After I went home from that first glimpse of the real Myra Henshawe, twenty-five years older than I had always imagined her, I could not help feeling a little disappointed. John Driscoll and his niece had suddenly changed places in my mind, and he had got, after all, the more romantic part. Was it not better to get out the world with such pomp and dramatic splendour than to linger on in it, having to take account of shirts and railway trains, and getting a double chin into the bargain? (8).

I felt a weird shiver as I read this last week for my contribution to a forthcoming scholarly collection revisiting Cather’s work within an interdisciplinary context. My task, which has been to write about Cather within the context of her metastatic breast cancer diagnosis in the late 1940s, has been complicated by the fact that the famously private author of My Antonia and O Pioneers! never wrote about her illness directly. But as I’ve refamiliarized myself with her fiction and short stories, what I’ve found are narratives that prefigure — prophesy, I would say, if I were wearing my esoteric hat — not only her terminal diagnosis but also the end of the American Dream, and end of Western capitalist expansionism along with it.

As I was writing my abstract for the paper, I realized how easy it would be to “read” My Mortal Enemy, based on quotes like the one above, as some drivel of an argument about all of the cultural topics that incite our ire these days, and to hold up Cather as captured by (or championing her as a proponent of, depending on your own political preferences) the apparent cultural norms upon which that ire is centered, from the aesthetics of femininity, to our relationship to aging, to the entanglement of money, romance, and desire. It struck me how easy it is to read the surface of anything, book, body, world, for something that suits a narrative of easy bitterness, irony, and self-righteousness, and how much of what passes for cultural, art, or academic criticism does exactly this, crafts personal admonishment of the political as an adequate response to art, while pretending the personal isn’t at play through the invention of one’s own language of the university, as if we were all first-year comp students1, to borrow from David Bartholomae. Or more simply put, we seem to read and respond to reading these days, in whatever sphere, by playing on the surface under the pretense of plumbing the deep.

What a loss it would be to read My Mortal Enemy and miss the way Cather deconstructs a fairy tale story of love not as an indictment against love, nor as an indictment of life, but instead as a celebration of a truer love, a stranger, deeper, and more emphatic life, one that goes on living beyond the opposites that Nellie sets up in the novel’s beginning: young and old, drama and boredom, love and hate, hope and despair, even life and death itself? That celebration is not necessarily on the surface of the text. But it is a golden thread throughout, honoring, as Cather also does in her short story “The Enchanted Bluff,” the bonds between the seen and unseen worlds, which is to say, the story celebrates what it means to live with an awareness of death, even when the culture around her characters, her characters, and she as the conscious author of a given time, necessarily do not.

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Astro Notes (free this week!)

I’ve thought a lot about this novel as an astrologer thinking about the qualities of time we’ll live through this week. We’ve got the Full Moon in Capricorn, occurring opposite the Moon in Cancer copresent with Mercury stationing retrograde and Jupiter, Greater Benefic in Hellenistic Astrology, spending its last moments in the sign of the golden scarab today. Ruled by and squared to Saturn in debility in Aries, the Moon asks after your relationship to tradition and belonging, and about the nature of your inheritances, one from the world of fate, one from the world of destiny. What is your relationship to fate and destiny, and what do you get from contemplating each? The majesty of Alan Chapman’s articulation of the golden thread behind Western spiritual traditions is that is doesn’t pretend to shirk duality, it doesn’t try to get away from the soil of this world, which is that every cause has an effect, every birth ends it death. But life doesn’t stay there, on that level! There’s something much beyond cause and effect, birth and death, our various, fallible human ways of telling stories about love and money. You can travel up the tree! You can know the difference between The Magician as a surface-level charlatan and The Magician as the “God who goes,” the one who speaks true words, who prays true prayers, who alters reality by devoting herself to the highest, and therefore participating in it. What is the distance between charlatanism and devotion? How far into the depths must you travel before you realize something golden, light, and true within yourself, this world, other people? These are good questions for the Mercury retrograde and the Full Moon.

Jupiter begins bestowing blessing, wisdom, community, the greater good in the sign of Leo today, and will do so over the next year and a half, the first time its been in the sign of the Lion, fixed fire, since 2014 and 2015. We’re happy to have the Greater Benefic here, as the South Node, the dragon’s tail, will join him soon, making things a bit more complicated, materially, although offering plenty of boons in terms of spirituality, realization, and touching Goodness, Beauty, and Truth — finding your true path, in spite of dissuasion. Adding to the astrological fireworks this week is Mars’ transit into Gemini, the mutable sign of the Twins, where it will make heady, red contact with Uranus. I like to call conjunctions “hugs” when I am trying to explain astrological transits to my six-year-old. But what does it mean when The Tower and The Fool hug? What fairy tale or myth are we living there? We’ll find out!

If you’d like a card pull for the Full Moon, comment with your rising and your question below. I’ll answer these questions with tarot draws over the course of this week! Sending love. If you want to learn how to do astrology, tarot, kabbalah, and other streams of esotericism together so that you can read your own chart and stand firmly planted in your life, without the distraction, temptation, or hallucinations of AI, see below and please spread the word to others who may be interested!

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In August, I’ll be teaching a six-week workshop on the Minor Arcana of the tarot, where, far from the usual move of reading the minor cards as playing second fiddle to the majors, we’ll read the pips as, in the words of Valentin Tomberg in The Wandering Fool, “superior to the Major Arcana [as] a system of meditation, of spiritual exercises …”

The Minors are both more particular to you than other cards, because they correspond to specific places in your astrological chart, and, in Tomberg’s words, require “a greater effort of consciousness” to read because they draw so precisely from the Kabbalah, Pythagoreanism, and other streams of the Western Esoteric tradition.

