Fourth stage of the Scorpion cycle
The Tale of the First Flight
While the salamander simmered and solidified into the eurypterid, still half-blind and buried in primeval mud, it beheld above it the shifting glow of luminous vapor. These radiant clouds danced in impossible patterns, forming and reforming into perfect silhouettes — images that seemed drawn from both the forgotten past and the longed-for future.
The eurypterid watched them for what felt like lifetimes, until one day it believed: the clouds must be a place — a realm where all desires come true. A place where it might become what it always dreamed of being.
So fervently it yearned for the clouds that its stony shell split open, and out flew a creature it had never imagined — the dragonfly. It believed it had freed itself at last from all imposed form. And with wings shimmering like the very dreams it chased, it soared joyfully toward the sky, never doubting for a moment that its illusions were real.
Transformations of the Dragonfly: A Flight Through Illusion
1. Ladybug (Musca): The First Unfolding
The dragonfly’s story begins not with flight, but with weight — a tiny, jewel-like body breaking free from stone and mud. Emerging from the cracked eurypterid shell, it first takes the form of a ladybug, still round and armored, still clinging to the memory of its crustacean past.
It hovers, not flies. Its wings are hidden beneath a polished red dome. It sees the world as soft and curved — a womb of colors and symbols, a dreamy field of possibility. It mistakes earth’s mist for heavenly clouds. It believes it is ascending.
But it carries its shell with it.
🐞 Ladybug as the “first dragonfly”
- Musca as an archetype is not a nasty fly, but an innocent bug that doesn’t even know who it is yet. Its appearance is the result of a mixture of memories, random shadows, smells, and sunbursts.
- And most importantly, it is not a dragonfly yet. This is its first form, a baby insect that crawled out of the shell of an eurypterid, saw the light, and crawled towards a hot salamander, thinking it was a lamb 🐑🔥
That is:
- Taurus is the earth from which the dragonfly crawled out.
- She rose, saw the shadow of scorpion claws (Libra), the smoking salamander,
- …and from the projection, light, heat, ignorance, illusion – Aries was formed.
🗨“Wow, this thing has horns and it’s all white and hot, so it’s definitely a lamb!” 🐑✨🔥
Musca = Ladybug = “Earth’s Halo” = first stage of dragonfly
- Hatches from Taurus – a warm, earthy, large and ancient body.
➤ She is still all flesh, but ready to move.
- Sees a “lamb” in the clouds – a projection of Libra/salamander, but in child form.
➤ This is not recognition, but a child projection: “Probably, this is someone kind waiting for me.”
➤ But in reality – this is a charred bone ancestor, which she does not recognize.
- Collision with reality: – the bug flies closer and sees itself in the flames, like a monster from the past.
➤ And then the transformation begins.
2. Volans: The Flight Begins
The shell breaks mid-air, and for the first time the being sees itself as something new — a fish with wings, a ribbon gliding on invisible waves. This is the Volans moment: fluid, elegant, and unanchored. The dragonfly truly takes flight.
It becomes a symbol of paradox: a swimmer in air, a flyer in water, and it forgets it was ever crawling. The joy of motion erases the trauma of becoming.
But Volans doesn’t yet know where it flies — or why.
🐟 Dragonfly = Volans = Flying fish
- A sharp remelting:
➤ the bug lets go of the past, molts in the air, and something neither one nor the other is obtained: a fish that can fly – or a dragonfly with fins instead of wings.
- This is not an “adult form”, but a reprogramming of the direction:
“I am not who I was. I am who I decided to be.”
3. Apus: The Hunger for Purity
Eventually, the contradictions of its form begin to haunt it. Too many limbs, too many memories, too many hidden places.
So the dragonfly sheds everything but speed and direction.
It becomes Apus — the swift, the one without feet. A blade of instinct, a shape honed for flight alone. No longer curious, no longer reflective, it moves simply to move, chasing insects, chasing wind, chasing itself. It devours.
🔄 Flight of the dragonfly as an archetype of personal retrospection and self-exposure:
- Ladybug (musca) — an ignorant child of the earth, spacesuit-shell, cuteness, but not yet self-awareness.
