Welcome to the monthly tarot reading for paid subscribers, complete with tarotscopes for each sign. If you’d like a more personalized astrology or tarot reading for a month that sees a lot of reversals and almost as many new beginnings, my books are open.
These readings were on hiatus for a while for a number of reasons that are mostly too boring or too tedious to get into here! But now we’re back with the King of Swords and the Six of Pentacles offering guidance for how to move through a month that tips us firmly into the second half of the year, entrenches us deeper into the Venus retrograde, and, towards its end, throws us for another loop as Mercury’s retrograde begins, too.
Essentially, August will have us zig-zagging into the future; it features the detours, off-ramps, and back-alley dealings that always make up the relationship between human desire and “natural” time. But it’s a month that forces us to pay attention to the truth that moving forward always also means circling back, stepping aside, making decisions based on signs that come from elsewhere (like this broken robin’s egg and these crow feathers I’ve collected on recent mountain runs; I dream of eggs, cracked and used-up when there are new developments with my breast cancer. Crows and ravens come to me when it’s time to center my writing ambitions with a bit more courage and schedule. So I’m meeting with my oncologist to check out a new lump in coming weeks; the revival of this paid-subscriber newsletter stems from the feathers’ appearance in my running path).
The tarot draw for the month features the King of Swords and the Six of Coins, both upright, from Repeater Books’ and Sereptie’s Philosopher’s Tarot deck, the one I’ve been using all summer for both divination and philosophical provocation. Neither the generic Waite-Smith King of Swords nor the figure of Marcus Aurelius in the Philosopher’s Tarot really inspires us to center intuition and magical thinking in our approach to life’s decisions. This King usually comes up for me and my clients, instead, as someone who is hellbent on having it all figured out.