February Tarot Reading
February Tarot Reading
and tarotscopes for each sign
They know something, don’t they, the Queen and Knight who’ve appeared as our guides into February?
Strung upside down and facing each other with—what? ardor? love? the intensity of a secret shared, a faith believed?—the Queen of Cups and the Knight of Swords speak to a month of collaboration on the small scale, in one-on-one interactions, in “backroom deals,” even as most of the people in our lives treat us as a little odd, a little off.
Upright, both of these cards call forth action and activity. The Queen of Cups, right side up, uses her deep emotions and intuitive insights to spur on herself and a wide array of others, reminding us that nurturance and care are often the agents by which first steps are transformed into long-lasting and successful journeys. The upright Knight of Swords, on the other hand, deals in the generation and analysis of thoughts and communication to start projects and relationships—to get things done with and through language. As a pair, they speak to the interplay of intuition and reason, emotion and logic, to launch new efforts that have a deep and enduring shelf life.
“How can we ensure that we’re articulating the link between the events of our lives and the feelings those events evince?” the Queen of Cups asks, taking a page from Louise DeSalvo. The Knight of Swords, appreciating anything to do with the articulation of patterns, cause and effect, any quantifiable experience, nods along, and adds: “We can move more swiftly now that we have a better understanding of ourselves and our lives. Let’s make the decision and do the thing we’ve been putting off; we can handle it now.”
Self-understanding and decisive action are imminently available to us in February. But because both the Queen and Knight are reversed, these qualities of time and self will likely feel subsumed beneath a general atmosphere of waiting and stagnancy. That makes sense given the planetary happenings of the month: Mars, Saturn, and Pluto are all moving through their last legs of lengthy transits through Gemini, Aquarius, and Capricorn, respectively. Astrologically, there’s a feeling of standing at the edge of the cliff, taking a moment to collect yourself before you dive into the sea below. March heralds the jump and the splash—an ocean of wildly new experiences and feelings as Pluto dips into Aquarius, Saturn shifts into Pisces, and Mars water-logs itself in Cancer.
Because our Queen and Knight face each other—the Queen with eyes open, hands clasped, the Knight with an active, lusty sword—we can expect good conversation, support, and care from people in private, intimate, or behind-the-scenes encounters. Troubling these connections a bit is the esoteric system set up by the Golden Dawn, in which the Queen of Cups and the Knight of Swords are in aversion to each other. This means they rule areas of the sky—and of the natal chart—that don’t witness each other through easy geometric angle, and, as a result, are seen as not usually being able to work together. For our purposes, we might expect the help and support on offer this month, then, to come from surprising corners. Or you might find that two areas of your life that rarely come together properly actually have a bit of synergy in February.
Best not to count on your big dreams and fastidious planning to be acknowledged this month by larger groups, audiences, the “outside world.” Save the first step—or big jump—of any new venture for March, when the newness of the skies supports such endeavors. Spend February instead getting the details right, addressing feelings of anxiety, fear, or concern, and collaborating on the margins. Focus on what you know now, and allow the conversations in the private corners of your life to open you up to new ways of moving into, through, and with the uncertainty of what you have yet to understand.
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Below are tarotscopes for each zodiacal sign. Because correspondence systems like the Golden Dawn’s gives us a way to map the tarot onto the horoscope, we can read where and how the cards exist, fundamentally and specifically, within each person’s natal chart. This is how we can use mundane tarot draws for a given period time to generate ideas for, make claims about, and offer advice to people about how that time will unfold for them. That’s what I’ve done for the tarotscopes below, asking the question: How and where do the reversed Queen of Cups and the reversed Knight of Swords show up in our lives in February, and what is there to do about it?
Court cards are a bit weirder than the Minor Arcana to map onto the chart because they always rule three decans—three 10-degree swaths of time and space—rather than just one. What’s more is that they always span two signs, with two of their decans being comprised of their same element and one—their “shadow” decan—coming from another element and zodiacal sign altogether. As a result, the Queen of Cups rules the first 20 degrees of Cancer, as we would expect of this watery Queen. And she also rules the last ten degrees of Gemini, the shadow decan that points to what she needs to better integrate into her activities in order to be the force for love, dream, poetry, and myth that she usually wants to be. Similarly, the uber-airy Knight of Swords understandably rules the first 20 degrees of Aquarius, and he also rules the last decan of Capricorn, the shadow side of materiality that he needs to turn his ideas into a concrete course of action. Your readings below incorporate all of this information, in one way or another!