Full Moon in Gemini
it’s hard to sit still when The Devil’s on your back
*spoiler alerts for the movie The Wailing below.
**my waters broke after I scheduled this post, seems fitting baby thinks she’s a newsletter! This might be last you hear from me this month, in spite of my “plans” outlined below—no time to update anything or add intriguing footnotes, sorry!
Two Saturdays ago.
I’m walking on Lonesome Pine road, musing about the Devil card I drew as “my teacher” from the tarot this morning. Hate that draw, least favorite card, what’s it mean? I see something on the road: I think the black shape on the ground ahead of me is a dead crow, similar to the one I encountered and had to bury few months ago. Similar to the one my husband and I had to help die, had to bury before we left the Midwest in 2022. I know these shapes and what they require, so I’m walking with a bit more purpose and dread now, steeling myself for the need to ceremonialize and grieve another body.
But when I get to the figure, it’s not a crow but the limp, bedraggled form of the black beanie I wore on a walk in the cold the day before. It must have fallen out of my coat pocket, when my brow got sweaty and I shoved it aside. It looks sad, lying there discarded in the gravel like that, tire marks mudded into the fabric, but not as sad as a dead bird would have looked. I move the black hat to the side of the road, planning to collect it on my way back home. On my head now is a white cap, moth-eaten, polyester fibers. None of my New Age texts have instructions on what it means when the crown chakra attracts bugs. I think about how, all morning, I’ve been fretting over whether to buy myself a nicer, less-pilled beanie for the coming winter. Or whether, in making that purchase, I’d be solidifying a future in which I definitely undergo chemo, a future in which I am bald and sick and comfortless and therefore in need a nicer cap.
Crowley says The Devil is reckless creation without regard for result. The Golden Dawn says the Devil is linked to Capricorn. Milton’s Paradise Lost casts Satan as a revolutionary, and the last thing I did before my first cancer diagnosis was read Per Faxneld’s Satanic Feminism, about how various women’s movements engaged with the rebel Devil, to prepare for an online workshop I was supposed to co-teach on the multiple histories of The Devil card. I never taught it, sick with the prospect of sickness, lost the friendship of a colleague in the process. Growing up, my Baptist parents believed I was the daughter who was too easily tempted. Something about my brain, then about my body. All of these interpretations! None of them my own.
*
What do I know of the Devil? The tarot card appears for me in moments just like this Saturday: in times when I can see clearly a multiplicity of meanings, actions, futures, results. Beanie, money, chemo, crow, all of the above and none of them, too. I can see, in the Devil’s anxious present, the multiplicity of everything, but can find no love in my heart for any of it, not even one little thing. That lack of love makes choosing a path forward harder, or, somehow, stupider. I draw The Devil when I say “yes” to something just to get the weight of every other option off my back. It’s not just me. I watch my clients struggle like this, too. My friends, my husband. The present is fraught with too much and so contraction into a singular future without thought or love seems the right way to go, the right to get out. The opposite of the birth contraction, I’ve found, which is an effort of every human faculty of devotion and intensity, and then some.
Three years ago.
I watched Na Hong-Jin’s horror film The Wailing with a group of friends I’d made on a literature and film discord server. I’m not much of a scary movie person these days, but only because the genre impresses me, and, since becoming a magician myself, I have become antagonistic to and fearful of terrifying impressions. They become too real; they have bodies during key moments of ritual. Yikes.
There is a moment in the The Wailing where the protagonist, at his most despairing moment, realizes there is no one who can help him out of the mess that he himself has helped to create. He’s the chief of a rural police force and the devil has come to town, killing and possessing townspeople, including the chief’s young daughter, his only, beloved child. After much running around and fighting and snooping through houses and even killing the devil’s familiar, a big black dog, on his own, it finally becomes clear to the cop that, unless he seeks out help, his girl is either going to a) die, b) kill his family, c) kill him, or d) all of the above. The cop enlists the aid of an expensive-looking shaman from the city, with a nice car and a man bun, to kill some more animals and swat at his daughter during a ceremonial dance. It doesn’t work. He takes his daughter to the hospital, where they hook her up to some IVs, but no cigar despite the saline lock and the drugs. He seeks an audience with the priest at the local chapel, but is told the church can’t help him. The devil, after all, is not a ghost. Exorcism won’t work here, the priest says, sorry.