In my class, Minor Secrets: The Vertical Axis and the Cosmology of the Minor Cards of the Tarot,we’ll explore the minors together in conjunction with your birth chart, the Kabbalah, and the cosmologies offered by Western magick to strengthen your understanding, love, and wisdom for your Self, the world, and the others you encounter within it. Practically speaking, the course is a way to reclaim your attention from the algorithm, to plant yourself firmly on whatever path it is you’re here to walk, and to join a wonderful community of some of the smartest, and kindest people on the internet.

Some testimonial from recent course participants:

I thoroughly enjoyed my time enrolled in In Its Right Place. The course spanned 6 weeks, with multiple meetings per week (a lecture and a discussion) as well as a class discord for daily draws and interpretations. This was the perfect dosage and environment for getting lots of practice with reading tarot in conjunction with the natal chart. I have a much deeper understanding of my own chart and how to read others’ as well, and I believe that Cameron’s ability to weave together Hellenistic, depth psychology, and mundane significations in the chart has allowed me to conduct deeper readings for myself every day. I can’t imagine drawing cards now without thinking of the astrological significations related to them. ‘

A truly enriching course and experience, and it’s so special to have a space where I can be with like-minded individuals who take the Western esoteric tradition seriously. I wholeheartedly recommend anything Cameron teaches--you will learn way more than you could ever anticipate!

— Beck, participant in In Its Right Place: The Tarot and the Twelve Houses

Cameron is the most generous teacher you could hope to find. She is deeply knowledgeable about the Tarot, astrology and the tree of life, and she creates a rich learning experience through daily group practice and discussion. The students she gathers are the nicest people on the internet, and the whole class experience is convivial and enriching and when class is over, I always really miss it and very much look forward to whatever she offers next.

— Max, participant in In Its Right Place: The Tarot and the Twelve Houses

Details for Minor Secrets:

What

Minor Secrets: The Vertical Axis and Cosmology of the Minor Cards of the Tarot will run for six weeks, beginning on Wednesday, August 5 and ending Saturday, September 12.

When

We’ll meet every Wednesday evening at 7 pm ET for 90-minute lectures diving deep into the Minor Arcana as living symbols in support of and supported by your personal horoscopes and the Kabbalah and every Saturday morning at 9 am ET for querent sessions, where students have the opportunity to ask questions about their own charts, tarot cards, or anything else that falls within the realm of esoteric, literary, divinatory, occult, or spiritual study.

Other Details

I cap these classes at 14 students to maintain an intimate cohort of spiritual friends. They’ve been such a source of joy, warmth, learning, and camaraderie during these dark times! Please join us! All lectures and sessions are recorded; asynchronous learning and students welcome.

A community Discord will be maintained to foster connections, conversation about daily tarot draws and esoteric study, and other class details.

Cost

The cost is $300, but if you feel called to the class and need a discount or some other kind of arrangement or work-trade, please email me at cameronscottsteele AT gmail DOT com.

Register for the course

The mother of Chiron could not bear his form, and so she ran from her duty in shame. Kronos took pity on her, transforming her into a linden tree, granting her a not-quite immortal place in the realm of mothers.

Baucis, the wife of Philemon, became a linden tree in her old age, a gift from Zeus after she and Philemon proved their worthiness to the gods through their hospitality to strangers, through their receptivity to strangeness, how divinity often hid as this last, came through in mundane life in the guise of the bedraggled, odd-speaking traveler needing water, food, rest.

I visited Monticello at the start of this year with my family, when friends of ours from Nebraska stopped through for a post-holiday visit. Although I enjoyed the rich yellow of Jefferson’s dining room, the tiny beds tucked into alcove walls in the bedrooms, I was struck most of all by the linden trees out front and by a portrait of Salome in a corner near one room’s ceiling. I’ve been reading Jung this year more closely than I did once before; part of this work has involved annotating Liber Novus and Liz Greene’s wonderful studies1 on Jung’s interest in and work with astrology in his black books and the Red Book that came out of them. I can’t look at a portrait of Salome without wondering about the old psychologist’s soul and, indeed, about my own soul2, and, more to the point, about the true nature of the human being.3 I can’t look at a linden tree without thinking of Chiron’s abandoned and abandoning mother, on the one hand, and the never-turn-away heart of Baucis, on the other. I can’t encounter these beautiful, cthonic trees without my skin prickling with its own receptivity to the gods, without wondering in awe: What is nothing more than a “gift of pity” for one is the “bestowal of eternal divine honor” for another.

In the natal chart, Chiron shows us where we rage against the wound of our own lost paradise. We astrologers love to talk about the archetype of the wounded healer, but Chiron’s myth begins with the rejection by his mother. The gods take pity on her, because even the gods do not know what it means to try to live straddling two worlds. She becomes a linden tree, the mother of the wounded form. Greene tells of us Chiron’s parentage in Chiron in Love:4

He is the son of Kronos, whom we know in astrology as Saturn. Kronos seduced a nymph called Philrya, but when his wife Rhea discovered them in flagrante, he transformed himself into a stallion and galloped away to escape his wife’s ire, leaving Philrya alone and pregnant. When the child was born, Philrya found his centaur form repellent and frightening, and she abandoned him, begging the gods to transform her into any shape other than human so that she could escape her shame. Kronos, out of pity, turned her into a linden tree (22, 23).

Meanwhile, Baucis becomes a linden tree precisely because she knows and loves the divinity that is, nevertheless and impossibly, found within the heart of that wounded form:

According to Ovid’s tale, Philemon and his wife Baucis spontaneously offered unconditional kindness and generosity to Zeus and Hermes, who visited the old couple disguised as poor travellers. When the deities revealed themselves and promised them that their dearest wish would be granted, Philemon declared that he and his wife desired nothing more than to spend the remainder of their days serving at Zeus’ shrine, and to die at the same moment so that neither would be left grief-stricken and alone … At the moment of their simultaneous death, they were transformed into intertwined trees, Philemon into an oak and Baucis into a linden (94, Greene’s Astrological World of Jung’s ‘Liber Novus’).

