Minor Secrets

The Full Moon in Capricorn, Willa Cather's My Mortal Enemy, astro notes for the week

At first, the girl is obsessed with the romantic story of the town’s elopers. She grows up hearing her aunt and other family members tell stories of the strange and beautiful woman who snubbed a large inheritance to run off with and marry a dashing man. But both reader and girl, Nellie Birdseye, narrator of Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy, meet the infamous beauty and her husband long after the fairy tale has run its course. When Myra Henshawe and her husband Oswald come back to their hometown at the novel’s open, Nellie’s unease begins with Myra’s obvious, pointed discomfort. No longer a triumphant beauty, Myra is ill-suited to her body, to conversation with other people, to her relationship with her husband, that suitor who once swept her off her feet. More than having living life in accordance with her own true will, more than having chosen love over money, Myra, it seems, at first, to Nellie, is evidence of something subtly terrible in the heart of the human being, in the heart of the American Dream. As readers, we begin to see this sentiment unfold in Nellie in an early-novel conversation with her aunt, after Myra has come to stay at their home. Nellie has just retold the myth of Myra’s elopement to the reader. But now, after having met the protagonist in flesh and blood, she’s begun to reconsider the character of Myra’s great-uncle, who, in all the town tellings, had been cast as the pompous, rich old man whose callous heart was shown up by Myra’s bold, runaway love:

After I went home from that first glimpse of the real Myra Henshawe, twenty-five years older than I had always imagined her, I could not help feeling a little disappointed. John Driscoll and his niece had suddenly changed places in my mind, and he had got, after all, the more romantic part. Was it not better to get out the world with such pomp and dramatic splendour than to linger on in it, having to take account of shirts and railway trains, and getting a double chin into the bargain? (8).

I felt a weird shiver as I read this last week for my contribution to a forthcoming scholarly collection revisiting Cather’s work within an interdisciplinary context. My task, which has been to write about Cather within the context of her metastatic breast cancer diagnosis in the late 1940s, has been complicated by the fact that the famously private author of My Antonia and O Pioneers! never wrote about her illness directly. But as I’ve refamiliarized myself with her fiction and short stories, what I’ve found are narratives that prefigure — prophesy, I would say, if I were wearing my esoteric hat — not only her terminal diagnosis but also the end of the American Dream, and end of Western capitalist expansionism along with it.

As I was writing my abstract for the paper, I realized how easy it would be to “read” My Mortal Enemy, based on quotes like the one above, as some drivel of an argument about all of the cultural topics that incite our ire these days, and to hold up Cather as captured by (or championing her as a proponent of, depending on your own political preferences) the apparent cultural norms upon which that ire is centered, from the aesthetics of femininity, to our relationship to aging, to the entanglement of money, romance, and desire. It struck me how easy it is to read the surface of anything, book, body, world, for something that suits a narrative of easy bitterness, irony, and self-righteousness, and how much of what passes for cultural, art, or academic criticism does exactly this, crafts personal admonishment of the political as an adequate response to art, while pretending the personal isn’t at play through the invention of one’s own language of the university, as if we were all first-year comp students¹, to borrow from David Bartholomae. Or more simply put, we seem to read and respond to reading these days, in whatever sphere, by playing on the surface under the pretense of plumbing the deep.

What a loss it would be to read My Mortal Enemy and miss the way Cather deconstructs a fairy tale story of love not as an indictment against love, nor as an indictment of life, but instead as a celebration of a truer love, a stranger, deeper, and more emphatic life, one that goes on living beyond the opposites that Nellie sets up in the novel’s beginning: young and old, drama and boredom, love and hate, hope and despair, even life and death itself? That celebration is not necessarily on the surface of the text. But it is a golden thread throughout, honoring, as Cather also does in her short story “The Enchanted Bluff,” the bonds between the seen and unseen worlds, which is to say, the story celebrates what it means to live with an awareness of death, even when the culture around her characters, her characters, and she as the conscious author of a given time, necessarily do not.

Astro Notes (free this week!)

I’ve thought a lot about this novel as an astrologer thinking about the qualities of time we’ll live through this week. We’ve got the Full Moon in Capricorn, occurring opposite the Moon in Cancer copresent with Mercury stationing retrograde and Jupiter, Greater Benefic in Hellenistic Astrology, spending its last moments in the sign of the golden scarab today. Ruled by and squared to Saturn in debility in Aries, the Moon asks after your relationship to tradition and belonging, and about the nature of your inheritances, one from the world of fate, one from the world of destiny. What is your relationship to fate and destiny, and what do you get from contemplating each? The majesty of Alan Chapman’s articulation of the golden thread behind Western spiritual traditions is that is doesn’t pretend to shirk duality, it doesn’t try to get away from the soil of this world, which is that every cause has an effect, every birth ends it death. But life doesn’t stay there, on that level! There’s something much beyond cause and effect, birth and death, our various, fallible human ways of telling stories about love and money. You can travel up the tree! You can know the difference between The Magician as a surface-level charlatan and The Magician as the “God who goes,” the one who speaks true words, who prays true prayers, who alters reality by devoting herself to the highest, and therefore participating in it. What is the distance between charlatanism and devotion? How far into the depths must you travel before you realize something golden, light, and true within yourself, this world, other people? These are good questions for the Mercury retrograde and the Full Moon.

