2026 offerings
the Ten of Swords + how to work with me in the New Year
Here’s the interruptions interpretation of the Ten of Swords, as good a companion as any for a practical newsletter on how to work with me in the New Year.
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 Theravadan Buddhist tradition describes the stages of enlightenment as a series of jhanas. In esoteric Christianity, the levels of consciousness sometimes take the shape of a temple, or else the stages of the passion of the Christ. In Magia, the stages of awakening come together through the symbol of the mountain. These maps offer the spiritual adept clues about what to look out for and expect in internal and external experiences as one ascends through higher stages of consciousness. If you’re new to meditation and enlightenment, it can be a shock to learn that, as one’s consciousness becomes more expansive and precise, one has to encounter not only the brightened and gladdened mind, but often excruciating experiences of confusion, dispersion, and loss. The Ten of Swords is the Lord of Ruin, but the key to the card is that you experience its ruin precisely because you’ve made your self, your mind, and your heart big enough to accommodate it. To love in the face of it. To have faith—to know, even—that the ruin you’re experiencing will pass and give way to something new, something creative, ruin’s opposite. Associated with the Sun in the last ten degrees of Gemini, the Ten of Swords has often been called “the dark before the dawn” or the minor arcana version of the “dark night of the soul.” In astrological circles, this card gets pulled as the “final choice” pip, where one has reached an ultimatum, where all other options fall away. Whether you experience the “final choice” as ruin or the dark night, or whether you can love the freedom that comes from knowing where you are, no matter the feelings or judgments about that position … that’s a particular this card can only point to. Upright, you’re in the “ruin” of rest and realization before things change. Reversed, have you mistaken an appearance of death for the thing itself? Are you increasing the suffering by telling yourself that’s all there is left?
Book a Reading
At long last, my calendar is updated and now available for booking tarot, astrology, and esoteric counseling sessions with me. Currently booking for February and March.
Register for “Concentration Without Effort” A Six-Week Course on the Major Arcana
What is the relationship between practical effort and ‘the flash of the intuitive divine?’ Between intellect and the imagination? How do we develop more fully our skills of attention—a discipline of reading—in service of and collaboration with the gifts of sudden insight, creative flow, or spiritual gnosis?
More specifically, what does the tarot have to do with any of these things?
What can the tarot teach us about who and what we are, and the way the answers to these fundamental questions change (or don’t), based on whether we’re engaging with mundane, creative, or spiritual levels of reality? Join me in February to explore them in depth during a six-week course on the images and archetypes of the major arcana of the tarot.
‘Concentration Without Effort’ will meet weekly to discuss the esoteric, creative, and psychological implications of each of the cards of the Major Arcana.
We’ll explore the cards in order, beginning (and ending) with The Fool, with an eye toward understanding how each card insists upon a new angle of what the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot calls “concentration without effort,” a special form of attention that combines past intellectual endeavor and the immediacy of direct experience. A special form of concentration that, furthermore and perhaps more immediately important, allows us to move past the petty and terrible distractions of our age of artifice.1
Practically speaking, this course will help you reclaim your attention spans and creative capacities from the algorithmic murk of contemporary life.
Esoterically speaking, this course will guide you into developing deeper and more precise skills of reading, contemplation, and attention.
If you want to learn how to better move through the bottom levels of anxiety, boredom, and fear in your own life, to read the Major Arcana of the tarot with creativity and precision, and/or use the tarot to enhance your personal, creative, and spiritual endeavors, this course is for you!
Schedule
This course starts on Wednesday, February 4, 2026. We’ll meet weekly on Wednesdays at 7 pm EST on Zoom. Each session consists of one 45-minute lecture on the Major Arcana cards that are the focus of the week and 45 minutes of class discussion and practical instruction, where participants will have the opportunity to interact with each other and myself through tarot readings, spreads, interpretation, and Q&A.
Additionally, I will host 90-minute long “querent” sessions on Saturdays at 9 am EST. These more informal sessions will offer participants a chance to ask more intensive questions about the relationship of the tarot to their creative or spiritual practices, natal charts, and/or lives more generally. We can also use the querent sessions to delve into tangential themes of interest to the class. Want to take a lengthy stroll through the development of Jungian synchronicity? Need some time to talk about your tarot draw’s relationship to a recent vivid dream? Fancy a discussion on the Holy Guardian Angel working in the Western Magickal tradition? The querent sessions are perfect for any and all of these streams of thought.
The course includes a dedicated Discord server where participants and I can post thoughts, share tarot draws and practices, and discuss weekly readings or additional material—personal, cultural, spiritual or otherwise—that correspond with the themes of the weekly tarot lecture.
Sessions are recorded for asynchronous viewing and are available for download during or after the end of the course.