The United States, the sorry heart of the West, is one such wounded form. At the home of the man who wrote its declaration into being, you will find two trees who can tell you more about this country’s future than anything on the guided tour.

Astro Notes

Happy Solstice! We celebrated by watching the finale of Widow’s Bay — good! But my favorite episode was the one that featured Patricia’s character as an analogy for awakening as she faced down her own lies, the island’s gaggle of hateful cool girls, and an undying serial killer, all while dressed in a hot pink tee shirt featuring images of the alchemical Sun and Moon. The Fool is the conjunction of the Sun and the Moon, as anonymous writes in Meditations on the Tarot5; the Fool walks the path between the Ineffable Godhead and Wisdom on the Tree of Life. The Fool risks madness, ostracization, for the chance at truly living, nevermind the break with consensus reality. Patricia is The Fool, par excellence, if you want to read the show as an analogy of what you’re bound to encounter when you walk a mystical path of enlightenment or, if you prefer Jungian speak, when you’re working on individuation. I hope I can find time to write about this in-depth this summer! We also celebrated the second month of our dear friends’ baby being in this world, attended a mountain-top funeral, let Kiernan get many long hours of chemo sleep, saw a black bear at sunset, and said as many prayers as we could over a short fire before the kids antagonized each other too much.

After seven years in Aries, Chiron moved into Taurus this past week. This is an intense, important, and transformative point in the horoscope where we struggle against themes of unfair suffering and the ways spite and vindictiveness often emerge from that suffering. There’s a chance for great compassion and the truest of loves to blossom here, but not because anything ever gets “fixed.” Instead, the compassion and love arises from elsewhere, that divine place inside of ourselves that, just as Jung turns toward and embraces Salome as his soul in Liber Novus, is moved by understanding on a level of reality that we don’t quite have words for. It’s a good moment to see where Chiron is in your natal chart, connect with that house, that degree, that sign more intimately. You can do so by pulling out the Minor Arcana card that is associated with your Chiron, and use it as a meditative or journaling guide. If you need help finding which card is connected to your Chiron, or where to find this placement in your chart, let me know! I’m also teaching a six-week class on the Minor Arcana, the natal chart, and the Kabbalah, beginning in August, where we’ll go into all of this, plus much more.

Register for the course

Astrologically, looking forward to the next little while, we’ve got Mercury about to station retrograde in Cancer, which will be the area of life where you’ll struggle to deepen your understanding of your own “realm of mothers.” In The Grail Legend, Emma Jung and Marie Louise von Franz write about this realm as the place of the collective unconscious, which Percival cannot access until he turns toward his longing and inadvertent disregard for his own mother. It’s in longing to see her again, in remembering her own cares and troubles, that he finds himself, at first and finally, in the place of the Grail Castle. I wrote about a monster that’s been in my own “realm of mothers” a few days ago; this kind of imaginal journey is par-for-the-course when our planetary psychopomp goes retrograde in the sign associated with the Chariot that carried Parminedes, pre-Socratic father of Logic into the Underworld to meet the Goddess. (That’s where logic and rationality come from — the divine, the underworld, the astral, not the other way around, btw.) Mars is on Algol this week.

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But one morning last week, I woke up early to do the coffee and the breakfast and the kids, as I do often by myself now that Kiernan’s sick and in the full swing of chemo. Instead of getting up and going, I felt that pull into the other world, and, curious, I said yes to it. I let the morning duties fall away as Kiernan and the kids slept, and then my body and the bed were lost to me, too, not completely, but just enough to gain entry into the underworld. I was in the back woods, by the graves. I felt what they were, the trapped dead, not dead enough, needing release. What is it that I can describe to you that I did? Some traditions call it “metta” or a practice of compassion and loving-kindness. Others call it praying for the damned. It wasn’t chöd, the Tibetan practice of allowing demons to feed on you so they—and you—might be transformed. But it was something close to this last, if we can say that any kind of intimate attention is a kind of nourishment, an offering of. The souls had not died properly, and, with my prayer and attention, they could move on. In the vision, you could see the earth shift, the leaves of every tree become more green. Light found its way into places it hadn’t been before. The souls left off in the direction of the East, to be reborn again. West is where they head for immortality, but that’s not something I can offer them by myself. I felt happy. Wrong word: I felt overjoyed, thinking it was time to go, thinking my work was done. I could already feel my fingers in my bed making their premonitory flicks of the coffee machine button, folding the coned paper liner of the filter. But the depth of the woods closed around me, more insistent, and I knew if I turned around I would see something that I have tried to avoid seeing my whole life.

What is spiritual practice if not seeing? What have all these long years of cancer—my own, my husband’s—been for, if not turning around to face the rot inside of myself? So I looked and there he was. Monstrous, horned, slick. Big teeth. It sounds silly, to describe him, in words that will bring to your mind the cartoon Beast from Beauty and the Beast or melodramatic renderings of Pan from any pulpy occult paperback. What could I say to convey how he terrified me? He was the embodiment of the Will to Power. He was my secret will to power, and yours, and all of ours. He had been called to the land by the unfinished dead. He has lived in me for years by my refusal to see him, by my denial of his presence. What could I do? What could I offer? All I felt able to say was: “I see you.” I felt how much control he wanted, how he could twist every desire I’ve ever had in his fist and squeeze it for all its worth. Squeeze me into this warped thing, this secretly vicious person who attracts other secretly vicious people and situations to her like flies to flypaper, trees of heaven to old graves. All of these bitter yearnings for more, to be on top, for money, for hatred and irony and that strange devil-may-care impulse I sense in myself at my worst and secret times to be the way of making it in this world. Nihilism in the place of joy. I could see how I stoked him by pretending he wasn’t there. I could see how I magnetized others with him in their secret hearts, the very same others who would mobilize him in the name of goodness, truth, justice, beauty, “good times,” fun. “I see you,” I said. And then I opened my eyes and fled into rountine.