Jupiter begins bestowing blessing, wisdom, community, the greater good in the sign of Leo today, and will do so over the next year and a half, the first time its been in the sign of the Lion, fixed fire, since 2014 and 2015. We’re happy to have the Greater Benefic here, as the South Node, the dragon’s tail, will join him soon, making things a bit more complicated, materially, although offering plenty of boons in terms of spirituality, realization, and touching Goodness, Beauty, and Truth — finding your true path, in spite of dissuasion. Adding to the astrological fireworks this week is Mars’ transit into Gemini, the mutable sign of the Twins, where it will make heady, red contact with Uranus. I like to call conjunctions “hugs” when I am trying to explain astrological transits to my six-year-old. But what does it mean when The Tower and The Fool hug? What fairy tale or myth are we living there? We’ll find out!

If you’d like a card pull for the Full Moon, comment with your rising and your question below. I’ll answer these questions with tarot draws over the course of this week! Sending love. If you want to learn how to do astrology, tarot, kabbalah, and other streams of esotericism together so that you can read your own chart and stand firmly planted in your life, without the distraction, temptation, or hallucinations of AI, see below and please spread the word to others who may be interested!

In August, I’ll be teaching a six-week workshop on the Minor Arcana of the tarot, where, far from the usual move of reading the minor cards as playing second fiddle to the majors, we’ll read the pips as, in the words of Valentin Tomberg in The Wandering Fool, “superior to the Major Arcana [as] a system of meditation, of spiritual exercises …”

The Minors are both more particular to you than other cards, because they correspond to specific places in your astrological chart, and, in Tomberg’s words, require “a greater effort of consciousness” to read because they draw so precisely from the Kabbalah, Pythagoreanism, and other streams of the Western Esoteric tradition.

In my class, Minor Secrets: The Vertical Axis and the Cosmology of the Minor Cards of the Tarot,we’ll explore the minors together in conjunction with your birth chart, the Kabbalah, and the cosmologies offered by Western magick to strengthen your understanding, love, and wisdom for your Self, the world, and the others you encounter within it. Practically speaking, the course is a way to reclaim your attention from the algorithm, to plant yourself firmly on whatever path it is you’re here to walk, and to join a wonderful community of some of the smartest, and kindest people on the internet.

Some testimonial from recent course participants:

I thoroughly enjoyed my time enrolled in In Its Right Place. The course spanned 6 weeks, with multiple meetings per week (a lecture and a discussion) as well as a class discord for daily draws and interpretations. This was the perfect dosage and environment for getting lots of practice with reading tarot in conjunction with the natal chart. I have a much deeper understanding of my own chart and how to read others’ as well, and I believe that Cameron’s ability to weave together Hellenistic, depth psychology, and mundane significations in the chart has allowed me to conduct deeper readings for myself every day. I can’t imagine drawing cards now without thinking of the astrological significations related to them. ‘

A truly enriching course and experience, and it’s so special to have a space where I can be with like-minded individuals who take the Western esoteric tradition seriously. I wholeheartedly recommend anything Cameron teaches--you will learn way more than you could ever anticipate!

— Beck, participant in In Its Right Place: The Tarot and the Twelve Houses

Cameron is the most generous teacher you could hope to find. She is deeply knowledgeable about the Tarot, astrology and the tree of life, and she creates a rich learning experience through daily group practice and discussion. The students she gathers are the nicest people on the internet, and the whole class experience is convivial and enriching and when class is over, I always really miss it and very much look forward to whatever she offers next.

— Max, participant in In Its Right Place: The Tarot and the Twelve Houses

Details for Minor Secrets:

What

Minor Secrets: The Vertical Axis and Cosmology of the Minor Cards of the Tarot will run for six weeks, beginning on Wednesday, August 5 and ending Saturday, September 12.

When

We’ll meet every Wednesday evening at 7 pm ET for 90-minute lectures diving deep into the Minor Arcana as living symbols in support of and supported by your personal horoscopes and the Kabbalah and every Saturday morning at 9 am ET for querent sessions, where students have the opportunity to ask questions about their own charts, tarot cards, or anything else that falls within the realm of esoteric, literary, divinatory, occult, or spiritual study.

Other Details

I cap these classes at 14 students to maintain an intimate cohort of spiritual friends. They’ve been such a source of joy, warmth, learning, and camaraderie during these dark times! Please join us! All lectures and sessions are recorded; asynchronous learning and students welcome.

A community Discord will be maintained to foster connections, conversation about daily tarot draws and esoteric study, and other class details.

Cost

The cost is $300, but if you feel called to the class and need a discount or some other kind of arrangement or work-trade, please email me at cameronscottsteele AT gmail DOT com.

My Mortal Enemy with the The Magus, pictures from a camping trip that was great until it wasn't!

1. And we kind of all are, in the age of AI and Substack, although often with less generous attitudes than the students I used to teach in first-year rhet comp courses at UNL.