- Fall into the eurypterid (Taurus) — revelation: “You are not cute, you are a monster in armor.”
- Flight into Volans — soaring: “I can be different, be light, be fast!”
- Return to the point of molting — the moment of truth: “Who was I then?.. Oh God.”
- Horror from one’s own previous form — the moment of shadow. “Was I really all paws?..”
- Apotheosis — apus (swift): shedding all that is superfluous, finding the only essence — wings and thirst. → Thirst for movement, hunting, resonance.
But even in this perfected flight, it begins to thirst. Not for air — but for water. For depth.
4. Dorado: The Final Dive
In a quiet moment between currents, the creature remembers: it was once a fish. Not a mimic, not a metaphor — a real one.
So it folds its wings and descends — back toward the element it abandoned.
This is Dorado: the golden fish, born again in water. Not innocent like the ladybug, not shimmering like Volans, not driven like Apus. Dorado is a myth come full circle — a wish fulfilled and instantly broken. A creature of impossible duality.
It knows now that the sky was only ever a mirror, and that true flight must include falling.
Dragonfly = Dorado
- Thirst and hunger
Flight is eternal, but without a drop of water.
The sky did not give water, did not feed,
and suddenly… a memory of a fish.
→ The Great Return to Water.
- Fish
Small, golden, perfect.
Everything about her is harmony, completeness.
She is not fire in water,
she is Water that has taken form.
→ The moment of evolutionary satisfaction.
Archetype: The Dragonfly – The Flight Where Everything Is Not What It Seems
The dragonfly is the first creature to take to the air, and yet it doesn’t know what air is. It believes it’s ascending toward heaven, when in fact it is simply escaping the weight of its own past. It carries no map, only memory and hunger.
Where the eurypterid was a creature of structure — armored, ancient, rooted in the world — the dragonfly is all movement and mirrors. Its vision is vast, fragmented, hyper-detailed; it sees everything at once, but can’t yet tell what is real.
This is the archetype of illusion mistaken for transformation. The dragonfly is not yet a conscious being — it is a reaction, a reflex, a burst of becoming that hasn’t caught up to itself. It flies because it must, not because it understands flight.
It represents the soul’s first desperate attempt to escape its own gravity, to believe in an external salvation, to mistake motion for freedom.
But it is also the first to doubt — and that doubt is the seed of consciousness.
The dragonfly doesn’t just symbolize the beginning of flight — it marks the beginning of disillusionment, of realizing that the clouds aren’t made of dreams, and that heaven, perhaps, is not above but within.
The Dragonfly Body – Everything Hurts, But You’re Flying (Archetype from Within)
For the first time, you don’t crawl, don’t swim, don’t scrape, but fly. Or, at least, you think you’re flying. In reality, you’re shaking in the wind, while your body hasn’t yet figured out what’s happening to it. The wings work separately from the head, the head works separately from the body, and the gaze… oh, it lives in its own reality, where 360° is the minimum.
This is the stage where movement outpaces awareness. You move until you understand who’s moving. And your whole body is like thin foil stretched over a chassis of veins and memories. Every gust of wind is a panic attack. Every attempt to sit down is an existential crisis. And the eye… the eyes won’t close anymore, because you don’t know how to blink. Even if you really need to.
The dragonfly’s body is a body that was not asked for, but received. It is lighter than you want, faster than you can handle, and more fragile than you believe. But there is magic in it – in the way it can hang, catch the light, disappear between blinks.
This is a body in which to live is like being an insect, a god, and a mistake in a time loop at the same time. It is impossible to relax, impossible not to see, impossible to stop. But that is precisely why it is possible to fly from it – not like a bird, but like a hallucination.
Psychophysically, this is the first experience of conscious movement outside of gravity, but still without a real center of gravity. As if the brain were still a eurypterid, and the body was already a flutter from the future. The mismatch is harsh. The body still remembers the stone, but no longer touches it. And therefore cannot understand where it begins and ends.
“Later, as the form simplifies and wings become purpose-built, sleep returns. The apus — the swift — can finally close its eyes. It still doesn’t know what it’s doing in the sky, but it can rest for a moment, mid-flight.”