He’s been showing up with some frequency since then. In one vision, he stood, in streams of sunlight, on Lonesome Pine Road. In another, he had turned West, toward the deepest river in the faraway mountains. I know he is seeking a source, the way I seek that source. Will we transform each other through consciousness, attention, recognition? I tell my tarot students that the Emperor becomes the Good Emperor by touching the dark, by uniting with the lowest not through excusing evil by instead by understanding it and holding it lightly. The Emperor acknowledges the shadows, names them, but turns her face toward the light. But even this move can be co-opted by the Great Deceiver. I feel it in myself when my heart hardens against itself, in moments when the only move is softness, humility, the secret eye open, silent, seeing.

Guess who else has the ability to see with the secret eye? The Horned One, that devil in my soul. In yours, too. How it sees, and what, and which moves it makes, and whether it will be transformed by love into Beauty, that’s something that is not entirely up to us, and yet is, at once, somehow, entirely up to us. The morning after my Horned One stepped into the light, I turned over a tarot card, after praying to the highest for love, for wisdom, to aid. The Queen of Disks, horned and regal, soft and fixed in her gaze, Understanding in Action herself, appeared. She’s motivated by a secret sense of oppression to change her own heart, the land, the heart and landscapes of others around her. In the end, she helps to make an altar of this world, the Shekinah of the Kabbalah, the Godhead revealed in healed Nature, and many other joys beside.

If you want to learn how to read the cards to support your visionary, spiritual, and creative practices, please join me and an intimate and lovely group of friends for a six-week journey into the esoteric, kabbalistic, and astrological correspondences of the minor arcana.

What

Minor Secrets: The Vertical Axis and Cosmology of the Minor Cards of the Tarot will run for six weeks, beginning on Wednesday, August 5 and ending Saturday, September 12.

When

We’ll meet every Wednesday evening at 7 pm ET for 90-minute lectures diving deep into the Minor Arcana as living symbols in support of and supported by your personal horoscopes and the Kabbalah and every Saturday morning at 9 am ET for querent sessions, where students have the opportunity to ask questions about their own charts, tarot cards, or anything else that falls within the realm of esoteric, literary, divinatory, occult, or spiritual study.

Other Details

I cap these classes at 14 students to maintain an intimate cohort of spiritual friends. They’ve been such a source of joy, warmth, learning, and camaraderie during these dark times! Please join us! All lectures and sessions are recorded; asynchronous learning and students welcome.

A community Discord will be maintained to foster connections, conversation about daily tarot draws and esoteric study, and other class details.

Cost

The cost is $300, but if you feel called to the class and need a discount or some other kind of arrangement or work-trade, please email me at cameronscottsteele AT gmail DOT com.

Register for the course

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My book Interruption: Divinatory Essays on Illness and Narrative is available for preorder from Sul Books. They’re having a summer sale; you can get 25 percent off with the code SUMMER25 and my eternal gratitude for preordering now! Here’s more information about the book:

What does it mean to truly live with the awareness of death?

Interruption is a beautiful, unflinching, and relentlessly hopeful collection of linked essays from Cameron Steele, a writer who survived three breast cancer diagnoses in three years as a new mother, a scholar of illness narratives, and a working astrologer and tarot reader.

Drawing on ancient and modern occult texts, psychoanalysis, contemporary memoirs and literature, and her own client sessions, Interruption explores motherhood, illness, love, spirituality, and capitalism, without ever settling for the too-easy answer of despair. More than a cancer memoir, it’s an illuminating and life-affirming love song to family, nature, the self, and the world we share together.

Written by a prize-winning poet, essayist, and former investigative journalist, and born from her Substack newsletter “Interruptions” (a current bestseller, ranked among the platform’s top 100 literature newsletters), Interruption: Divinatory Essays on Illness and Narrative expands Cameron Steele’s original dispatches into a compelling meditation on what it means not just to survive, but also to truly live.

Preorder the book!

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The word he was speaking about was “Defeat.” The Five of Swords is the card that has the dubious honor of being its lord. “Little Lord of Defeat,” I whisper to myself when I draw it from my deck. It’s a habit of mine, putting the diminutive “little” in front of the esoteric titles for the bad cards from the Minor Arcana, as if the adjective could make “defeat” and “failure” (Seven of Disks) and “cruelty” (Nine of Swords) and even “satiety” (Ten of Cups) somehow cute. Or if not cute then, at the very least, no big deal. That “little” of mine is language as a lie, habit as a brushing off, a kind of petty evil trying to diminish what it is I do with the tarot everyday when I’m facing cynicism from some hard part of myself that still doesn’t jive with how beloved the cards are to me, how seriously I take divination (nothing less than a conversation with God, gods, the images and words of the divine). In these moments, the “Little Lord of XYZ” is a bad vernacular habit I surface to ward off the potential for that meanness to hurt, the cynicism to land in a soft and precious place that I’ve only in recent years stumbled my way into finding in myself. But cynicism can’t be fought with nonchalance, coolness, the pretense of something being just fun and games when it isn’t! So I answered my student truthfully and seriously, which is to say, I told him the following:

Every card is an arcana, a living Symbol that reveals and conceals as appropriate. The Five of Swords is the Lord of Defeat, so there will always some element of truth to that. One of the first practical moves we can make when we’re learning to read the cards is looking to see where that truth shows up in your life. You can most easily do that by looking to where the first decan of Aquarius falls in your natal chart. What house does this card live in? What does it mean for Venus, which holds decanic rulership of this place in the sky, to rule this area of your life? What other planets or important points in your horoscope are there? How does that match or diverge from your own experience of this place? Why is Venus in the sign of the Water-Bearer associated with Defeat?

