Really fascinating to read about Death, these questions about what remains when existence ceases always leave me spinning as so much that exists in our universe is technically dead yet we still talk about inanimate objects like stars "dying." Of course, when they die, they still always become something else, something that you can again call dead and dying at once...
I am a Libra rising, yet again really questioning whether what I do for a living is really in alignment with my values. I wonder how I can find more calm when faced with realities of paying rent vs. making art?
Apologies for the delay! Thanks for these thoughts on Death, your remarks make me think of the anthroposophical principle that when we pull something into form out of the spirit world—when we or natural processes coagulate or crystallize something into material form—we, in a sense, kill it because we are limiting its potentialities by bringing it into form. So then the spiritual principle becomes a moral one—what is our moral obligation to the thing we’ve rendered into form, and how do we bring it back to life again by helping it find contact with the right observation, audience, adulation, etc.
These are great questions for your tarot guide for the next while! I drew the Thoth Ace of Swords in answer to your question. Lady Frieda Harris depicts the Root Powers of Air as a green blade surrounded by triumphant golden light, shining into the cosmos and even illuminating the dark power of the clouds below.
The Aces are gifts from the spirit world and this one in particular is the Gift of the Word, your own special, magical relationship to language, writing, the Logos. This is Crown in Formation, and it offers you the power to translate abstract ideas and ideals, like “values” and “alignment” into form, into something other people can come into contact with. This Ace pulls focus on the air triad in your natal chart—your Libra First House of Self, your Aquarius Fifth House of Creativity (where Venus rejoices), and your Gemini Ninth House of Spirituality (or whatever you consider to be a spiritual authority in your life. Lots of astrologers will talk about publishing, academia, or “how to map-make the patterns of the cosmos” here, also foreign travel and language). Your work is in alignment when you are writing with the “Root Power of Air” from these areas of life, when you are combining personal, creative (even romantic), and authoritative insight in a clear, beautiful, and true way that enables your audience to have contact with something Good in a dark age. What that looks like on the ground, day-to-day, money or materials management style, matters less with the Ace of Swords than does the fact that you’re doing it—you’re accepting this gift of freely circulating Air, the power of the Word, and you’re offering it to others so that their minds and hearts may be unburdened, enlightened, and brightened, even amidst trouble and turmoil. Sending love!
Thank you so much Cameron, for the insight, and for the reading, it came to me at just the right time. (In some sense, putting words on the page is also a matter of giving form to something formless, the two messages feel in concert somehow)
Scorpio rising 🖤 I am preparing to leave for another year plus trip traveling on the sea. There is much work to be done and many fears and anxieties swirling through my mind and body. I am curious who or what could be a guide for me during this coming moment of change.
Hi Courtney, good luck as your look to your travels ahead!
I love the card I drew for you! The Ace of Disks is Root Power of Earth and it offers you grounding—a gift of elemental earth that you can take with you on the sea, on your trips, and yet not so heavy as to be weighed down by.
Lady Frieda Harris depicts the Ace of Disks as brown and golden whirling circle that could be a spinning gold coin or a magnolia flower unfurling or a scarab or a bug in the process of transformation into some winged creature. This is Crown in Action, and it offers you the divine gift of material support in the earth houses of your chart, so the Third House of intimate friends, siblings, and communication, the Seventh House of one-on-one partnerships, and the Eleventh House of professional networks and audience/larger groups of friends. Esoterically, these are the Houses of the Goddess, the Embodied Other, and The Agathosdaimon/Good Spirit. The Ace of Disks offer guides in these areas of your life—turning towards communication between intimate others, your romantic partner, and your sense of your own hopes and dreams as what offers you stability, reflection, and connection to the divine/a sense of creativity and joy throughout this period.
The Ace of Disks also has that special sense of being able to connect with your own sense of what the tarot means, so if you have your own tarot practice, or have been wanting to start one, this card is a lovely invitation to wrap yourself up in it! Sending love!
