Fifth stage of the Scorpion cycle
Somewhere between the Sun and the ash lies the memory of a body — not yet human, not quite fish. It crawled, once. Not to survive, but because the Earth remembered how to hold weight again. And in that weight — there was story.
This is Lacerta. The emergence of the spine.
Before the spine, there was only motion — flickering, darting, shimmering. The golden fish knew how to grant wishes, but she had no memory of her own. She moved through dreams, not bones. And when the time came to choose, she chose to remain small and shining, forever swimming toward the hands that waited.
But something else, deep in the same current, turned away.
It did not wait.
It did not shimmer.
It grew.
First came the spine, rising where once was only a flick of instinct. Then the feet, the claws, the dry land. The lizard did not grant wishes — she remembered too much for that. She crawled out not to change the world, but to feel its weight. To press against it. To know what it meant to stay.
“She remembers something soft, golden, and without bones — but that was not the path she took.”
This stage is the formation of the back, the axis, the spinal center, but still without higher control centers (the brain in our sense).
It is the spinal cord without the brain, pure vertical of memory, the spine as the axis of perception.
It is not the form itself, but the memory of it.
Not the body, but the topology of the axes, like the ghost of the spine, preserving the line of the spine, even when the bodies no longer exist.
🦎 Comparison with previous stages
Eurypterid: potential intelligence, hidden and buried in mineral flesh, almost geology.
Bone marrow, but without true form.
Dragonfly: an electric arc, a plexus of nerves that catch the air.
Pure sensation, without support, only direction.
Lacerta: a real axis appears for the first time.
A spine that can support both.
It carries the weight of the earth (from the eurypterid) and the memory of flight (from the dragonfly), but at the same time it crawls, clinging to the soil, pressing itself into the terrain, and guarding the inner flame – the remnant of the salamander.
It is neither water nor air, it is earth and bones, dry and alive, supporting and waiting.
Lacerta is the first spine that does not simply react, but remembers. It is the spine as a carrier of experience. In it, for the first time, a form emerges that is capable of surviving to the future, because it clings to the world with claws, not with hope.
🦠 Archetype & Symbolism
Lacerta is the first form with a spine, where the head begins to be assembled. It is not another beast, but a supporting axis, the ghost of all the beasts that have been and those that will be. It is an archive and a framework on which something greater will grow.
Archetype:
— Memory of the body, standing upright.
— Assembly of a single being from many fragments, which used to float on their own.
— The shadow of an immortal, who still does not know that she is alive.
If the previous forms were about experiences (toad), a flight (dragonfly), an ascent to the light (fish), then the lizard is a return to the body, but no longer amorphous, but axial. This is a reflex, realizing for the first time that it is repeating itself.
She remembers everyone — not because she is smart, but because her structure is woven from memory.
Symbolism:
- The spine as the first supporting structure, not a flexible rod (like fish), but a real backbone.
- The head as a promise, not a completed organ: not yet thinking, but already direction.
- The tail is an extension of the body into the past. It is long because it drags everything that was behind it.
- The skin is a border that it can shed. Lacerta begins renewal through shedding, as the first mechanism for overcoming time.
Archetype from within:
“Before you were, you watched. Before you acted, you remembered.”
Lacerta is a vertebrate creature that did not immediately become itself.
It was not born with a head, but only with the sensation of a back, as if it was an extension of someone else.
All it had at first was the memory of a spine that stretched through the bodies of others.
It looked, but did not see, because it did not know where its eyes were.
It remembered a shape, but did not know which one was its own.
🧠 Psychophysics
Stability, attention, inert readiness.
This is a form that has survived everything – and now simply exists, while others try to understand why.
She does not think – she reflects. The word “reflection” is literally physical for her: she twitches not because she is scared, but because she remembered.
- First axis. First “up and down”.
- In the body it is the spine, in the consciousness it is the feeling of the center of gravity.
- Lacerta does not move – it orients itself. The back leads, but does not carry.
- The head does not appear from within, but through an external response: through looking at others who have it.
- Lacerta for the first time becomes aware of itself as a body among other bodies. It feels: “I am not he, but I also have a beginning, if I have an end.”