The Five of Swords is also very many other things. In the Kabbalah, it’s Geburrah in the world of Yetsirah, or Strength in Formation. It’s the place in reality where strength comes to us through the ability to cut down or through, sometimes quite literally, sometimes through words, sometimes (and even better than the first two) through the presence of the Divine Word that shapes every level of reality here on earth. These esoteric associations can seem an endless rabbit hole or, more to the point, an endless horizontal axis upon which meaning spreads out, thins out, slips on new coats, paints on new faces, raises new questions. What is the relationship between Venus as Love and Love as Strength? How are Defeat and Strength in Formation one and the same? What does it mean to have your astrological Moon ruled by the Five of Swords, and how might we read or tell a narrative of breast cancer alongside this symbol, this card that comes up for every new twist and turn in my own journey through illness?

But divination as it endlessly presents along a horizontal axis or rabbit hole of fractalizing associational meaning is little better than a LLM playing the role of your therapist. There’s nothing real there, nothing true, nothing good, not absolutely. Many tarot readers, astrologers, esotericists, animists, academics, feminists, all those generous, good-hearted people who started out with the very real, very true sense that “something is wrong here; things should be otherwise” get stuck here, in this mirage-like place where the quest to become more of oneself, or to help others in similar, abject positions, or to be healed, or to heal society, or to be connected to a higher, deeper principle, has been abandoned in the anxiety of being unable to name anything without qualification. If you can recognize the danger of this moment, you do find the vertical axis of truth that always exists, that’s always ready to offer itself to you, when you are ready to see it.

The Minor Arcana of the tarot are minor secrets in that they are, always and at once, concealings and revealings. As living Symbols — sumpatheia, in the language of the Neoplatonists — they offer you incalculable breadth of seeing into your own life, the world, the relationships therein. As sumpatheia, they also conceal everything that you are not ready to see, that you cannot see until the reality of the vertical is made clear.

There’s an old cliché about two people riding the same bus through the same landscape. One person sits there, experiencing Heaven. The other finds herself immersed in Hell. The difference between the one and the other has little to do with their personalities or their brains, their identity markers or their hopes and dreams. The difference is that one has had contact with the vertical axis and, paradoxically, like Percival discovering the Castle of the Grail King, has experienced the implosion of every axis all at once, has entered into and thus has faith in a place where time and space are one.

If the tarot is a true description of a cosmology — living Symbols that show us the Gods we are, encounter, bow before, and turn about with — then the Five of Swords is neither “little” nor “endless,” neither “Defeat” nor “Strength in Formation,” and it certainly isn’t all of these things, at once, either. Instead, when you draw our Lord of Defeat, you can know, immediately, with precision that, on one level of reality, it is irrevocably and unalterably “Defeat.” On another, it is planetary Venus bestowing love, sweetness, and gift in a moment of peril or betrayal. On a higher plane, it is the mystery of discovering that the goddess Aphrodite unbinds you from Defeat precisely at the moment you experience it, and in realizing this wonder, you yourself free the goddess from the lies of existence, the formation of the horizonal plane. There’s a fourth level, too, but that is a mystery only you can name, in silence, for yourself.

Sending love on the Gemini New Moon! I am happy to pull a tarot card for you as a guide for the next two weeks. I am even happier to tell you that my forthcoming book Interruption: Divinatory Essays on Illness and Narrative is now available for preorder from . They’re having a summer sale; you can currently get 25 percent off the book price with the code SUMMER25.

Finally, I’ll be teaching a course on the minor arcana as they correspond to your natal chart and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Minor Secrets: The Vertical Axis and Cosmology of the Minor Cards of the Tarot will run for six weeks, beginning on Wednesday, August 5 and ending Saturday, September 12. We’ll meet every Wednesday evening at 7 pm ET for 90-minute lectures diving deep into the Minor Arcana as living symbols in support of and supported by your personal horoscopes and the Kabbalah and every Saturday morning at 9 am ET for querent sessions, where students have the opportunity to ask questions about their own charts, tarot cards, or anything else that falls within the realm of esoteric, literary, divinatory, occult, or spiritual study. I cap these classes at 14 students to maintain an intimate cohort of spiritual friends. They’ve been such a source of joy, warmth, learning, and camaraderie during these dark times! Please join us! All lectures and sessions are recorded; asynchronous learning and students welcome.

The cost is $300, but if you feel called to the class and need a discount or some other kind of arrangement or work-trade, please email me at cameronscottsteele AT gmail DOT com.

Register for the Course

For tarot card guides for the New Moon, comment with your rising sign and your question below.

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Astro Notes

Offering a consideration of the relationship between ruin and desire, the New Moon occurs this evening around 11 pm ET at 24 degrees Gemini. Thinking about Gemini’s association with the Lovers card of the tarot, I like to think about New Moons in this sign as helping us to think long and hard about our responsibility toward the Beloved, whatever the Beloved in our life may be. With New Moons, we plant seeds, we turn inward, we allow the Moon, in all of its darkness, to be found ablaze, in love, somehow more visible than ever, precisely because it is found in the heart of the Sun.

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At the end of the month I’ll have surgery to removed my implants and my nipples. I’ve lived with breast reconstruction since 2021, when my first cancer diagnosis necessitated a double mastectomy. Even then, I think I knew aesthetic flat closure was the healthiest, best surgical option for myself. I’ve always loved Anne Boyer’s writing, and was especially drawn to her moving accounts of breast implant illness and pain during the seven years she lived with silicone in her body after a triple-negative breast cancer diagnosis and mastectomy at age 42. But I didn’t really need to read Boyer’s writing to know installing several extra pounds of plastic on my chest wall would be a bad idea, nearly whichever way you looked at it. At the time, however, I was too caught up in the unfairness of a cancer diagnosis at age 33 — so young! My son was only one! I had just survived a decade’s long eating disorder to finish my PhD! We’d lived through one of the heights of the pandemic! — to maintain the vision of the distant. The injustice of having to lose my breasts felt like too much. I’d try to possess a semblance of beauty for years yet, thank you very much.