Thank you so much. What a beautiful reading. I can feel centered and so much potent earth energy swirling through me thinking about it. I have a set of cards on the boat that I have been dreaming of becoming seriously involved with. Ha. It’s even harder to ignore now. Thank you ✨
Hi Lesley! Good luck with the novel! I, for one, cannot wait to read it!
As your guide throughout this process, I drew the Ten of Cups. Lady Frieda Harris has depicted this as ten golden cups arranged in the formation of the kabbalistic tree of life atop a red and orange background. Rayed white light spills from the top cup and touches all the others. This is the Lord of Satiety and it offers the realization of the fullness of your dreams, precisely because you’ve already put in all the work to make them come true. This is Kingdom in Creation, and, as with all the cups cards, part of the success of “creation” is the ability to see this realm as the power of the artist to say yes to something in the archetypal world, and, with the blessing of the imagination, to make it real in a way other people can see too. In your Eighth House of “other people’s stuff,” then, this card speaks to the ability to access the audience you need—the audience you want—to participate in the kingdom you have created with your novel. As Mars in decanic dignity in the last ten degrees of Pisces (the last sign of the zodiac), there is something here about not holding back on the last leg of the journey. Go big as you chase your end of the rainbow! Don’t hold back on your appetite; take time to consider the fears or anxieties you have about this process and use those fears and anxieties as gifts of strategy—they point you to where you think the problems lie, they point to what needs to be tackled first.
There’s something here, too, about tending to the story or the myth of the “wounded healer.” What have you learned about this story and how might this guide the submission, marketing, and publication process? How does this story relate to your understanding of death, inheritance, and contracts? How does this story relate to your own understanding of your own hunger, desire, and satiety?
In general, though, this is a nice card of realized and realizing your dreams! Satiety as confirmation of success and those golden cups certainly look rewarding! Sending love!
That seems like a GREAT card here, thank you! And very apt. One of the main characters is very much a wounded healer, and many of the characters revealed hidden aspects of myself to me as I wrote (the first draft even predicted, in an uncanny way, how my mother would die a few months later). It's a literary portal fantasy called Grievous, named after a mushroom-derived drug that's supposed to heal grief. So your comments reveal aspects of the ms as well as the process of getting it to the world. I found your reading last week helpful in being with my kids, btw--remembering to communicate my delight in them although I can't fix their difficulties.
i'm doing this for myself, the small variations in turning tarot every day and your newsletter has evoked such good faith in this, and in me. thanks always for your words! if it;s not too much can i ask for a general eclipse + retro card pull for a sag rising who is wondering when the pisces action will end (jk! but tired). sending love!
Thank you! I drew the Thoth Sun as your guide. Lady Frieda Harris’ image shows two delighted, winged, naked children dancing together on a mountaintop meadow. They are protected from other intruders by a gate and they bask in the warmth of the dazzling, 12-rayed sun. This is the card of certainty after a period of confusion and doubt. It offers guidance in the house and sign whereever your natal Sun appears. This is where you should focus, this card says. This is where you carry the spark of the divine forward with love, playfulness, certainty and joy. For those of us interested in ways of being that break with standard logic and a hard-won focus on cause and effect, one of the dangers is going around and around in the same associative loops or interpretative circles. We can get bogged down on interpretations of zodiacal transits, or how the political intersects with the spiritual, or how to jerry-rig just the right kind of interpretation so that scary or exhausting pattern or synchronicity doesn’t seem so scary or exhausting. The Sun is the card that ends the repetitive, occult looping, forcing you out of a focus on the inane and instead on what it is that you are actually here to do. You can read any planet in the natal chart for your fate (karma, suffering, amor fati) or for your destiny (what your divine inheritance is, what you are here for, the power of the divine that stands behind you). The sun can point you to ego questions as fate or to you being a particular vessel for your particular spark of the divine. Throughout eclipse and mercury retrograde season, then, your task is to get intimate with the sun, with the solar principle in your life, with your shard of the light that you know how to carry. You know how to carry it! You can delight in this as you do so! Sending love.
Really fascinating to read about Death, these questions about what remains when existence ceases always leave me spinning as so much that exists in our universe is technically dead yet we still talk about inanimate objects like stars "dying." Of course, when they die, they still always become something else, something that you can again call dead and dying at once...