At the end of the course, students will come away with:
An in-depth understanding of each of the 22 major arcana (and plenty of the court cards and minors besides) and how those cards can be read as psychological, spiritual, and creative guides within the framework of one’s daily life.
Methods for using the tarot to increase attention span, tolerance for difficulty in literary, spiritual, and creative endeavors, i.e., becoming better at reading the difficult literature you’ve always wanted to read, becoming a more disciplined meditator, helping you move through writer’s block, just as a few examples.
An ability to read one’s own tarot draws (or read tarot for others) with more precision and imagination.
A working knowledge of the supplemental texts we’ll read in the course, including foundational esoteric texts such as Hermeticism’s Emerald Tablet, Aleister Crowley’s introduction to the tarot in the Book of Thoth, select essays from anonymous’ Meditations on the Tarot, and more recent essays and conversations from T. Susan Chang, Duncan Barford, Olga Tokarczuk, and more.
A community of others who are interested in going beyond traditional, familial, and cultural suppositions about the nature and meaning of personal and collective human life.
Cost
The course costs $300 and will be capped at 14 participants. If you’d like to participate and need financial accommodation, please message or email me directly.
Testimonials
“It has been my pleasure to work with Cameron for several years, now, most recently in the Portals to the Source course on dreaming. Cameron draws on a diverse array of thoughts and modalities from across cultures and time to form the insights and practices which she shares in her courses and newsletters. But perhaps more importantly, Cameron is also able to share intimately about her own life, health, and dreams. She is able to bring people together to create the last digital spaces where I feel optimism and community, in these increasingly divided digital times.” — Jenny, participant in the Portals to the Source: A Workshop on Dreams course
“Working with and learning from Cameron has been one of the great pleasures of my life. Not only does she simply know SO MUCH, but this knowledge is alive and lit up inside of her, making the information she offers (whether it be chart interpretation or teaching a specific subject) not just information, but story, and not just story, but your story. Being in a class or reading facilitated by Cameron, one feels as integral to the magical warp and weft as Venus or Jung or the II of Swords, which makes the learning experience profound, empowering, and as beautiful as you can imagine.” — Meg, participant in The Luminaries: Uncovering your Solar and Lunar Patterns of Liberation course
“As a lifelong vivid dreamer, I was excited to enroll in Cameron’s workshop on dreams, Portal to the Source. The course worked within the perspective that dreams are specific messages, timed appropriately, and not just the psychological refuse of the waking day. Cameron provided many historical, mythological, and philosophical perspectives that not only helped me understand how dreams function through us, but also why they appear to us the way that they do. To me, the equal weight given to these perspectives and the role of the tarot in understanding the dream as a message was very inspiring and has given me a lot to chew on in my creative work.
Cameron is a masterful tarot reader and thoughtful academic, and it was a pleasure to learn from her. I fully recommend any of her courses to anyone looking for learning that lives comfortably in the grey area between several truths. In Cameron’s hands, competing truths aren’t competing, but are easily assimilated, turned over, and understood together.” — Beck, participant in the Portals to the Source: A Workshop on Dreams course
“While it’s hard to note everything that I learned during the workshop, I found myself drawn into the symbols, mythologies and meanings of the Sun and the Moon in ways that were new to me, and I really appreciated that. Cameron is a gifted reader of astrology because she brings depth and breadth to the art. Her ability to show you the connections between your houses, signs and planets is amazing and led me to think more deeply and broadly about my chart, and about astrology in general.” —Denise, participant in The Luminaries: Uncovering Your Solar and Lunar Patterns for Self-Liberation course
“The second of Cameron’s two-part dream workshop starts in a little over an hour and I’ve been looking forward to it all week.
After the first one I went through some old dream journals and college papers (I took a class on dreams and dream theory, god bless the liberal arts). I’ve felt increasingly disconnected from this part of myself over the past few years, my dreamworld shrinking and becoming more mundane, my practice of recording my dreams falling by the wayside. I’ve missed it.
As I reread those journals, some dreams from 15 years ago felt as fresh as if I’d had them the night before. Some felt completely alien. Lots of fear and pain but also lots of humor, lots of wonder, ache of every variety. Lots of messages from my subconscious that I can clearly understand now with the benefit of hindsight, but also some of the same central mysteries and questions I still puzzle over. Many visits from loved ones, alive and dead.
As part of the workshop I’m picking the practice back up. My dreams these past couple of weeks still feel very small compared to what they used to be, but I knew it wouldn’t transform overnight. The lines of communication are rusty, long neglected. But I’m catching little flairs in the dark. Signals that vanish as soon as my eyes open. Night by night I’m remembering how to remember.
This workshop was easily the best thing I’ve gifted myself all year. If this sort of thing is even remotely your bag, I can’t recommend it enough. Cameron is so talented and has created something really special with this! If you get the chance to work with her, do it!!” — Cat, participant in Portals to the Source: A Workshop on Dreams
