Such fruits await

more cards for the interruptions tarot book

Read about this project here! Today I’ve added the Two, Three, Seven, Eight, Nine and Ten of Wands (can you tell it’s been a fiery two weeks for me?) As well as the Two of Disks, and the Princess/Page of Disks for the courts. The Hierophant and The Lovers have turned up over and over again as the Major Arcana I’ve needed to attend to and so also grace these pages.

Hope you enjoy as Pluto stations direct today and brings you wealth and health in the underworld. Happy to pull a card for you for the upcoming New Moon in Libra, which happens this weekend/early next Monday morning, depending on your location. As ever, comment with your rising sign and your question <3.

Minor Arcana

Two of Wands

When the spiritual teacher and Russian intellectual Valentin Tomberg was young, his mother was worried about him as they fled the Bolshevik revolution. She went out into the night searching for him, only to be captured, tied to a tree, and shot dead by the Red Army. Tomberg was the one to find her.¹ He could have let this cruel and tragic experience harden or ruin him for life. Instead, it inspired a lifetime of intellectual feeling, warm love for all of humanity, and a deep commitment to understanding the beautiful, the good, and the true that lives inside, outside, and all around each one of us. For Tomberg, Sophia or wisdom, was the reason we are all here. Love of Sophia was what made life sweet—uniting us all, in spite of our differences, however small or horrible. The Two of Wands is Wisdom in Emanation, Sophia as the reason for keeping one’s heart open in the face of an initial shock. It’s Mars at home in Aries, courage rather than brashness, willpower rather than severity. Upright, the Lord of Dominion confers upon you the ability to participate in the unification of all beings. Reversed, you’re rightly smarting over a true loss. But what is the risk in letting wisdom and warmth guide you, rather than clinging to vengeance and fury?

Three of Wands

“The bridge from dogma to the inner experience of the individual has broken down,” CG Jung wrote, and the Three of Wands’ task is to repair the bridge between outer rules and inner experience, to restore the virtue of and faith in the ability of one’s inner knowledge to lead oneself and others along a good path. The Three of Wands is Understanding in Emanation, where the astrological Sun exalts in the cardinal fire sign of Aries. It’s a card that offers you the courage, silence, and inspiration to trust yourself to do the right thing, even if that “right thing” isn’t outwardly acknowledged or appreciated by others. Here’s the thing about love: when we cultivate it in ourselves, for others, even in the face of vitriol and hate, we create something that never dies, that never goes away, that always fortifies. Upright, our little Lord of Virtue understands the function of exoteric dogma and rule, but never misses the opportunity to turn inward for her real compass. Reversed, this card asks the question: what problem prevents you from trusting yourself? How might you handle such a problem so you can carry the light you were meant to carry?

Four of Wands

Sometimes the party can’t start until something else finishes. Sometimes completion can’t happen until forgiveness is sought and offered. The Four of Wands is the Lord of Completion and Mercy in Emanation: it shows you situations where true celebration begins with the courage to say “I’m sorry” and “I forgive you.” Down the ages, tarot readers have described the astrological decan associated with this card as a place of rest, recovery, good wine, and happy feasting. It’s the midpoint in a longer journey where people come together to honor each other in spite of the arguments they might have been embroiled in just a few moments before. Ruled by Venus in the sign of her detriment, the gifts of joy, togetherness, and a beautiful moment that lingers long into the sunset are bestowed by virtue of a hard-won focus on what’s good in life and good in other people, and orienting oneself to that instead of the darkness. Reversed, this card is the burnt husk of a rose, death and dissolution of relationship before apology or forgiveness was ever offered. It’s a warning against discounting the powerful magic of a heart full of mercy—a true way to be near enough to god.