I am a Libra rising, yet again really questioning whether what I do for a living is really in alignment with my values. I wonder how I can find more calm when faced with realities of paying rent vs. making art?
Hi Karmela,
Apologies for the delay! Thanks for these thoughts on Death, your remarks make me think of the anthroposophical principle that when we pull something into form out of the spirit world—when we or natural processes coagulate or crystallize something into material form—we, in a sense, kill it because we are limiting its potentialities by bringing it into form. So then the spiritual principle becomes a moral one—what is our moral obligation to the thing we’ve rendered into form, and how do we bring it back to life again by helping it find contact with the right observation, audience, adulation, etc.
These are great questions for your tarot guide for the next while! I drew the Thoth Ace of Swords in answer to your question. Lady Frieda Harris depicts the Root Powers of Air as a green blade surrounded by triumphant golden light, shining into the cosmos and even illuminating the dark power of the clouds below.
The Aces are gifts from the spirit world and this one in particular is the Gift of the Word, your own special, magical relationship to language, writing, the Logos. This is Crown in Formation, and it offers you the power to translate abstract ideas and ideals, like “values” and “alignment” into form, into something other people can come into contact with. This Ace pulls focus on the air triad in your natal chart—your Libra First House of Self, your Aquarius Fifth House of Creativity (where Venus rejoices), and your Gemini Ninth House of Spirituality (or whatever you consider to be a spiritual authority in your life. Lots of astrologers will talk about publishing, academia, or “how to map-make the patterns of the cosmos” here, also foreign travel and language). Your work is in alignment when you are writing with the “Root Power of Air” from these areas of life, when you are combining personal, creative (even romantic), and authoritative insight in a clear, beautiful, and true way that enables your audience to have contact with something Good in a dark age. What that looks like on the ground, day-to-day, money or materials management style, matters less with the Ace of Swords than does the fact that you’re doing it—you’re accepting this gift of freely circulating Air, the power of the Word, and you’re offering it to others so that their minds and hearts may be unburdened, enlightened, and brightened, even amidst trouble and turmoil. Sending love!
Thank you so much Cameron, for the insight, and for the reading, it came to me at just the right time. (In some sense, putting words on the page is also a matter of giving form to something formless, the two messages feel in concert somehow)
Thank you, Karmela! I’ll be back with more reflections on this generous comment and your reading in the morning!
Scorpio rising 🖤 I am preparing to leave for another year plus trip traveling on the sea. There is much work to be done and many fears and anxieties swirling through my mind and body. I am curious who or what could be a guide for me during this coming moment of change.
Thank you so much.
Hi Courtney, good luck as your look to your travels ahead!
I love the card I drew for you! The Ace of Disks is Root Power of Earth and it offers you grounding—a gift of elemental earth that you can take with you on the sea, on your trips, and yet not so heavy as to be weighed down by.
Lady Frieda Harris depicts the Ace of Disks as brown and golden whirling circle that could be a spinning gold coin or a magnolia flower unfurling or a scarab or a bug in the process of transformation into some winged creature. This is Crown in Action, and it offers you the divine gift of material support in the earth houses of your chart, so the Third House of intimate friends, siblings, and communication, the Seventh House of one-on-one partnerships, and the Eleventh House of professional networks and audience/larger groups of friends. Esoterically, these are the Houses of the Goddess, the Embodied Other, and The Agathosdaimon/Good Spirit. The Ace of Disks offer guides in these areas of your life—turning towards communication between intimate others, your romantic partner, and your sense of your own hopes and dreams as what offers you stability, reflection, and connection to the divine/a sense of creativity and joy throughout this period.
The Ace of Disks also has that special sense of being able to connect with your own sense of what the tarot means, so if you have your own tarot practice, or have been wanting to start one, this card is a lovely invitation to wrap yourself up in it! Sending love!