And then the second cancer diagnosis rolled around the next year and I had to do chemo. I haunted the mountains on nauseous, nauseated walks in central Virginia. I found myself, in the upper-clarity of post-infusion steroids, taken with the beauty of winter among the rocks and the vines, the weird turreted hills of a particular Blue Ridge climb, worried that I was marring something until one day I realized I could look like this and still find Beauty. I mean, I was looking like this and finding Beauty. It was a thing that was happening! That was the first time I really got it, what it might mean to be devoted to Beauty. It had little to do with what I had taken it for in the past. It transcended the 2020s bitchiness on social media, the competition I’d felt with my sisters growing up, the misguided decisions people made about bodies under the guise of health, and the accusations that people lobbed at each other about their misguidance. Beauty came to me in those chemo days as the bald head, the eyelash-less face, the inclusion of its opposite as proof that it had absolutely nothing to do with the aesthetic manipulation of the body at all. Beauty was the proof of the justice of my life in that moment—a hint of the secret “yes” I had said to my own incarnation and all of its apparent awfulness, its diseased necessity.

But the breasts! The appearance of breasts! I couldn’t find it in me to give them up. I got pregnant and then I got cancer again, this time a more aggressive, advanced cancer. The doctors shook their heads: After having the baby, the nipples and the implants needed to go. But last year, standing tired and postpartum in the plastic surgeon’s office and facing down chemo round two, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go through with it. Those hot feelings of injustice and anger gleamed inside of me again. The surgeon grinned like a fairy-tale wolf. He said he could remove the implants and replace them with leftover pregnancy fat. I insisted I wanted to go flat, but I felt sick, too. Unfair seethe. I laid awake at night trying to remind myself that I’d already lost my breasts, that removing the implants was the best thing for my health, what I should do if I really wanted to live as long as possible, for my kids, for my husband, for myself. Online, people tried to hurt at each other over peptides, Botox, privilege, dysmorphia. In my mind, I bargained with myself with the language I’d read online, vacillating between castigating myself for caring so much about fake boobs that couldn’t feel anything and slimy pep talk mantras. You deserve to have the body you want to have!

So funny, the “deserve” thoughts. It’s not that they’re wrong, it’s that we misapply them to current circumstances in material life instead of following their trail of longing to the proof we’ve always already known the perfection of Beauty, and many other Gods, besides. We can always reach Beauty again; participate, for a time, in perfection.

In March, my husband was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer, beginning his daily regimen of radiation just nine months after I finished my own radiation. Our son was six, our daughter was one. Two weeks later, my body said, finally and completely, “no more” to the attempts to possess Beauty. I was diagnosed with grade-four capsular contraction: my body was trying to rid itself of the implants, rid itself of a mere appearance of beauty, all on its own.

I’ll go flat at the end of May, a few weeks after my husband finishes his first course of treatment, a few weeks before he has surgery, too, for a chemo port. This summer he’ll have sixteen weeks of his own slow, blinking walks through the mountains, trying to shake off the poison that keeps him alive. Who better to be beside him than me, scarred, flat-chested, strong in myself, sure that I know, at least, some of the route? How exquisite life can be in the moments when we’re graced with the equivalence of strength and Beauty, which is to say when we realize the justice of saying yes to the Beloved, the responsibility of a choice very much beyond the mistakes of possession and the whims of desire.

Wishing you participation in Beauty on this New Moon in Taurus. Notes on the current astrology follow, and I am happy to draw a card for you as a guide for the new moon. Comment with your question and rising sign below.

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Astro Notes

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Back when I was doing the Holy Guardian Angel work, I got annoyed when my Angel decided that I needed to start calling him “Oneiro” instead of “Aphobos.” I received this communication in a dream. The name Aphobos, Greek for “anti-fear” or something like it, had apparently suited its purpose. Instead, I should now address the angel as “Oneiro,” or the Greek root word for “dream.” Once upon a time, my dreams were always full of crazy words, misshapen letters, mountains made out of language, language made out of the misspellings of the names of mothers of homicide victims from my old days as a crime reporter. In this dream, “Oneiro” came to me not as a word I knew. I had to look it up in the morning when I woke up. I groaned, because I didn’t get it. I’d been working on the kind of courage it seemed a woman who had an angel named “Antifear” might need. I’d been meditating through cancer and cancer treatment, taking care of the kids, setting bad, old relationships to rights. Now my angel had a different name? Now my angel was called “Dream?” What did it mean to have the angel, who loved and guided me best of all, called by the name of the place in my life that was unreservedly tainted by nightmares and disturbance? A good dream for me, back then, was one that I called “bad dream” instead of “nightmare.”

I listened to the Angel, though. One thing that got shaken out of me upon the advent of my first real, trembly, and abiding spiritual experiences was the notion that I was adept enough to consciously know what my life should look like, never mind what I needed to do in any given moment. That sense of higher purpose, that sense of will in alignment with a greater whole? That was going to have to come from somewhere else. But even as I embraced and felt deeply grateful for this spiritual reconfiguration, it still felt humiliating and risky, nearly all of the time, to allow myself and my decisions to be guided by faith rather than my hard-won sense of reason or justice or fashionability or wanting to appease so-and-so or this-and-that. Nevertheless, I began to dutifully call my Angel “Oneiro,” allowing the name of “dream” to turn my attention, with delicacy, faith, and curiosity to the details of my bad dreams, the nightly terrors. More practically, I deepened the dream practice that had already been in place for years with an intellectual and spiritual study into the nature of dreams. What I didn’t realize I was also doing was studying the nature of existence, because, as it turns out, the analogy of enlightenment being like waking up from a dream isn’t just an analogy! The dream and existence are more closely linked, in certain respects, than existence and reality are. As these insights began to unfurl, there wasn’t much to do except record them in my journal and wonder at the adventure. Sometimes that’s all that’s really required if you happen upon the desire to tend to a growing awareness of reality, which is something very much beyond dream and existence altogether.