🜁🜄 Elements
- Air: the breath of forms, the spirit that has not yet taken hold.
- Water: the residual plasticity of the fish tail, the memory of desires.
- Earth appears for the first time: as a support for the spine.
- There is no fire yet – no will, no center. But it is already emerging.
✧ Astrology of the Lizard
Lacerta marks the moment the body begins to “remember itself” — not through flesh or thought, but through bone. The spine, emerging from the dark aquatic soup, becomes both a memory device and a moral compass. No longer drifting, this creature crawls onto the scaffold of time.
☉ The Axis of Leo and Aquarius
Here, the world begins to revolve around a center. Not yet a heart — a core. Not yet identity — but orientation.
Leo brings ignition. The solar flash that burns through the primordial fog. It doesn’t speak yet, but it casts shadows. The lizard squints — and in that act, a nervous system is born.
Aquarius, its opposing twin, builds the scaffolding. The grid. The crystalline structure of things. It sees the future before the bones are done ossifying. And that future is cold, skeletal, brilliant — a lattice without flesh.
Together they form the axis: the first will to become, and the silent calculation of becoming.
♄ Saturn and ♅ Uranus: Architects of Bone
The lizard does not dream — it remembers. Its body is a fossil that has not died yet. Saturn keeps it slow, deliberate, pressed into time like a leaf into stone. Uranus crackles in its tail — a tension, a glitch, a flare of direction without destination.
Each bone is a history. Each joint, a negotiation. Saturn carves order into motion; Uranus questions every pattern before it stabilizes.
This is not elegance — it is survival as geometry.
✷ The Stellar Neighbors: Hydra, Crater, Corvus
Overhead, the stars do not speak — they witness. Hydra spills its length across the sky, echoing the body’s new horizontal stretch. Crater holds ancestral echoes — the memory of waters poured, poured again. Corvus, the crow, watches quietly. It remembers something the lizard cannot name.
This is a zone of ghosts. But also of invention. Of firsts. The first vertebra. The first step. The first error that was also design.
✴ On the Edge of Combustion
The via combusta, the “burning way,” lies close now. Not every Lacerta crosses it. But those who do are never the same.
To brush against it is to glimpse the Sun too early — to mistake light for guidance, and sacrifice for transformation. Some burn. Others calcify. Most… turn back.
Those who stay just long enough become strange creatures — not yet dragons, not yet gods — just bodies that remember too much.
☿ The Spine as Memory, Not Voice
Mercury is present, but mute. Here, it moves from Cancer into Leo — thought becoming form, feeling hardening into directive.
This Mercury does not speak — it shivers. It carries the entire archive of vertebrate error, bone by bone. It is not language yet, but position. The lizard cannot tell you where it’s going, but its tail twitches when the geometry is wrong.
The Fifth House: Creative Gravity
In the fifth house, form doesn’t just appear — it performs. The lizard becomes aware that its movement means something. That the Earth records it.
A footfall is a choice. A tail-flick is an afterthought. The world is no longer just environment — it’s an audience.
But with performance comes exhaustion. And with exhaustion, memory. A long memory.
Memory and Mutation
This is not metamorphosis. It’s a dispersion. The fish does not become a lizard — she becomes all of them. Each with their own spines, destinies, and delusions of supremacy.
But deep inside, they still carry it — the first line.
The memory of the one who gave it to them.
Lacerta is not one being. It is the echo of all creatures who ever dared to carry a spine.
🦖 1. Ichthyostega — “The one that first came out”
From the depths of the sea into the swamp air — the first spine, the first paw, the first real step.
The spine is like a straight line between the past and the future.
Now you no longer float with the flow — you carry the body.
Ichthyostega is the mother of all landforms, the first in the line.
🡆 Transformation: from flexible movement in space to direct movement in time.
🌀 2. Gecko and chameleon — “Masters of adhesion”
They don’t run to the target — they cling, freeze, watch.
The spine becomes a tool for adhesion to the surface.
The eyes become independent. Strength is in locality, precision, adhesion.
The chameleon is a lizard that doesn’t hurry.