Thank you so much. What a beautiful reading. I can feel centered and so much potent earth energy swirling through me thinking about it. I have a set of cards on the boat that I have been dreaming of becoming seriously involved with. Ha. It’s even harder to ignore now. Thank you ✨
Leo rising with a novel about to go under submission to publishers via an agent. How is this process going to go, and what can I do to help it along?
Hi Lesley! Good luck with the novel! I, for one, cannot wait to read it!
As your guide throughout this process, I drew the Ten of Cups. Lady Frieda Harris has depicted this as ten golden cups arranged in the formation of the kabbalistic tree of life atop a red and orange background. Rayed white light spills from the top cup and touches all the others. This is the Lord of Satiety and it offers the realization of the fullness of your dreams, precisely because you’ve already put in all the work to make them come true. This is Kingdom in Creation, and, as with all the cups cards, part of the success of “creation” is the ability to see this realm as the power of the artist to say yes to something in the archetypal world, and, with the blessing of the imagination, to make it real in a way other people can see too. In your Eighth House of “other people’s stuff,” then, this card speaks to the ability to access the audience you need—the audience you want—to participate in the kingdom you have created with your novel. As Mars in decanic dignity in the last ten degrees of Pisces (the last sign of the zodiac), there is something here about not holding back on the last leg of the journey. Go big as you chase your end of the rainbow! Don’t hold back on your appetite; take time to consider the fears or anxieties you have about this process and use those fears and anxieties as gifts of strategy—they point you to where you think the problems lie, they point to what needs to be tackled first.
There’s something here, too, about tending to the story or the myth of the “wounded healer.” What have you learned about this story and how might this guide the submission, marketing, and publication process? How does this story relate to your understanding of death, inheritance, and contracts? How does this story relate to your own understanding of your own hunger, desire, and satiety?
In general, though, this is a nice card of realized and realizing your dreams! Satiety as confirmation of success and those golden cups certainly look rewarding! Sending love!
That seems like a GREAT card here, thank you! And very apt. One of the main characters is very much a wounded healer, and many of the characters revealed hidden aspects of myself to me as I wrote (the first draft even predicted, in an uncanny way, how my mother would die a few months later). It's a literary portal fantasy called Grievous, named after a mushroom-derived drug that's supposed to heal grief. So your comments reveal aspects of the ms as well as the process of getting it to the world. I found your reading last week helpful in being with my kids, btw--remembering to communicate my delight in them although I can't fix their difficulties.
i'm doing this for myself, the small variations in turning tarot every day and your newsletter has evoked such good faith in this, and in me. thanks always for your words! if it;s not too much can i ask for a general eclipse + retro card pull for a sag rising who is wondering when the pisces action will end (jk! but tired). sending love!
Hi Apoorva,
Thank you! I drew the Thoth Sun as your guide. Lady Frieda Harris’ image shows two delighted, winged, naked children dancing together on a mountaintop meadow. They are protected from other intruders by a gate and they bask in the warmth of the dazzling, 12-rayed sun. This is the card of certainty after a period of confusion and doubt. It offers guidance in the house and sign whereever your natal Sun appears. This is where you should focus, this card says. This is where you carry the spark of the divine forward with love, playfulness, certainty and joy. For those of us interested in ways of being that break with standard logic and a hard-won focus on cause and effect, one of the dangers is going around and around in the same associative loops or interpretative circles. We can get bogged down on interpretations of zodiacal transits, or how the political intersects with the spiritual, or how to jerry-rig just the right kind of interpretation so that scary or exhausting pattern or synchronicity doesn’t seem so scary or exhausting. The Sun is the card that ends the repetitive, occult looping, forcing you out of a focus on the inane and instead on what it is that you are actually here to do. You can read any planet in the natal chart for your fate (karma, suffering, amor fati) or for your destiny (what your divine inheritance is, what you are here for, the power of the divine that stands behind you). The sun can point you to ego questions as fate or to you being a particular vessel for your particular spark of the divine. Throughout eclipse and mercury retrograde season, then, your task is to get intimate with the sun, with the solar principle in your life, with your shard of the light that you know how to carry. You know how to carry it! You can delight in this as you do so! Sending love.