June tarot reading
"What do you do with bad cards?" featuring the reversed Moon, the Four of Fire, and THE BOOK OF LOVE
I’ll admit to more than a small shiver of fear when I draw The Moon, reversed. Bad tarot draws imprint themselves on you, like a bad experience of anything else — the food poisoning you got from the most convenient takeout place that you now can’t go back to, even in a pinch, or else the car accident you almost had in front of that cute plant nursery you’ve now sworn off visiting, or that time an editor treated you or your work so miserably that you decided to swear off pitching places other than writing for Substack for an entire year.
The problem, for me, with tarot, is that I can’t forgo it. “Even when you’re not turning over the cards, you’re turning over the cards,” a friend wisely observed during a stint last winter when I tried to move away from my tarot rituals briefly. I wouldn’t draw my daily cards, but I still spoke about the happenings of every day in the syntax of tarot. The five crows squabbling over a piece of old focaccia in my backyard were never just a murder of birds so much as a living scene of the Five of Swords. The book I picked up about the myth of the selkie woman from a Jungian perspective made first and best sense to me as an Eight of Cups narrative. When I need to elucidate the fallout of narcissistic fathers and infantile mothers for my husband and me, I write love letters about the Three of Wands. For better or worse, tarot, like English, has become a language that I require for sense-making, for self-making. Of course, there are going to be some words I’d rather avoid but find myself needing to use, just like when the English words “impact,”1 or “moist,” or “narcissistic father” creep into my descriptive vernacular.
The reversed Moon is one of those words. It’s already maybe the murkiest card of the entire Major Arcana: what’s up with the crayfish the size of a dog, why do the age-old arguments about whether the Moon is “lesser than” the Sun because of its ties to the Earth have to be so predictable, with the white men fearful of period blood the loudest on one side, and the white “witches” with a strange disrespect for the soul or historical accuracy the loudest on the other, why does the card give me the creeps even when I really just try to read it as the dreamscape of the poet, the Piscean, the couch potato, that kind of thing. But, truly, that is the thing when you start reading tarot: as much as we can use our Geminian powers of interpretation to inflect or change the meanings of a card’s appearance—to sense-make with willpower, playfulness, and transgression—at the end of the day, a card does come with its own register, its own valence that’s going to work itself on you. The falsity of the observer and the observed binary, you know? It’s always right there, in the randomness of the shuffle, the image that appears, upright or upside-down, before you. Very humbling, very beautiful. Very annoying2 when the reversed Moon appears, a card that was the signifier, for you, of a cancer recurrence, and all of the sudden you find yourself afraid of what the month might bring.
What do you do with a bad draw? You reel yourself in; you expand your search outwards. You remind yourself that, for whatever it’s worth, the valence of The Moon is the valence of uncertainty and doubt—these are the limits of the card, the parameters that reign in the possibilities of meaning. Reversals, for me and for my clients, usually occur when we’re forgetting a card’s limits. When, instead, we’re letting our imaginations turn into greedy little capitalists, colonizing our mental space with bland, easily manufactured narratives that don’t serve anything other than to put us into emotional and physical debt. So, you reel it in: Can you deal with the potential for June to be delimited by moments of uncertainty and doubt? Absolutely; in one sense, the unknowingness that stems from measuring out your various options is ontological to Gemini and its season, anyways. There’s a choice, but we haven’t quite chosen. There’s a pressure, but we haven’t yet divided up the weight of responsibility, or even decided, really, the other people with whom we can share that burden.
Talking to your people—defining roles, asking more of your relationships, and giving more to them, too—is one strategy that our second card, The Four of Fire, offers up for moving through June. Associated with Venus in Aries and, in the Herbcrafter deck, with elderberry, this is the card of transformation through gathering. Solstice dinner parties, and picnic potlucks add levity and ceremony to the environment even when you’ve really come together for hard convos, serious talk.
Part of the story of elder, my herbalist friend Meg3 says, is the story of the changeling: the transformation occurs through the mechanics of gathering or sitting in the right place, next to the right people, with the right kind of heart. The promise of June’s reversed Moon, then, is the promise of the Moon in Kelly Link’s novel The Book of Love. Sometimes cast as a megalomaniac goddess, sometimes as a friend who listens to a lonely sister’s midnight heartaches, the Moon in the Book of Love is both terrible and lovely, a presence whose true power is what the Moon’s true power will always be: to wax and wane, to bring frightening darkness and a certain, manic slant of light. Or as one character remarks, “The moon is full. Isn’t this proof of something? That things can disappear and then come back again?”
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Associated with Pisces, the Moon reversed also indicates the resurgence of a sense of pressure that will feel likely familiar to many of you: What new effort or vision began for you around the end of 2021 or beginning of 2022? Can you remember the attendant feelings “oh my god, I have to do this” warring with “oh my god, how will I ever do this?” Jupiter’s entrance into Gemini last week means the planet is moving into a year-long series of tense squares with Saturn in Pisces, signaling the second chapter of whatever that story is about for you. It’s a risky, nail-biting chapter, in some ways, but I’ve always respected square aspects in astrology for how they inspire action, strategy, doing something that matters. With four planets in Gemini by mid-month, “doing something” will be easy; it’s the “that matters” part that might feel more difficult.
More lovely is the Mercury-Jupiter conjunction happening today around the same time as the Venus cazimi with the Sun. Mercury and Jupiter together is particularly auspicious for musicians, writers, “pleasant polymaths,” in the words of my astrology teacher Austin Coppock. Meanwhile, Venus has been purified by the Sun every four years in Gemini since 1964; if you want to track what this has meant for your life in particular, you might look back to the events, feelings, and experiences surrounding relationships, love, aesthetic, and beauty that occurred for you in June 2020, June 2016, June 2012, June 2008, June 2004, and so on.
If you’d like a week-by-week look at the astrology this month, I can’t recommend the weekly astrology updates by
in her newsletter enough. I’ve been a little bored of planetary delineations in predictive astrology recently; Fearnley’s ability to write brilliantly about culture and film in conjunction with what’s obviously a depth of astrological knowledge is a breath of fresh air. I’m inspired, frankly!Wishing you inspiration, gathering, and the just-right guide through uncertainty in May, whether that guide be a book, a person, a practice, or some just plain ole good news.
Below are bibliomantic tarotscopes for the month, using Link’s The Book of Love, a novel I’m bereft to have recently finished, it so deeply led me out of my own moony anxieties over the past few weeks. What an experience of truth, reading this magical tome of friendship and love, music and strange realms! The way I do bibliomancy is to use the divined quotes as a provocation to stir up some feeling, or some argument within myself. It’s not about whether I agree with these assertions, it’s more about what does it point me toward that I might need to understand, to develop understanding around? My own suggestions for the month follow The Book of Love quote. Read for your rising sign, unless you feel like getting sucked into the the hilarity of how well the randomly divined quotes match up with each sign at hand, as I did!