Scorpioactive

The physicist Marie Curie was arguably the most plutonic/scorpionic person who ever lived. The discoverer of radium and polonium attained her qualifications in the 1890s, under onerous conditions (poverty, sexism), drove her genius to near breakdown to generate epoch-defining new science and enjoyed a passionate love saga amid one of the most turbulent times on record.

Curie had her Sun in Scorpio conjunct the Midheaven (enduring reputation) and opposite Pluto in Taurus – Pluto is the ruler of Scorpio so to have it opposing suggests enormous, chthonic performance pressure on a daily basis. Not only that, her Venus, Mars and Saturn were also in Scorpio.

Marie Curie was thus a quintuple Scorpio and her Scorpio “stellium” was all in the 10th house – the vocational sector. Saturn, her chart ruler as she was Capricorn Rising, as part of the Scorp cluster emphasizes the Scorpio/Plutonic vibe further.

And to complete the picture, her Pluto in Taurus was trine her Ascendant in Capricorn AND the North Node in Virgo. All the Scorpio was grounded in a Grand Earth Trine involving the Scorpio ruler.

If you take the purest definition of the scorpionic temperament – investigative and obsessive, keenly interested in the unseen and power – she was the epitome of it. “Nothing in life is to be feared,” she said. “It is only to be understood.”

This is from a woman who routinely walked around with test-tubes full of radioactive isotopes in her pockets, admiring their spooky green glow. Not that their danger was known at that point, of course. Marie Curie actually coined the term radioactivity – she won two Nobel Science prizes for her research and was the ‘face’ of a zeitgeist that put radioactive particles into multiple products.

By the time the dangers were discovered, she was ultra-radioactive and so was everything she’d ever touched.  Even so, she lived until her late 60s, passionate and productive despite gliding around like a nuclear reactor in meltdown and with enough radioactivity that today even her labnotes and cookbooks are still kept in special lead-lined museum viewing boxes.