow work that’s required of our individual and collective healing.

Shadow integration is the process of making the unconscious conscious. When we allow our denial mechanisms to run the program in the background, we wind up with things like: the “colorblind” approach to race, the notion that marginalized groups are oppressing the people in charge, and the entire educational travesty that led us to 45. Or, individually, we wind up projecting all our issues onto everyone else — and then wonder why we keep running up against the same old patterns.

Scorpio’s medicine is not one of further denial, and it’s not one of rejecting what we find once we dig down to the bottom. If anything, Jupiter’s M.O. might be to confront us with a magnified portrait of everything we think we can’t stomach until we discover the internal strength required to process whatever’s really been going on. And if you really think about it: to process means to first accept. You accept a bite of that rotten apple — you stomach it — and then you process it internally, and by the end, it comes out as shit that fertilizes the soil.

Jupiter in Scorpio could also very well bring fringe, taboo topics more firmly into the mainstream. More than anything, it promises to bring an uncompromising stance in our quest to get to the truth. Jupiter’s moral eye is firmly trained on the findings of all this detective work, and it’s a little harder to get away with things when Scorpio gets involved.

Here’s to a devilish year of intense renewal and resourcefulness.

This post was originally published on 10/10/2017 on thedailyhunch.com.