Pholus: Healing the Trauma of a Spiritual Emergency

Nov 9

In a post earlier this year, I wrote about how centaur asteroid Pholus entering Capricorn in late 2019 set the stage for a release of our collective ancestral trauma. Melanie Reinhart coined the phrase, “the lid comes off,” to describe what happens in a Pholus transit.

Now, in November 2020, no one can argue that the lid has NOT blown off even wider in Western culture and the United States, revealing ever more starkly the intergenerational trauma of systemic racism, exploitation, and materialist gain.

2020 brought us a crisis of body, conscience, and spirit.

We cannot turn away from the truth that our fates are tied inextricably into the lives of those around us and into the fate of the earth and its creatures. The choices we make affect not only ourselves, but everyone around us in an ever-widening circle of effect.

As fear and grief rampage through our nervous systems, we are seeking grounding, hope, and faith. After 4 years of a Trump presidency, we are seeking truth.

Pholus and Spiritual Crisis

Like his centaur kin, Pholus has a very elliptical, 90 year orbit. His path takes him from being very close to Saturn all the way out to Neptune. Curiously, his path slows to a crawl in the sign of Capricorn where he spends the most time of any zodiac sign. He entered Capricorn in 2019 and will stay there until 2041.

Saturn represents our physical world: the earth, our bodies, the physical and social structures that make up ourselves and our communities.

Neptune represents any state of consciousness where we transcend our physical world: transpersonal or unitive states of consciousness, spiritual ecstasy, psychosis, or drug and alcohol highs.

All centaurs help us to integrate traumatic experiences in our nervous systems.

Pholus is a guide that helps us re-ground and return to earth-bound consciousness after “leaving our bodies” in Neptunian states.

Recently, a colleague recommended the book Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis, a multi-contributor volume by Stanislav and Christina Grof from 1989.

The book “explore[s] the idea that many episodes of unusual states of mind, even those that are dramatic and reach psychotic proportions, are not necessarily symptoms of disease in the medical sense. We view them as crises of the evolution of consciousness, or ‘spiritual emergencies,’ comparable to the states described by the various mystical traditions of the world.”

Types of Spiritual Emergencies

The Grofs’s book reviews the following types of spiritual emergency: “the shamanic crisis; kundalini awakening; episodes of unitive consciousness; psychological renewal through a return to the center; the crisis of psychic opening; past-life experiences; communications with spirit guides and channeling; near-death experiences; close encounters with UFOs; possession states.”

All of these experiences are emergencies in our Western, materialist culture because they involve leaving the “familiar ground” of normal, everyday consciousness and the mental framework of Cartesian dualism.

Pholus’s Myth

In Pholus’s ancient Greek myth, he lived in a cave in Arcadia, where he was the protector of a storehouse of sacred wine that would put the centaurs into a state of ecstasy.

When Hercules raided this wine cellar. all the other centaurs were attracted by the intoxicating scent, provoking a brawl. Hercules ended up killing many centaurs and both Chiron and Pholus were accidentally fatally wounded by Hercules’ poison arrows.

In this myth, we can see Saturn, Neptune, and the themes of spiritual emergencies reflected: Saturn represents the underground storehouse, while Neptune is symbolized by the wine, which is so potent only a whiff provokes the other centaurs to lose all rational control. (This is why Melanie Reinhart says that Pholus represents “the lid coming off” suddenly.)

Pholus is the centaur who symbolizes managing states of consciousness between Saturn and Neptune.

Healing the Root: Becoming our Own Spiritual Authority

In the method of centaur attunement brought forward by David Leskowitz, we focus on Pholus as a healer of our root chakra. Our root chakras represent our connections to the earth, our ancestors, as well as the attachments to our parents formed shortly after birth.

Healing our roots is a long process of releasing trauma, working through fear, re-discovering safety, and remaining embodied throughout the process. It is about realizing that the earth is here to support us, not demand our labor and perfectionism.

But this is only one side of the coin (the Saturnian side).

The life of the spirit, of divine consciousness, calls us to move beyond mental, physical, and emotional structures into a more expansive version of ourselves. Learning to discern our callings to spirit is also a lifelong lesson, especially living in a world where man has become divorced from spirit, or God.

We are living in a time where “spiritual information” is everywhere but we have no way to distinguish what is true for ourselves and very little support from society to pursue our spiritual lives.

It is quite easy to become habitually ungrounded through substance, spiritual practice, or disassociation. This is the pure Neptunian state.

To heal the rift between Saturn and Neptune means becoming our own spiritual authorities.

Mastering the Initiatory Experience

I often write here about learning to trust your inner voice. It is both the scariest and toughest aspect of spiritual and emotional growth.

I take the meaning of initiation at its most simple, signifying a rebirth or a renewal. Implied in initiation is death and then resurrection. It is the process through which we create new selves and it is painful, confusing, and very risky.

In most historical times and cultures, initiation was woven into the fabric of life and society because people had a relationship with the Divine.

Now it is up to us to establish that relationship to the Divine on our own.

Pholus, as a centaur that travels the space between Saturn and Neptune, can be a guide to healing your separation from divine consciousness. Attuning to Pholus can help you to manage integrating your spiritual and rational, social selves.

The “spiritual emergency”is so prevalent in our society because we have no frame of reference for initiatory experiences. They are pathologized, feared, and dismissed.

It matters not what form your personal trauma or spiritual emergency has taken. It only matters that you honor your inner truth and divinity while also healing disconnection, disassociation, and self-abnegation.

There are many ways to do this and almost all include mindfulness, embodiment, prayer or affirmation, and intention.

What new rituals can you initiate to help you heal your connection to both the earth and the cosmos?

If you’re interested in Centaurs and working with them on your healing journey, I offer monthly programming through my Centaur Healing project.