Ophiuchus

Face the totality of existence and love it anyway.

Ophiuchus is a point of great contention among the astrologers of the modern day. While it is not officially a part of the historic zodiac, it lies along the ecliptic path nonetheless, and this brings up to the surface the very means our minds make of meaning. Is the significance of the constellation carried within the calculus of the stars? Is what lies on the ecliptic of some metaphysical substance, what made it worth of symbolizing fate? Or was it the arbitration of the original 12 zodiacs which our ancestors traced, read, and projected upon which made it significant? Was it the fixation of our consciousness upon those symbols which made them so important to the astrologers today? Whichever you believe reveals the underlying conception you have of the machinations of metaphysicality. Perhaps it is both, perhaps it is neither.

This tension between meaning and myth marks the threshold where interpretation becomes creation, where our search for cosmic order transforms into the stories we tell to sustain it. From that threshold emerges the figure of Ophiuchus himself, the symbol born of our need to find coherence in contradiction.

Ophiuchus is not merely the thirteenth constellation; he is the unspoken axis around which life and death coil. He stands between Scorpio and Sagittarius, between chthonic-like descent and divine aspiration. In doing so, he becomes the living tension that binds both. He is the Serpent-Bearer, but not because he tames or masters the serpent. He bears it because he must. Because to hold the serpent is to live in acknowledgment of what creation demands: that every act of life is also an act of death.

But to know Ophiuchus, you must know Serpens; to know life, you must know death. The serpent is an age-old symbol which has been lost, found, retold, rehashed, integrated, forsaken, and dismissed. Today we associate it with fear, with death, with predation, and to some still spiritual and religious sects, divinity and wisdom. We will dive into the enormous depths of the history of this symbol and golden threads which tie them all together another time, but for now know that in the context of Ophiuchus, Serpens is death, renewal, and potential. Potential in the neutral connotation; potential is the capacity to change, for better, for worse, and at all. It is the multi-headed hydra of reality which is utterly unmanageable and uncontrollable; from which upon solving one problem, many others sprout. And in this way, it is life, raw and ever-blooming.

Ophiuchus is shown often with the snake about his waist, bearing its weight fully, balanced with half the snake on one side and the other. Insofar as the serpent is still representational of death and potential, Ophiuchus represents the one who bears the weight of potentiality, both the joy and the depravity of existence. To embody the symbol of Ophiuchus is to honor all what remains when all certainty falls away. The unbearable, miraculous clarity of existence. It is to hold hand-in-hand both divinity and oblivion. In doing so, we find ourselves able to feel contradictory emotions, believe contradictory reason, and embrace this mad existence from which it is paradoxical even to simply be. It is no wonder those who heed the same path of Ophiuchus go the path of the medicine-man, for it is self-fulfilling: to heal is to acknowledge the truth of death and the worth of life. But while the doctors abate death for the value of life, the shamans embrace death for the value of death, and heal more than the ailments of the flesh. 

In the myths, Ophiuchus is often Asclepius, the healer who learned to raise the dead and was struck down for it. But this myth, like so many, speaks less of punishment and more of boundaries, of a being who dared to stand at the threshold where mortal and divine blur. It was not resurrection that provoked the gods, it was his comprehension. Resurrection meant the end of death, and death is not opposed to life, but completed by it. To bear the serpent is to hold the knowledge of consequence. It is to see that medicine and poison are the same in substance, differing only in dose and intent. Ophiuchus is the archetype of integration, the healer who heals not by rejecting death, but by making peace with it.

Ophiuchus embodies the understanding that healing cannot occur without suffering, that wisdom cannot arise without wounding. In him, the serpent is not sin, but symbol of life coiling upon itself, of eternity breaking into motion, eternal bloom. To hold it is to acknowledge the full breadth of being: the sacred and the profane, the bright and the broken, each giving meaning to the other. The serpent’s body, endless and self-consuming, mirrors our own striving for wholeness. Ophiuchus teaches that to know the serpent is to know the self as something that dies continually and is reborn through understanding. He stands not as a hero, but as a witness who bears the unbearable and remains whole. 

The age-old omission of Ophiuchus from the zodiac feels fitting. He disrupts symmetry. Twelve signs form a closed system; Ophiuchus opens it again. He is the reminder that perfection is stasis, and stasis is antithetical to divinity. It is through imbalance, through tension, through paradox, that life breathes. He is the unacknowledged thirteenth, the one who breaks the circle so that it may turn anew. To contemplate Ophiuchus is to contemplate what it means to heal. To heal is not to erase pain, but to reveal what it has to teach. To know life is to know death and not flee from it. To hold the serpent is to face the totality of existence and to love it anyway.