*

I don’t call my Angel “Oneiro” anymore. I mostly pray to Aion, the god of unbound time, the god that, as Alan Chapman’s wonderful work has showed, Aleister Crowley and C.G. Jung both experienced deification with. Aion was the divinity that Crowley was invoking with the bornless ritual all those years ago. The language of the “Holy Guardian Angel” came as a result of Crowley’s desire to point the Western Magical Tradition in the right direction, ie, toward union with the highest (known also as awakening, enlightening, samadhi, whatever your preferred name for that abiding nondual experience is) without encouraging people to muddy the waters of their practice with endless amounts of metaphysical speculation (that of course, Crowley himself delighted in indulging in). Jung’s union with the same God is well-documented in Peter Kingsley’s Catafalque, a book I wrote about a while back and highly recommend.

It’s easy to look at Crowley’s life and let your upper-lip curl in distaste. The blessing of finding yourself living out a series of rock bottoms, though, is that you don’t really have much time or patience for posturing or pretense in the same way as you might have done. You just want to know what works. You find that even the most pressing questions—about death, about fear, about survival—can end up being the wrong ones. You find the right questions to ask: Is it possible for me to have direct contact with reality? What does it mean if I can? Who does that make me, and how does that contact change not only the shape of my life but the shape of life entirely, its wild surfaces and strange middles and stranger depths?

*

When I have nightmares these days, I know how to pay attention to them. I know how to teach others to move through them. Now, though, I find myself struggling with the good dreams. How do I account for dreams of luminosity, wheels, mandalas, endless light streaming through the high ceilings of houses with no windows? How do these dreams account for or map onto an existence where my husband has started radiation and chemotherapy, a sentence so beyond nightmare it still brings tears to my eyes even to think much less type? (Although sometimes the sentence makes me laugh; I was always so afraid of melodrama, and nevertheless the surface appearance of my life has inclined towards it!)

In the last quarter of Jung’s Dreams, he traces the development of the dream images of an unwaveringly scientific man who, in spite and because of his preferences for rationality, reason, his training within the proper academy, finds himself being drawn inexorably into awakening territory (in Jungian terminology, we’d say individuation). As he ventures further away from his preconceived notions about his nature, in particular, and the nature of the human being, more generally, the images served up to him nightly by his unconscious eschew the personal details and detritus of his singular concerns for something vaster, stranger, more archetypal. These demands from elsewhere are rendered in the forms of wheels and spirals, alchemical flowers, squared circles, rushing snakes in four corners of rectangles that are more than shapes, magickal objects in the middle of mandalas whose centers are never simply the geometric midpoint of a circle. Often, an unknown woman guides the man into these oneiric demonstrations. Jung records the fortieth dream of the man as thus: “Under the guidance of the unknown woman the dreamer has to discover the Pole at the risk of his life.”

Jung’s dry commentary links the Pole to “the point round which everything turns,” “another symbol of the self,” and, via alchemy, to “the Pole [that] is the heart of Mercurius, who is the true fire, wherein his master rests …” This is, too, the idea of the anima mundi, “the collective unconscious whose centre is the self” (262).

It simply amazes me, this self, this dream Pole that seems more a part of reality than the man that Jung writes about, than woman who reads the writing.

What happens when you dream about Goodness beyond the personal or even global hell in which you find yourself? Jung warns about the "refuge in blank incomprehension” that most people clamor after. On this New Moon, may I refuse that, or if I find myself there, may I go through the incomprehension, too, risking life, and my husband’s life, which is to say, living, for both of us, in the true fire, wherein our master rests.

Sending love. This week is the last chance to sign up for the six-week workshop I’m teaching on the tarot and the twelve houses. There are four spots left. We start in two weeks! Read about the workshop here. Register below.

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Astro Notes

Right, so the most important thing about the Aries New Moon is that it’s sitting with its ruler Mars. That’s great. There’s light there, the Sun exalts in Aries, we’ve got Mercury, also newly in the sign, transmitting messages, so there’s a therapeutic element to this new beginning, whatever it is. We like the Moon and Mercury together—we especially like the New Moon and Mercury together—because Mercury is able to translate and offer language for experiences that might otherwise simply be registered by sensation, in the body, or, because we’re in Aries land, as headache and tension.

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Read about the interruptions tarot book here or my forthcoming collection of essays here.

New Additions to the Majors

The Aeon (20)

What brings one back to life after a period of deadness? Is this even possible? Various spiritual traditions have treated the question of resurrection in various ways, and The Aeon card offers contact with the gift of rebirth …

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Upcoming Workshop

What: Have you wondered what it means to have your luminaries in a “bad” house? Or why some astrologers call the twelfth “the house of hidden enemies and curses” while others insist upon its spiritual nature and behind-the-scenes work? What does it mean that you’re a Gemini Rising with all of those intense swords cards—the Eight, the Nine, and the Ten, lords of Interference, Cruelty, and Ruin, respectively—crowding your First House of the embodied self? Why is the Ninth House the “House of God” and also the house of publishing, foreign travel, and academia? Why are people with their natal Suns in your Tenth House so annoying aspirational? How does the tarot map onto the astrological houses, and vice versa, and how does learning to read the relationships between the cards and the “most grounded” aspect of the horoscope help us to deepen our relationship to transformation within and throughout daily life? Can we get more “free” by attending to the details of esoteric “place?”

Join me to explore and answer these questions and more during a six-week workshop on the twelve houses of the natal chart and the tarot cards that belong in and rule over each. “In Its Right Place:” The Tarot and the Twelve Houses of Your Natal Chart will explore the planetary, archetypal, esoteric, and practical dimensions of the twelve houses of the horoscope. We’ll pay particular attention to the tarot and its myths as a way into the traditional and personal associations of each house.

When: The course will begin on Wednesday, April 29 and run through Wednesday, June 3, featuring ninety-minute lectures on Wednesday evenings at 7 pm EST and ninety-minute “querent sessions” on Saturday mornings, when students can ask questions about their own charts and pursue individual lines of inquiry or interest.

