I don’t know about other tarot readers, but I can never get secret wishes out of my head while I’m shuffling the cards. No matter what I tell myself about emptying out my brain, curtailing my desires, I’m always quietly hoping I will pull Minor Arcana cards that feel familiar, exercises in choice and will. Scenes that I can grasp, move through, even, to some extent, change.
Give me the workable worry of the Five of Pentacles or the navigable delusions of the Seven of Cups any day over the sense of blessing come from nowhere that can accompany the Wheel of Fortune, Temperance, The Lovers, just to name a few of the all-around “favorite” Major Arcana cards.
I like the wiggle room of the minors, I like agentic smallness, problems that can be solved with wit, dark humor, homemade cleaning supplies trussed up with frankincense and mugwort and billed as routine magic. I like meeting inconvenience with walks in the woods to sort out the problems of being a body that relies on other bodies—those that love me, those that merely tolerate me, those that can’t stand my presence but cope with it anyways. You draw the Five of Pentacles and you know you’ve got friends to call even when institutional support is shut down, cut off. You draw the Seven of Cups and you know you’ve at least got a good story to sublimate into art, however much the hangover hurts.
You draw the Wheel and there’s not much else to do except to hang on, bow, chant the Hygromantia prayer to Jupiter and cross your fingers that the luck of the spin is the winning kind. You draw Temperance and you’ve got to trust that the Sagittarian part of your horoscope can stand its tests of extremities; you know you’re in for a process of creating, of living, that has little to do with how culture or society tells you it’s best to create, or to live.
You draw The Lovers and you wander around, struck by every heron that flashes blue against the fall leaves of your Blue-Ridge backwoods path, how all the goldenrod stalks have folded down into a tarry ash; you get stuck here in the visions. It’s not just nature you’re observing anymore, but desire shaking back and forth from abstraction into material with the late October wind. It’s Eros come to you and your bald head and your bad mood and your shadowy suspicions about what exactly has come home to roost, and yet you’re forced to fall in love with it, come home to write about it, sit at your desk and fret over the way your body wants, and wants, and wants, even in its sickness. Especially in its sickness, especially in what Lauren Berlant calls “the familiar friction of being in relation” at once, intensely, all the time.
You draw the Moon for that friction, the World as an imperative: You don’t get wiggle room in November, you get messages. You get inconvenience as Berlant describes it:
“At whatever scale and duration, “inconvenience” describes a feeling state that registers one’s implication in the pressures of coexistence. In that state the body is paying attention, affirming that what’s in front of you is not all that’s acting on you.
Whatever tone it takes, whatever magnetic field it generates, this latter kind of contact with inconvenience disturbs the vision of yourself you carry around that supports your sovereign fantasy, your fantasy of being in control.”
The minors sometimes, I confess, support such a fantasy. The majors, for me, at least, decimate it, reminding me of how good luck “out of nowhere” and unearned blessing can destroy old or taken-for-granted structures of self, other, and world just as much as sudden tragedy or difficulty do.
So, for November: how do The Moon and The World reveal the fantasies of being in control, and what might we do instead of bemoaning the revelation? How can we approach the divinity in the shuffle without a ready-made barter in our teeth? I’ve used the phrase “bow before” as the action required by the cards of the Major Arcana, but what does that actually mean in daily life, especially if we’re not really the praying type?
In the esoteric correspondence system set up by the Golden Dawn at the turn of the 20th century, The Moon card became associated with Pisces, the sign of sleep, death, the imaginal, the womb from which we come and return. All water and absorption, it shares little with The World, except for a sense of ending, completion. But The Moon offers up ending by way of subsuming, of re-immersion back into—reintegration with—the shadow sides of our lives we’d rather pretend weren’t there. The World offers closure through outward recognition—a boundaried success that arrives with the sound of our names on the tips of others’ tongues.
Ruled by Jupiter, the Moon expands—experience, consciousness, delusions reaching new heights—while The World, associated with Saturn and Earth, concretizes, partitions off, calls into question the nature of the boundary—are you being penned in or protected? Cut off or uplifted? What is ending for you this month, both cards ask, and how do you navigate the feelings of completion and starting anew that follow each seemingly final moment?
There’s also a sense of continuity incorporated into November through these Major Arcana Cards: They hearken back to projects, decisions, and issues that began for you in December 2020, when Jupiter and Saturn conjoined at zero degrees Aquarius. Linking November to that pandemic winter two years ago, The Moon and The World ask you to connect some past plot with present desire. What does it mean to move forward in light of how far you’ve come (or in light of how little has actually changed) since a global healthcare crisis changed the world?
“Social theory tends to melodramatize and draw its energy from pervasive social antagonism,” Berlant writes. They continue: “But social theory also needs to attend to the difficulty of being with the ordinary not just as a microecology of disaster but a scene of ongoingness that includes catastrophe, comedy, awkwardness, intimacy, work, care work, noticing, dissociating, demanding, shrugging, and working it out in real 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 Moon and The World show up in our lives in November, and what is there to do about it?