The Dragonfly: Psychophysical Layer
Experiencing yourself as a dragonfly is a strange, disturbing and in many ways paradoxical state. It is a feeling of insane acceleration, high mobility, non-stop movement and flow, but at the same time – almost complete loss of body sensation. As if you are a light shell rushing through the air, deprived of stability, support and rest. It seems that you can fly, but you are not quite sure why and where. And sometimes you do not even remember who you are.
This is the stage where the intellect is accelerated to the limit, where thoughts can be too fast, too chaotic, too light to hold. The sense of time and space begins to distort – you can suddenly find yourself “in the past” or “in the future”, as if everything inside you is moving and responding to external events with incomprehensible logic. In this state, it is easy to confuse reality with imagination, and the internal with the external.
Sometimes you feel tiny but important – like you have a mission but don’t know what it is. And sometimes you feel hyper-aware, with all your eyes open, like the world is made up of hundreds of layers and you’re looking at them all at once.
This is a very vivid stage, full of insights, panics, ecstasies and failures. You may feel like your old form has been shattered, but the new one hasn’t yet been established. And between these forms, you’re a wavering, winged mistake, caught between sky and water and reflections.
🌬️🔥💧🌍 Elements
The dragonfly is a paradoxical creature born at the turning point of the elements:
Water is its past: like a ladybug, it crawls out of the earth-body, carrying the darkness and humidity of the toad and fish depths.
Fire is the remnant of the salamander, the memory of transformation. It no longer absorbs, but illuminates the path.
Air is its current element, but rather as a space of mistakes and searches than as a comfortable environment. It breathes air, but does not belong to it.
The earth is only in memories. It has not touched the earth since it left its shell. The earth remains behind, like an imprint, like a sore joint.
Thus, the dragonfly is an impulse that bursts out of the water into the sky, burned by fire, cut off from the earth.
🜃 Astrology
Constellations associated with transformation:
Taurus is a soft, earthly point of reference. A ladybug, the first stage of a dragonfly, hatched from its body. Aldebaran is its first landmark.
Libra is the shadow of the claws of the echinoderm, reflected in the form. Libra gives it duality, a pair of wings, a sense of balance that will never be there.
Scorpio is the true ancestry. Hence its symbol is a wavy line with an arrow.
Gemini is a flight from the body, a split of the form into wings and shell, forward movement.
Pisces is the final projection. Strekoza is trying to catch up with her original image, the fish she saw as a child.
Luminaries:
Moon (through Cancer) — abandoned shell, memory of cyclicity.
Mercury (through Gemini/Virgo) — nervous impulse, from which it all began. But it controls poorly.
Neptune (through Pisces) — unrealizable dream, to which the dragonfly strives, not knowing who called it there.
If we add analogies, then the dragonfly is an explosive mixture of:
- Pisces dream,
- Virgo neuroses,
- Gemini duality,
- Libra reflection,
- and Scorpio cruelty.
♏ The Symbol and the Lizard: Tracing the Curve of Return
The Dragonfly thinks she’s reached the sky, transformed at last into the shining fish that dwells at the center of heaven. But the arc of her flight has traced something deeper than she knows. It is not a line upward, but a curve — one that loops, spirals, and dips back down.
The symbol of Scorpio is not merely a glyph for poison and intensity. It is the map of her trajectory:
- First a gentle rise — the hopeful ascent of the ladybug.
- Then a sudden drop — the shell falling away as she becomes Volans.
- A steeper flight upward — the violent rush of Apus.
- And finally, a pointed tail, a hook at the end — Dorado: the wishful end, the delusion of completion.
But the tail curves back. That’s the secret of the sting. It says: “You are not finished.”
The curve does not end with Dorado. It folds into a hidden form — the Lacerta, the lizard that waits in the unseen part of the sky. She is the echo of the Scorpio’s sting, the silent continuation of the pattern. She is neither insect nor fish, but something entirely new. Something that crawls between dimensions, climbing walls, shedding tails, moving in zigzags and fractals — always close to the ground, but never trapped by it.
She is the seed of the dragon.
And so the Dragonfly leaves behind her illusions of perfection and becomes a path — a winding line that carries us toward the next transformation. Toward something with skin, memory, and claws.