April Tarot Reading
Strength and the reversed Ace of Swords offer competing advice for the month.
Welcome to the Saturday newsletter for paid subscribers, which offers literary and esoteric guidance for the week ahead. I’m taking next week off to focus on my kid, who is on Spring Break. You can expect the next essay for free subscribers to appear on Wednesday, April 12. If you’d like to write in with a question for the tarot, you can respond to this email, and I’ll answer it as part of the next Saturday newsletter. Thanks for being here!
One card glows with patience. The serene-faced figure on its front stoops as if to kiss the face of an open-mouth lion, as if the lion weren’t a lion at all so much as a beloved pet, the lady’s baby, her dear, precious one, however grumpy, however well-endowed with sharp, impossible teeth. A lemniscate crowns the woman’s head, mimicking the curve of the lion’s back, the swirled pools of water at their feet; Strength attaches itself to the loops of the image, a reminder that success is a winding thing, dipping, circling back, requiring soft endurance, a gentle press.
The other card struggles beneath a straight-lined viciousness. Here a floating hand invokes a sword from the sky, pointed with force. There’s no face, no real body involved in the wielding. There’s only a tight grip, a stormy background, the mountains turned upside-down, a golden crown slipping off the end of the sword’s blade. Reversed, the Ace of Swords invokes the power to destroy world and self, devastation implied by the weapon’s downward thrust, the image’s disembodied rigidity.
If March brought about the engine-revving for the New Year that we missed out on amidst the relatively placid first few months of 2023, April’s astrology fills our lives with fumes. A Mars-ruled Solar Eclipse in the final degree of Aries layers a dense smog atop our ability to clearly identify and pursue important goals. Mercury enters Taurus, an Earth sign that already inspires the Messenger God to anxious worry; on top of that, Mercury will station retrograde a day after said-eclipse, adding obfuscation and backtracking to the nodal funk.