I feel like some of you are going to roll your eyes when I tell you the first card I drew for the September tarot reading is Death. I swear to god I shuffled so well.
I would roll my eyes at me too—it’s actually one of my favorite pastimes—but anyways, here we are, cancer girl and her eternal readings of death and despair!
Truly, though, I don’t have too many gloomy messages for any of the signs this month as I try my hand at another batch of taroscopes for each zodiacal rising. This is partly because the second card for the month of September turned out to be the Ace of Cups and partly because Death, in spite of the grayscale depiction in my Shakespeare Tarot deck, has always seemed to me one of the more colorful draws of the Major Arcana. In the Golden Dawn system of associations, the Death card corresponds to Scorpio, after all, and Scorpio is ruled by Mars—a planetary force accused of many things, lack of color or viv not being one of them!
It’s almost a right of passage for tarot readers to spend time waxing philosophical about when Death means death and when Death simply means change. Transition, and its attendant gasps of conflicting emotions. (Here’s one of my favorite of such considerations from T. Susan Chang). As you can guess, when this card appears—depicted over and over throughout various decks as a skeleton ruler come for its due—it usually means the latter.
A recent client of mine drew Death in answer to a question about their new job, for example. Kiernan, my husband, drew it in a reading (with Chang herself) about whether we should uproot our family, take on more debt, and move back to the state where we both grew up. I drew it before I gave birth to Theo and many, many times in the weeks after. On the Discord server I host for our collaborative decan walk, Death is tied with Judgment for the most drawn Major Arcana card. No one is dying in any of these instances, and yet, of course, in little ways that feel too obvious to remark upon, everyone is.
A new job means a shift in the meaning you make of yourself at work; the tarot understands the hollow bottom of only ever being suspicious about work as a vocation even if our society doesn’t. A cross-country move with a sick partner and a wild kid means a shift in the meaning you make of family as well as home. A new baby means a shift in the meaning you make of yourself as mother, as body, as me.
Why do all narratives of motherhood start with the message of self-sacrifice, a well-meaning Instagram mom complained in her stories the other day. Because all change requires sacrifice, the Death card answers, the exposed bones of what it suggests about the nature of life something that we miss all the time, that we can’t gaze too directly at, for fear of what it might inspire us to do, or say, or think, about our lives and how we’re living them. “What goes too long unchanged destroys itself,” Ursula K. Le Guin writes in Tales from Earthsea. “The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.”
Death carries with it, then, a kind of resplendent message—the Ace of Cups renewal that is all colors, all at once, the chance for something new before your options get closed down again, either by choice or circumstance. The open cupboard of this Shakespeare Tarot Deck ace, filled with a choose-your-own-adventure assortment of knick-knacks and oddities, hints at that moment of yes, I could… before the “yes” becomes too real, too fixed.
In the tarot, Aces aren’t like the other Minor Arcana cards; they don’t correspond to sections of time the way each of the two-through-10 cards link up to a specific 10-day periods, the length of one astrological decan. Instead, the Aces rule quadrants of zodiacal space, with an emphasis on a particular zodiacal sign as part of that signification. In this system, the Ace of Cups rules the Libra-Scorpio-Sagittarius quadrant. Because it is the seed of the water suit—the initiating drop of water that contains the beginning, middle and end of the story of elemental water, its intuitions and dreams, its changeful nature and emotive desires—the Ace of Cups focuses its message on the sign of Scorpio.