We’ve had a month to kick it with Libra, a time for honing in on our relationships and correcting the balance of give and take in our lives. But this polite cocktail reception just got a little too stuffy for us to handle — we’re about ready to cast aside the social niceties and take advantage of the open bar in a way that might get a little too real for these mild-mannered peeps.

If Libra is about being on our best behavior in order to get past the first few dates, Scorpio is about letting it all hang out once you’re ready to discern how far this thing is really going to go. Scorpio might have a well-known penchant for secrecy, but this enigmatic sign won’t put on airs for the sake of making anyone else feel comfortable. With Scorpio, you get the good, the bad, and the ugly, and this is a month when we’re all a little more in the mood to take a good, unflinching look at ourselves — #nofilter.

From a seasonal perspective, the Sun’s ingress into the sign of Scorpio comes at a time when night is starting to overtake day as we move into a darker, colder period. With less of an emphasis on being out and about in the sunlight, this signals a turning of our attention inward, and what better way to initiate this process than to dig deep below the surface, as Scorpio is known to do?

Scorpio is all about depth and intimacy — and often on an all-consuming, take-no-prisoners level. Scorpio natives are known for their intensity, particularly in intimate relationships, but this all-or-nothing tendency can often be seen in just about any other aspect of their lives — how they dive into a new field of study, tackle a project, or binge-watch their favorite Netflix series, for example. That’s because Scorpio is primarily concerned with getting to the bottom of everything, or with getting acquainted with the totality of our experience — especially whatever we’ve repressed or swept under the rug.

Scorpio is sometimes associated with sex and death, which makes sense when you consider that all of our cultural taboos originate in these areas. As it happens, sex and death are both highly intimate and transformative processes, because they both, in their own way, make new life possible. “Rising from the ashes” is more or less the Scorpio season battlecry, and we might find that there’s nothing more regenerative than getting real with where we’re at this month.

It’s definitely no coincidence that so many holidays associated with the underworld take place this month either (like Día de los Muertos and All Saints Day). Halloween’s pagan roots can be traced back to the old Celtic celebration, Samhain, which marked the end of summer and beginning of winter. Clearing out the old to make way for the new was one way to mark this occasion, as was dressing up in costumes in order to honor the dead, who were believed to be set free on this occasion in order to roam our physical world. The ancients believed that the boundary between our physical world and the spiritual world was thinnest at this time, making it easier to connect with departed souls.

This post was originally published on 10/22/2016 on thedailyhunch.com.