Seeing with the secret eye
A Queen of Disks story
The Horned One stood in the woods beside a wrought iron gate, behind which old graves crumbled and forgot themselves, grew into the trees, became moss and lichen. My husband and son had stumbled onto the graves on New Year’s Eve in 2024. Until then, no one had visited them for centuries it seemed, no one had been back into those trees, where anything clear had long since fled or been overtaken with trees of heaven and rosehips, all those sweet names we have for what’s invasive, twisted, forgotten its place. They left the graves where they were, after a quick prayer and a hurried story to me later. I never went back there. I couldn’t say I forgot about them, how could I? They were in the heaviness of the woods behind the garden, they were the heaviness itself, the dividing line between our property and Lonesome Pine, our house and most every neighbor. They governed the woods, although one neighbor, with his construction projects, with his desire to sublimate the angst of stillness, retirement, satiety, having gotten what he thought he wanted from life, thought he owned that place. For a while, his machines roared and the trees began to come down, invasive, native, anything in between. But on a Full Moon in winter, the engines stopped. The machines broke. Nothing moved back there. The woods belonged, ultimately, to the graves. I think was I content to leave it that way.
But one morning last week, I woke up early to do the coffee and the breakfast and the kids, as I do often by myself now that Kiernan’s sick and in the full swing of chemo. Instead of getting up and going, I felt that pull into the other world, and, curious, I said yes to it. I let the morning duties fall away as Kiernan and the kids slept, and then my body and the bed were lost to me, too, not completely, but just enough to gain entry into the underworld. I was in the back woods, by the graves. I felt what they were, the trapped dead, not dead enough, needing release. What is it that I can describe to you that I did? Some traditions call it “metta” or a practice of compassion and loving-kindness. Others call it praying for the damned. It wasn’t chöd, the Tibetan practice of allowing demons to feed on you so they—and you—might be transformed. But it was something close to this last, if we can say that any kind of intimate attention is a kind of nourishment, an offering of. The souls had not died properly, and, with my prayer and attention, they could move on. In the vision, you could see the earth shift, the leaves of every tree become more green. Light found its way into places it hadn’t been before. The souls left off in the direction of the East, to be reborn again. West is where they head for immortality, but that’s not something I can offer them by myself. I felt happy. Wrong word: I felt overjoyed, thinking it was time to go, thinking my work was done. I could already feel my fingers in my bed making their premonitory flicks of the coffee machine button, folding the coned paper liner of the filter. But the depth of the woods closed around me, more insistent, and I knew if I turned around I would see something that I have tried to avoid seeing my whole life.
What is spiritual practice if not seeing? What have all these long years of cancer—my own, my husband’s—been for, if not turning around to face the rot inside of myself? So I looked and there he was. Monstrous, horned, slick. Big teeth. It sounds silly, to describe him, in words that will bring to your mind the cartoon Beast from Beauty and the Beast or melodramatic renderings of Pan from any pulpy occult paperback. What could I say to convey how he terrified me? He was the embodiment of the Will to Power. He was my secret will to power, and yours, and all of ours. He had been called to the land by the unfinished dead. He has lived in me for years by my refusal to see him, by my denial of his presence. What could I do? What could I offer? All I felt able to say was: “I see you.” I felt how much control he wanted, how he could twist every desire I’ve ever had in his fist and squeeze it for all its worth. Squeeze me into this warped thing, this secretly vicious person who attracts other secretly vicious people and situations to her like flies to flypaper, trees of heaven to old graves. All of these bitter yearnings for more, to be on top, for money, for hatred and irony and that strange devil-may-care impulse I sense in myself at my worst and secret times to be the way of making it in this world. Nihilism in the place of joy. I could see how I stoked him by pretending he wasn’t there. I could see how I magnetized others with him in their secret hearts, the very same others who would mobilize him in the name of goodness, truth, justice, beauty, “good times,” fun. “I see you,” I said. And then I opened my eyes and fled into rountine.
He’s been showing up with some frequency since then. In one vision, he stood, in streams of sunlight, on Lonesome Pine Road. In another, he had turned West, toward the deepest river in the faraway mountains. I know he is seeking a source, the way I seek that source. Will we transform each other through consciousness, attention, recognition? I tell my tarot students that the Emperor becomes the Good Emperor by touching the dark, by uniting with the lowest not through excusing evil by instead by understanding it and holding it lightly. The Emperor acknowledges the shadows, names them, but turns her face toward the light. But even this move can be co-opted by the Great Deceiver. I feel it in myself when my heart hardens against itself, in moments when the only move is softness, humility, the secret eye open, silent, seeing.
Guess who else has the ability to see with the secret eye? The Horned One, that devil in my soul. In yours, too. How it sees, and what, and which moves it makes, and whether it will be transformed by love into Beauty, that’s something that is not entirely up to us, and yet is, at once, somehow, entirely up to us. The morning after my Horned One stepped into the light, I turned over a tarot card, after praying to the highest for love, for wisdom, to aid. The Queen of Disks, horned and regal, soft and fixed in her gaze, Understanding in Action herself, appeared. She’s motivated by a secret sense of oppression to change her own heart, the land, the heart and landscapes of others around her. In the end, she helps to make an altar of this world, the Shekinah of the Kabbalah, the Godhead revealed in healed Nature, and many other joys beside.
If you want to learn how to read the cards to support your visionary, spiritual, and creative practices, please join me and an intimate and lovely group of friends for a six-week journey into the esoteric, kabbalistic, and astrological correspondences of the minor arcana.
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 book Interruption: Divinatory Essays on Illness and Narrative is available for preorder from Sul Books. They’re having a summer sale; you can get 25 percent off with the code SUMMER25 and my eternal gratitude for preordering now! Here’s more information about the book:
What does it mean to truly live with the awareness of death?
Interruption is a beautiful, unflinching, and relentlessly hopeful collection of linked essays from Cameron Steele, a writer who survived three breast cancer diagnoses in three years as a new mother, a scholar of illness narratives, and a working astrologer and tarot reader.
Drawing on ancient and modern occult texts, psychoanalysis, contemporary memoirs and literature, and her own client sessions, Interruption explores motherhood, illness, love, spirituality, and capitalism, without ever settling for the too-easy answer of despair. More than a cancer memoir, it’s an illuminating and life-affirming love song to family, nature, the self, and the world we share together.
Written by a prize-winning poet, essayist, and former investigative journalist, and born from her Substack newsletter “Interruptions” (a current bestseller, ranked among the platform’s top 100 literature newsletters), Interruption: Divinatory Essays on Illness and Narrative expands Cameron Steele’s original dispatches into a compelling meditation on what it means not just to survive, but also to truly live.
It is such an honor to read your words today. Yesterday my sweet baby chaos muppet of a dog was struck and killed by a car, through no negligence of a friend who was watching her, and I am in the depths of grief. It’s raw and twisting, and your post is the reminder I needed to witness that rawness and distortion without feeling the need to roll in them. I’m in such pain and surrounded by such love.
Woah! And....'She’s motivated by a secret sense of oppression to change her own heart, the land, the heart and landscapes of others around her. In the end, she helps to make an altar of this world'.....yes!