The gecko is the one who clings even to glass.
🡆 Transformation: from outward movement — to grip, adhesive toe pad, fixation. Control.
🦕 3. Sauropod — “Axis as a vertical”
A massive carcass reaching for the sky.
The spine is no longer just a backbone, but the meaning of life.
It is stretched to the limit of what is possible, supporting incredible mass and length.
The brain is in two places: one in the head, the other in the tail.
An example of absolute bodily geometry.
🡆Transformation: from local control to total length and mass.
🕳 4. Shrew / Ghost Mammal — “Little Fire Bearer”
The first spark of inner warmth.
The spine now protects a very fragile creature.
This is the beginning of the mammal line, almost human, almost nothing.
Lives short, fears light, but knows how to care.
A new type of inner center — not a spine, but a heart.
🡆Transformation: from scale and mass — to memory and vulnerability.
🐉 5. Emptiness. Death. Hydra.
Death of form.
All the above-described creatures disappear.
The ridge disintegrates into archives, fossils, museum exhibits.
Their memory slides in the mud, in sedimentary layers, in DNA and in dreams.
Hydra appears – a residual form, the shadow of all vertebrates, a collective animal ghost.
🡆 Transition: Lacerta → Hydra is the death of the body carrier, but the preservation of information.
🪐 Lacerta: Astrological anatomy of the spine
♉ 2nd house / Taurus — Body shape, muscle memory, support and gravity
- Ichthyostega = awakening of the body will: paws, spine, fixation in gravity.
- This is the body’s determination to get out on dry land.
- Ruler: Venus, but here it is not connected with feeling, but with density and weight.
→ “I have a body. It is not carried away by the current. It rests on its pillars.”
♍ 6th house / Virgo — Coordination, coupling, working mechanics
- Gecko and chameleon = local attention, control of movements, adaptive joints, eyes.
- Virgo: the sign of paws and tails, ankles and spinal service.
- Here the spine becomes an intelligent mechanism — not heroic, but efficient.
→ “I adapt because I cling. I notice the little things. I survive.”
♌ 5th house / Leo — Axis, center, elongation, charisma of the body
- Sauropod = the axis on which the world rests.
- Leo is the manifestation of the spine as the central pillar of power, mass, dignity.
- Sauropod reaches for the sky — it is like a pillar of solar grandeur, but without the consciousness of the sun.
→ “I am the axis. I connect heaven and earth. My heaviness is my crown.”
♋ / ♏ 8th house / Transformation and genetic death
- Shrew / small animal = transition to warm-bloodedness, care, body with a heart.
- The 8th house gives a biological change of strategy: from mass to warmth, from power to care.
- Here mortality, time, birth and care as a cycle first appear.
→ “I am the beginning of the race. I survive due to memory, anxiety and a warm body.”
♒ 11th house / Archives, remains, awareness of the extinct
- Here is Hydra: it stretches from the past, like an archive of vertebral shadows.
- The 11th house is the sign of extracting someone else’s experience, including fragments.
- Ruled by Uranus: here a sudden awareness appears – “I am no longer a living being, I am a set of memories.”
→ “I am gone, but I am still here. I carry the bones of others. I am someone else’s trace.”
♓ 12th house / Pisces / Moon Dragon — Complete disintegration, dissolution of form, transition to myth
- The final stage of Lacerta = complete dissolution in the earth, in the archives, in the pre-death state.
- Here the soul, if there is one, prepares to reassemble.
- The Hydra ceases to be a form — it becomes an expectation of form, like a sound before incarnation.
→ “I lie in the earth. I no longer breathe. But my bones sing.”
➤ Transition to Hydra
Eventually, Lacerta stops crawling. Not because it’s finished, but because the Earth ends. The fossil trail leads nowhere. Ahead — ash, silence, and strange heat. The Sun is too high now. The spine casts long shadows behind it.
And then it realizes: it left the water long ago, but never stopped missing it. Its bones are dry. Its direction — unclear.
The lizard lies still long enough to forget itself again. And in that forgetting, it begins to split. The spine, too heavy. The memory, too sharp. One head isn’t enough anymore.