Exhausted, horrified, the insufficiency of the pillars of his community, of which he has always proudly been one, finally dawning on him, the cop is clawing for something, anything, please god, anything to do. And even though at this point in the movie it is clear to the viewer—and should be clear to the cop—that all of this doing, all of this trust in the forward movement of things to a recognizable solution, is part of the problem, the idea of just sitting a moment with his confusion and fear is intolerable to him. The cop rounds up some of his buddies and a few clubs in an attempt, I guess, to find and pummel the devil to death.
*
There is another way. The film offers the protagonist an out in the form of an angel, the town crazy lady, who walks around muttering to herself early in the movie and, at the end, reveals herself to be the one person who can help. She has set a trap for the devil, and if the cop will just sit with her, in the dark morning, and do nothing to interfere, the world be OK again. He can be redeemed if he will just relinquish his faith in his own frantic will and instead embrace the pain and weakness of waiting—acknowledging, in the process, what he has done, for his part, to lead himself, his family, and his community to this point of death. There are no rituals to save him, there is no new action to take. There is only the choice to be still, to face himself, and to face the horror of what, for a moment, is outside of his control, as well as how his fierce desire to control everything has helped lead him here.
The cop can’t do it. He can’t sit still by the dawning fields with the angel, even though she has offered him salvation. He is too sure that he needs to be churning forth, in every moment. He is too sure that he can, after all, be the hero. He begins to doubt the appearance of wished-for aid. Maybe the angel is not an angel but just a crazy lady dressed in white, after all, and he tears himself away from his vigil with her, running for his home, he must protect his home, it is the one thing he knows how to do, that’s surely where he should be right now. He arrives to find the rooms filled with the blood and body parts of his family members, his possessed daughter bloated from her feeding, spent and catatonic on the porch. I still love you, he says to his daughter, before she kills him too.
One day from now.
The Full Moon in Gemini is normally one of action, speed, quick little steps towards big goals. This one, no, I wouldn’t say so. Ruled by a stationary Mercury in an area of a Gemini known esoterically as a place where a man finds himself with ten rather histrionic swords sticking out of his back, this lunation asks for the buzz words of faith that mindfulness culture loves to co-opt: meditation, contemplation, stillness, quiet. Oh god, surrender. (I still love you, I say, as you kill me, the messenger, too!) I’m sorry but it’s not just the standstill Mercury! It’s also that the Moon is squaring both Saturn and Neptune, pressurizing confusion and instigating a hateful choice you might find yourself wishing you could walk back later if you actually follow through with it.
Full Moons, in astrology, are brief moments with long histories and long futures; best to navigate them with proper attention and interpretation, especially as this one sees us through the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year, and the transition to Capricorn season where a retrograde Mars wants you showing up to every interaction with a club.
For this one, best to take another Gemini tack, tried-and-true, which is to admit when you don’t know it all, and remain blithe and unbothered by that admittance: You’re tired. You’re smarting a little, maybe, because you’ve made some blunders in the process of perceiving and being more than a little freaked out by the world’s ordinary evil.
When the dead crow was not a crow but my own damn hat, I had occasion to remember an aspect of drawing The Devil I tend to forget. In the early 20th century, the Golden Dawn assigned the quality of “mirth” to the sign of Capricorn and its tarot counterpart. I may hate the card, but mirth has always been one of its secret qualities that I try to cultivate whenever it appears. It may be the Major Arcana of confusion and illusion, the dark and irreducible unknowns of matter, but it’s also the place where we teach ourselves a talent for humor at the edge of the void. It’s where we gain the talent for learning how to resist jumping over the void’s edge because you’re terrified of the view, too.