May tarot reading
"Ruin is never complete" with the Ten of Swords and Michael Eigen's Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis
The Ten of Swords might be my favorite bad card.
Every tarot reader has a bad card that they feel is “really not that bad.” The Ten of Swords is mine. Lord of Ruin, death by backstabbing, the darkest of nights, I don’t mind this hysterical little dude, I think, because my mind defaults to this anxious landscape even on good days, even in good moments. Ten swords in the back and exhaustion on the wind? Yes, fine, I know how to do that! I know how to move through that, whether the real life equivalent is coming through the final stages of addiction, or receiving an email about the termination of one’s teaching contract, or staring at a dark hole on a computer screen in a doctor’s office and reading the void correctly before an official diagnosis gets put to words.
I like this card, because I understand the feeling of “ruin” and I’ve gotten good at its teaching. Ruin, like anything else in this conditional world, doesn’t last. “Ruin is never complete,” as Crowley says in his Book of Thoth interpretation of the card. Or in the words of Federico Campagna, from his 2013 anti-work polemic The Last Night: “it is exactly from the understanding of the limits of our lives and our enjoyment of them” that we can begin to win back a sense of radical freedom for ourselves. That’s what the Ten of Swords, strangely, always ends up being for me: a radical freedom descends upon my life precisely through the mechanics of what seems like ruin or doom. A lost job becomes an opportunity to explore how chained I’ve been to abstract ideas of success and ambition. A cancer diagnosis becomes a entryway into an enchanted world, where fairies, ghosts, gods, and tarot cards are living beings that gird (and tantalize) my life. The end of an eating disorder opens the doors to a new relationship with my body, with aging, that has so very little to do with what literally anyone else has to say about beauty, aesthetics, how I dress, what my curdled c-section scar or dimpled breast implants might mean. The horror doesn’t disappear. But it does offer up its bones for a different story to flesh itself out. The Ten of Swords is the exchange moment. Not a bypassing but a handoff—I’m finally done with one emotional register and ready to move up a scale. Or something.
Other tarot readers may have superstitious rituals to ward off the wounds, darkness, and hysterics of the Ten of Swords. T. Susan Chang, for example, likes to stick ten toothpicks in an apple when she pulls this card as an act of sympathetic magic to take on the card’s meaning. If you habitually pull this card and one of your beloved chickens gets slaughtered by a fox, as Chang has reported, I understand the impulse. But for me—and for many of my clients in the past—the Sun in Gemini that shines as a band of light in Pamela Colman Smith’s rendition of the card really does a lot for Ruin. The magic comes from embracing the end, from saying, “The End!” to whatever is over with gusto or flair or ceremony, as if you wished it for yourself, even when you didn’t. For me, it’s been less about slaughter and more about a finality that brings about something completely new.
I’ve drawn the card to represent the times I’ve definitively chosen to follow a new teacher or find a new therapist (both of whom have their Suns in Gemini). I’ve drawn it to signal my husband’s new career move (Gemini rules my Seventh House of marriage and partnership, the Sun rules much in my eternally-Leo husband’s life). I drew it when I finally understood that I was going to choose a double mastectomy over a lumpectomy back in 2021 (the right decision, as it turns out, given the recurrences of cancer, even without any breast tissue intentionally left behind). Recently, I drew the card coincidentally with the end of what felt like a month-long descent into the underworld: in April, my attention was on rehabilitating my relationship with my angry dead and also leading caregivers of loved ones with terminal cancer through an intense six-week writing process.
On the kabbalistic Tree of Life, the Ten of Swords seems far away from God, spirit, the ineffable. Tens live at the bottom of the tree, in Malkuth, the shattered sphere of the kingdom of earth, where the pressure of the divine is often too much for us. Where, during creation, according to some strains of mysticism, everything broke open and couldn’t be put back together again. Swords coincide with the realm of Yetsirah, the world of language, of formation. As “kingdom in formation,” the Ten of Swords shows us what’s possible when we use language to construct a new form altogether, rather than trying to jam the broken shards of an old formation into an order that no longer works. Ruin becomes possibility. Hysteria becomes a message from God. Shadows become what my son Theo calls the “middle-change,” that magical, scary time before the full sun shines again.
In May, Saturn moves into Aries and Jupiter into Cancer. Something is over—ruined, maybe!—something new dawns, terrifically. In the background of your life, behind all the change and conditionality, behind the “ramshackle riot of soulless mechanism,” does something eternal lurk? Are you doing sympathetic magic in May to ward off the riot? Or is there something else you can do when faced with the Ten of Swords’ logic of lunatics and philosophers?
The bibliomantic tarotscopes for the individual signs for April are below. For the bibliomancy part, I’m using Michael Eigen’s Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis, a book I’ve returned to time and again over the last few months for its insights into the intersection between mysticism and psychology. Eigen is an explosive, beautiful, strange writer. He shocks me! Shock—a good Ten of Swords affective tool. As he writes in a passage that came up for the Virgo Rising horoscope below:
“To complement Winnicott, who writes of the other surviving my destructive urges, Bion writes of my getting murdered and being all right. Being murdered by the other and being all right. That might not be an easy place to get to, but it is not an impossibility. You learn how to do it over the course of your life, sometimes better, sometimes worse. Every process has variability. How to get killed, survive destruction, and still be there for oneself and others. It is a freeing capacity to develop. It helps one be freer from oneself as well more able with others … you surviving me, me surviving you. Me surviving your destruction of me, you surviving my destruction of you. I would add: me surviving me and you surviving you” (30-31).
The way I do bibliomancy is to use the randomly selected quotations 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 Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis quote. Read for your rising sign.
I’m happy to answer questions about this month’s tarot draw or astrology if you comment with your rising below.
Taurus Rising: “It is good to have stories and myths. They express deep emotions of the human race or individuals, make you feel something that is real. Some touch something you feel is ‘all’ in you, a special “all-sense” that brings wonder and tears and joy. We are only always part, and yet feel this ‘all’” (13). Although May will tempt your focus to remain on what’s broken, bruised, and “only always part,” the magic for you lies in seeking out, telling, and reveling in the parts of your life that, paradoxically, make you feel that “all-sense,” or wholeness, is possible. You’ve reached a decision, maybe, about money, resources, and the stuff that you consider to be your own. Regardless of whether that final choice feels relieving or terrible, there’s deep truth in that it opens you up to new experiences, finally. You’re totally allowed to be trepidatious, but it wouldn’t hurt to allow yourself to run your hands over a sense of wonder, too. You’re here, you’re doing it, you survived that! What’s next? The sun does shine in May!