This is the second in a two-part tarot reading for paid subscribers for the New Year. The first newsletter in the series featured an essay on the tarot cards I drew for 2023 as well as important astrological dates to keep in mind for this new year; today’s installment provides specific tarotscopes for the year for each rising sign, showing you what the Eight of Wands and Ace of Pentacles mean for you!
Happy New Year, everyone! I hope the last days of 2022 provided you with rest, reflection, something delicious to drink and/or eat, a nice pillow on which to sleep.
I, for one, haven’t been able to get the Eight of Wands and Ace of Pentacles out of my head. I can’t seem to square the fast delivery of news, the chance at … new chances with the lethargy of the end of 2022. And yet when I brush up on the cards from my favorite readers, the overarching message of both of them is one of potential, one of change, one excitement and, yes, hope, however tentative.
Part of the promise of the cards—and one of the reasons I love the dialectic of two-card draws more than any other spread—is the way the Eight of Wands launches into the open hand, grasping the Ace. There’s an ease of movement here in the images of Pamela Colman Smith’s renditions, a natural progression: Here is the energy set forth by the Magician and the Temperance, the Major Arcana associated with the Eight of Wands and the gods, respectively, of communication and movement. Here is that energy participating in the creation of something that wasn’t there before: the Ace of the material world. A new project. A new relationship. A new journey. A new home. A new orientation to self-healing that might fucking work out this time.
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 Eight of Wands and the Ace of Pentacles show up in our lives in 2023, and what is there to do about it?
Because the Eight of Wands corresponds with the first decan of Sagittarius, we’ll take a look at where this decan shows up in your birth chart, and what this card might mean for you there specifically. Aces are bit trickier—they rule quadrants of space rather than swaths of time—so for the Ace of Pentacles, we’ll take a wider view of the Aries-Taurus-Gemini section of your chart, with a more intense focus on the Taurus house, where most of the power of the Ace of Pentacles is said to reside. This latter makes a lot of sense to me, though, given all of the action that Taurus has seen in 2022 and will continue to see in 2023, as it hosts the North Node of the Moon, Uranus, and, beginning in May, Jupiter’s lengthy transit through the sign.
Read for your rising, if you can, though you may find useful scraps in the write-ups for your Moon and Sun signs, too.
Finally, if you’re looking for more straightforwardly astrological readings on 2023 more generally, I’d suggest Nina Gryphon’s practical look at the year ahead or the inimitable Astrology Podcast forecast for 2023. This time Chris Brennan and my teacher Austin Coppock are joined by Leisa Schaim and Diana Rose Harper, whose recent plug of my work has brought new faces to the interruptions instagram account and is greatly appreciated!
Capricorn Rising: It can be hard for you to trust the messages that arrive in the form of the non-material—from dreams, from silent musings, from the moments you spend in retreat from the world. And yet the opportunities you have to revitalize health, work, and daily routines come from these spaces in 2023. It’s time to listen to the news that comes through the liminal moments of your life; if this proves to be too hard, you can always study or fixate on the paths of your neer-do-wells, frenemies, or nemeses, learning from and superceding their mistakes as you climb your way into better work-life-health practices. Regardless, the New Year offers you a tangible gift with getting wiser at work, stronger in body, and right in relationship with collaborators and coworkers. Read Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 by Peter Schjeldahl and pre-order Alicia Kennedy’s No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating.