I am writing to you with a new face, by virtue of shaving my head last week in preparation for my upcoming chemo regimen. I have always been fascinated by the way mundane life can trap kairos—a kind of rough timelessness, or according to astrologer Andrew B. Watt, “the right time” guided by neither clock nor calendar—in the ordinary. Online, we seem to struggle a lot over the gap between ideas and actions, the way it requires a breaking through. In real life, we bridge that gap every day, whether we notice it or not: We shift from thought to movement when we slice a tomato for a breakfast sandwich, and so a whole fruit becomes the past while the tomato parts—sticky juice, leeching seeds, the scramble to sop up the plate with the bread—becomes the now.
As an adult whose recovery from an eating disorder still feels tenuous, no matter how many years separate me from the bulimia that ruled my twenties, I am endlessly fascinated by how the thought of nourishment, of time to eat, I’m hungry, shifts material states as mental energy impinges on the “real world.” Not just my body, but the body of what will be food, even the moment of preparation has a physical existence: Here’s my hand with the knife. Here’s the tin plate I like to use, ready on the cutting board, here’s the tomato, goopy, one of the last of the season. Here’s the scene, seconds later, changed, all of it.
If I’m not careful, I tend to fixate on the transition from one state to the next, how even the smallest of my actions to take care of myself seems to require a bit of violence. Bleed the tomato for breakfast. Rough up the gums to brush my teeth. Fill the car with gas, though I try to walk as much as I can. Adjust my stride to lessen the painful click in my hip. Squint as Carolina shears away the braid I’ve come to see as a symbol of health.
My hair fell out when I was a drunk; I’d pick it out when I was bulimic. I grew it nearly to my hips when I came out the other side of those experiences. Part curtain, part siren, it was also a statement on my ambivalence about motherhood: I love this child, but he does not complete my circuits of desire. I kept the hair long, in spite of a baby who pulled at it, a toddler who yanked it hard.
I chose to shave it all at once instead of cut it in stages or wait for it to fall out, because I’m trying to believe strongly in rising to meet an occasion of struggle. And also because I’m sick of feeling wounded at the hands of bad luck, a capitalist-carcinogenic lifestyle, doctors, health insurance claims adjusters. If my appearance has to change, I’d rather begin the violence myself. As the poet Bob Flanagan writes at the end of his 1985 poetic meditation on self-injury “Why:” “Because you always hurt the one you love.”
Philippa Snow ends her new essay collection Which As You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment with commentary on Flanagan’s poem, on his last line in particular, which Snow remarks, “hints at a radical form of self-acceptance on the part of its creator, a once-and-for-all verification of the way that he maintained a relationship with his body that was not straightforwardly combative, but more often earnestly appreciative.”
Kairos, the right time— “the god of opportunity, of the fleeting moment, the incredible possibility that opens up just for a moment and that must be seized without hesitation (by the bangs!), so that it doesn’t pass you by,” as Olga Tokarczuk writes here—includes the willingness to seize upon the radical self-acceptance that Snow and Flanagan write about. It’s a willingness that requires a firm grip, an ability to cut, an understanding that desired change means releasing nostalgia. Judgment and the Six of Cups, our cards for October, speak also to this opportunity for transformation that occurs by refusing to shy away from the edgy, “decisive moment that changes everything.”
In esoteric tarot, the Judgment card corresponds to elemental fire rather than linking up to a particular zodiacal sign or planet. I’ve written about this card before as one that requires us to “act … guided by and from a place of heated depth that often has little to do with what [we] want to be doing in a given moment. It’s a card that announces that I’ll be making decisions based on inflamed passions and ‘truer’ desires that often seem to have little to do with either intellectual logic or basic needs.” Meanwhile, the Six of Cups corresponds to the second decan of Scorpio. Ruled by the Sun in the martial sign of intensity and depth, the Six of Cups contains the paradox of joyful sorrow or exuberant longing. It’s a complex card about simple pleasures and the dangers of nostalgia—how these things both sustain and hinder us in times of difficulty and change.
Taken together, Judgment and the Six of Cups suggest an October that offers kairotic moments—new beginnings if you can manage to sever ties with nostalgia, one kind of desire, in exchange for hopeful visions, another, less inert kind. You likely do this in a thousand small ways, just as I do, every day. Here’s to a month of scaling that up a bit.
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 Judgment and the Six of Cups show up in our lives in October, and what is there to do about it?
As a quick aside: Judgment is an interesting Major Arcana card to attempt the tarotscope exercise with. Because it corresponds to an element instead of a specific sign, decan, or planet, Judgment shows up as the trine between the three fire houses in a chart. As a Sagittarius rising, for example, I have fire signs in the first, fifth, and ninth houses, meaning that when I pull the Judgment card, esoterically it speaks to all three of these places in a chart. I’ll be mentioning this trine, and where it shows up, for each sign below!
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 October or the autumn and winter months more generally, I’d suggest Dr. Ali A. Olomi’s look-ahead at the end of 2022, which provides an excellent synthesis of astrological, historical, and social justice approaches to the end of year. Or, of course, the Astrology Podcast forecast, this month with Chris Brennan, Austin Coppock, and Diana Rose Harper.
Libra Rising: With Judgment activating your Third, Seventh, and Eleventh houses this month, don’t be surprised if you find yourself energized to change something about the way you communicate with siblings, partners, and any groups/institutions you’re a part of—or audiences you’re responsible to. At the same time, the Six of Cups emphasizes that sinkhole feeling in the middle of your bank account, the resources and possessions you consider hard-won or rightfully yours. It’s easy to separate out a chart and say “this is mine,” “that is theirs,” but in real life, balance is a bit more blurry. This month, the opportunity for the “right time” comes to you through a willingness to see the fault in adhering to diplomatic logic all of the time as well as a willingness to embrace bold statements. Sometimes fighting for liberation from within the toxic system or relationship is just an excuse to cling to a golden version of reality that doesn’t really exist. Read R.F. Kuang’s Babel: An Arcane History.