Scorpio · Pig
Warthog
“Backs into its own doorway, tusks facing out.”
The Warthog is the Ancient Zodiac sign for a Scorpio born in the Year of the Pig, the point where the Scorpio sun meets the Pig moon.
The Scorpio-Pig, known as the Warthog, is warmth with a defensive plan already in place. Scorpio brings strategy, intensity, and a permanent awareness of where the exits are. The Pig brings generosity, appetite, and an honest enjoyment of the day. Together they make someone sociable and good-humoured who has nonetheless thought carefully about what happens if this goes wrong. A warthog does not own the burrow it sleeps in, it takes over an abandoned aardvark hole, and it always enters backwards. That way the tusks face the entrance and anything following it in meets the business end immediately. It grazes on calloused wrists, kneeling to reach the short grass, and it would rather run than fight, sprinting at thirty miles an hour with the tail straight up. But cornered, with its back in that tunnel, it is a genuinely serious animal. Scorpio-Pigs are funny, hospitable, and much more calculating than the good nature suggests. They enjoy company, feed people, and quietly maintain a position they can defend. They forgive slowly and forget nothing. The risk is a life arranged around the possibility of attack, with a great deal of energy spent on defences that a kinder reading of the situation would not have required. The name fits because a warthog is not fierce by preference. It kneels to eat, runs when it can, and reverses into its own home every night with the weapons pointed at the door.
Warthog Birth Dates
You are the Warthog if you were born in one of these stretches, when the Sun was in Scorpio during a year of the Pig.
- October 23 to November 21, 1923
- October 23 to November 21, 1935
- October 23 to November 21, 1947
- October 23 to November 21, 1959
- October 23 to November 21, 1971
- October 23 to November 21, 1983
- October 23 to November 21, 1995
- October 23 to November 21, 2007
- October 23 to November 21, 2019
- October 23 to November 21, 2031
- October 23 to November 21, 2043
Scorpio
“All or nothing, and it decided which some time ago.”
Scorpio is fixed water ruled by Pluto, and it is the sign of depth in the literal sense: what is underneath, what is not being said, what people do when they think nobody is reading them. It is intense by default rather than by choice, loyal to very few, and constitutionally incapable of the middle setting on anything that matters. Its constellation carries the sky's most explicit grudge. Orion boasted he could kill every animal on earth, and a scorpion was sent to stop him, and it did. The two were placed at opposite ends of the heavens so they can never appear together: as Scorpius rises in the south, Orion is already setting in the west, still fleeing after several thousand years. The scorpion's heart is Antares, a red supergiant whose name means the rival of Mars, because it burns the same colour as the war planet and refuses to be mistaken for anything lesser. A Scorpio reads people accurately and says almost none of it out loud. They keep confidences absolutely, commit totally when they commit at all, and are excellent in a crisis because intensity is their resting state. The cost is the memory: this sign does not simply recall a betrayal, it files it, and the door that closes afterwards is not the kind that reopens because someone apologised well.
Polarity: negative · Modality: fixed · Element: water · Ruler: Pluto
Pig
“Stopped to eat, fell asleep, and finished anyway.”
The Pig closes the cycle, and it is the most contented sign in it. Generous, sincere and unembarrassed about pleasure, it gives freely, forgives quickly, and sees no virtue in being miserable on the way to anything. It is easy to underestimate and much harder to genuinely upset than most people expect. Its race is the most honest finish in the story. Partway across, the Pig got hungry, so it stopped and ate. Having eaten well, it became sleepy, so it lay down and slept. Then it woke up, remembered the race, and completed the crossing to take twelfth and final place, apparently pleased with how the day had gone. It is the only competitor whose delay was neither a strategy, an accident nor an act of kindness. It simply preferred lunch, and it still made the calendar. Pig people are warm hosts, loyal friends and the ones who feed everybody. They are honest, trusting, and better at enjoying what they have than any other sign on the wheel. The cost is the appetite in every sense: too much of the good thing, a generosity that gets quietly taken advantage of by people who have noticed how rarely it is withdrawn, and a comfort so easy to settle into that years can pass very pleasantly without much being decided.
Polarity: yin · Direction: north · Element: water
Zodiac Interplay
Polarity: Starlight
Still water, and a very long way down.
You feel the weather in a room before a word is spoken. Where others see events, you see undercurrents - the pause before the answer, the thing said too brightly. It makes you the person everyone tells the truth to, eventually.
Modality and Direction: Keystone
Remove you and the arch notices.
Sustaining energy set into northern ground. You are the load-bearing element in most rooms you are in - not the loudest presence, just the one everything else turns out to be resting on.
Elemental Cycle: Fathom
No floor found yet.
Water doubled, all the way down. Your intuition operates below the level of argument - you simply know how something is, and you are usually right long before you can explain why.
Resonant. Water meets water: one phase, doubled. Neither half tempers the other. There is nothing in this sign pulling the opposite way.
Warthog Best Matches
- Warthog and Hedgehog: Total Eclipse, 98 out of 100
- Warthog and Goldfish: Total Eclipse, 98 out of 100
- Warthog and Flamingo: Total Eclipse, 97 out of 100
Warthog Hardest Matches
- Warthog and Salamander: Night Crossing, 33 out of 100
- Warthog and Gecko: Night Crossing, 34 out of 100
- Warthog and Hydra: Night Crossing, 34 out of 100
Other Scorpio Signs
The eleven other signs a Scorpio can be, one for each remaining year of the Chinese zodiac. Same sun, different moon.
Other Pig Signs
The eleven other signs someone born in a year of the Pig can be, one for each remaining sun sign. Same moon, different sun.