A Discord server will be hosted for the class community as we record daily tarot draws, chart explorations, and the intersection of esoteric, literary, and cultural attentions!

Registration: Registration is limited to 14 participants to ensure the class remains an intimate affair where you learn astrology and tarot, in-depth, as it applies to mundane transits and to your own chart and life.

Cost is $300 per participant, although I am always happy to offer payment plans and lower registration fees as need and desire arise!

Register for the course

These Nodal Times

I found myself offering this perspective to students as I closed out the recent workshop series on the major arcana of the tarot. I’m sharing it here in case its useful as you navigate the strange quality of time around the Equinox:

Astrology can be so useful when it leads us into an understanding of the season we find ourselves in and the weather we’re contending with. It doesn’t let us off the hook when it comes to personal responsibility; it doesn’t do much if you’re using it to incite fear in yourself or others. But it can offer the ability to lift your gaze, to see a little farther, to live the questions of “who am I?” and “what am I here to do?” with a grander sense of love, connection, and freedom.

We’ve been in nodal territory ever since the eclipse season of February and early March; Mercury’s retrograde period back and forth over those nodal points on the Pisces and Virgo axis has extended the obfuscation/obliteration feelings that can swoop into our lives with nodal energy. Add Mars in Pisces into the mix, and you’ve got an interesting recipe for conflict, drive, strange messages, and weird drama in the sign of the zodiac that would really rather not receive any more psychic messages than it already does.

Here’s a short retelling of the Vedic astrological myth associated with the Moon’s Nodes: The gods and the demons wanted to create the world. To do that, they had to work together to churn the milky way so that it would produce the magical milk of ambrosia. Together they worked hard, churning and churning until the world was created and the magical ambrosia overflowed the starry sea. The gods were all permitted to drink the ambrosia to ensure eternal life; the demons were not. But one wily demon dressed up as god. Just as he began to drink from his cup, the Sun and the Moon cried out, realizing that he was a demon, alerting Lord Vishnu in the process. Vishnu used his scythe and lopped the demon’s head off, but not before the demon had tasted one drop of the elixir. So the demon chased its tail forever, the head always hungry but never full, the tail always repulsed but never empty.

The North Node/the demon’s head/Rahu in the chart is always opposite the South Node/the demon’s tail/Ketu in the chart. This opposition shows us, karmically or contractually, what we have agreed to come to live out here during this incarnation. If you don’t do well with past life or reincarnation stuff, you can view this opposition as where you have an insatiable hunger/revulsion thing going on. The nodes are about the pull into earthly life and incarnation, as well as the pull back into spirit, circling around whatever house theme is the shared concern of the opposite houses where the nodes fall.

Not every chart is extremely concerned with the nodes. Some people really aren’t bothered by them or by the eclipses that activate the nodal story through transits. But others, who have planets aspecting1 the nodes are going to really be drawn to figuring this story out, understanding what brought them into life, and how that incarnatory desire relates to their soul and to the spiritual world more generally. When, collectively, we have important mundane transits that are in conjunction/opposition with the nodes, or square to them2, then, collectively, we all do experience the push to understand why we are here, incarnated on earth—including and perhaps especially a push to acknowledge what is going awry in our lives that prevents us from having a broader and deeper conscious awareness of who and what we are.

That push—maybe it’s a huge shove for you; it has been for me!—has been up for a lot of people, recently, although the particulars are different. Mercury was conjunct the North Node a few days ago, and will remain in that conjunction as it slows down, stalls out, and then gets moving in the “right direction” again over the weekend. It got hot and heavy with Mars in the midst of this, and will transit over Mars again in upcoming weeks. The story keeps changing. Conversations and insights maybe are continuing to unfold, and in ways that feel intense or scary or too much to even really look at except to duck down and finish each day’s grind. But there’s something more here, if you can look up. If you can find time for deeper questions, a broader view. It’s an exclamatory time, and it will calm down soon. There will be clarity again, and time for relaxing into what you’ve learned. How you brought love into the world in the face of shit! Or whatever it is for you.

Again, some people will feel the call to look at this stuff and try to attend to some of these questions more than others, depending on particular charts and individual lives and who wants to see the meaning in quality of time.

Happy to answer questions about the workshop, or in the comments. Sending love,

Cameron

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We’ve had a lovely conversation going on in the tarot class I’m teaching about how we’re all doing the same practice, turning tarot cards every day and seeing how external and internal shifts link up with our contemplation of the images, yet with small variations in routine, synthesis, and methodology of interpretation. These “small variations” can be a…

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When I say the tarot is beloved to me, what I mean is that the cards are a fool’s errand of encountering perfection in the heart of daily existence. When I turn my cards over every morning, I encounter the death of consensus reality and give birth to something else. What comes into being through the cards is something very much beyond the consensus of w…

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You’ll find new additions to the interruptions tarot book below, including an interpretation of The Emperor inspired by Mercè Rodoreda's strange, lovely, and devastating novel Death in Spring. You can read more about the tarot book project here, and the definitions for the other cards I’ve drawn so far here.

Happy Imbolc and Happy Full Moon in Leo! I’m e…

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There was the mountain that people around here call The Priest and the river Tye we had given to our daughter as a middle name. She was in my husband’s arms, squirming, trying to touch her river, trying to shove its rocks into her mouth. Her cheeks were red like polished apple…

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Ten of Swords

Many spiritual traditions that recognize awakening as a human birthright include various maps for traveling the terrain of the mind. The hermetic Kabbalah has the Tree of Life; The Thera…

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You can learn more about the methodology and intent behind the interruptions tarot book in this post. You’ll find the other card definitions that I’ve written about so far, here, here, and here.

New Court Cards

Page or Princess of Swords

The speaker in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish” catches a fish and, over the course of the poem’s 76 staccato lines, …

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