Seven of Wands

A blue heron near my home likes to spend its mornings patiently standing over the steam rising off the toxic water of the local water treatment plant. This is the action of the Seven of Wands, the steadfastness of Victory in Emanation, the solid heart and unflinching eye of a heron who knows it can rule over even the stink and sludge of wastewater. This card turns up when you’re in a hurry but must cultivate calm, when your mind tells you “this is the last shot! This is the Hail Mary!” but your soul knows there’s always something else that comes after. You can warm yourself by shitty water. Also, you can fly away when the time has come to go elsewhere, as my stately mountain heron does each day. But when you choose to fly, you do so out of love for the situation as it is, out of recognition that your work here is done, not abandoned. Mars rules the last ten degrees of Leo associated with this card and offers the delicacy of choosing one’s battles carefully to the fixed fire sign’s unwavering obsession with strength. Reversed, it’s easy to use that “everything sucks and so do I, I’ve got to change all of this by myself right now!” energy against yourself and others. What’s another way to say or perform “Hail Mary?” with courage and grace?

Eight of Wands

Sometimes the best way to say the thing is to say the thing as soon as it occurs to you that there is something to say. Associated with the mercurial Hermes in the first ten degrees of the mutable fire sign of Sagittarius, the Eight of Wands is the Lord of Swiftness. It’s good for expediency, and it worries about editing, the perfect aesthetic, or the self-corrective impulse after the fact. This is Glory in Emanation; it’s the baby who has made up her mind to crawl in the moment before she does it, or the overcoming of the last wallop of fear before you seize the moment only on the faith that, whether or not you’ve read the signs correctly, it’s still time to act. This is the card of Hugh Paston, the protagonist of Dion Fortune’s The Goat-Foot God.² Mired in a fog of grief and incredulity after the death of his wife, on impulse he stops by an antique bookshop while meandering the streets of London. The book on magic he picks up in the two-penny bin changes his life, and the direction of his heart’s aim, for the better, forever. The book isn’t fancy, pretty, or well-written. But it conveys the magic of the Eight of Wands: the right message at the right time. Reversed, why are you so mired in doubt that you’re afraid to act at all? Are the stakes really that high?

Nine of Wands

This card shows up when you have had a direct encounter with your own power or ability but still harbor confusion about how to offer your talents to others for good. This is the Lord of Strength, and she’s obsessed with using her hard won strength to demolish what she sees as a blockage—a high wall—between herself and the people she loves. When she tries to tear down the wall and invite people in, they seem to not want to join her. When she offers little hints or gestures toward the path around the wall, they think she’s speaking nonsense. When she lays out clear directions for how to arrive at the open gate in the wall, they lash out at her, maybe even pointing to her clarity as proof that she’s right to be on one side of the wall, they on the other. So she’s a bit battered in the head, even if strong in body and the heart. How does she connect with people who want to enforce separation? Is that even possible? Ruled by the Moon in middle decan of Sagittarius, the Lord of Strength offers stability through a persistent ability to look and see. Your eyes are open. So is your heart. Don’t let your fear shut everything down all over again. You wont be alone forever. Perhaps the right strategy is no strategy at all—just patient, loving waiting, just a trust that the wall is not even something you have to concern yourself with. Reversed, you keep pointing to your bandaged head and your wounded attempts at connection as proof that you’re better than everybody else. That was never going to work! In the words of the poet Andrea Gibson, don’t weaponize your wounds!

Ten of Wands

You don’t actually have to walk up that mountain with all of those sticks on your back!³ You could just put the sticks down, or ask for help, or carry the sticks but over a longer, more leisurely journey. Nevertheless, this card does tend to show up when you’re trying to schlep all of the groceries into the house on one go, or when you’re in the last week of writing the dissertation you should have maybe paced yourself better on over the course of many years, or when you need to pick up the phone and ask a trusted friend for their actual help but for some reason can’t or won’t. This is Saturn in Sagittarius, the last dregs of fire before it gets reborn as earth, the heavy weight of earth before it becomes fire again. It’s Kingdom in Emanation; but the point isn’t to create strategies for fixing the kingdom all on your own—the point is to realize that with all of the purity of willpower you’ve built up over the course of the wands suit, you’re near enough to the finish line to stop with the silly belief that you have to do it all by yourself, in one go. The work gets done regardless, but when this card shows up it’s asking you whether you really want to “wallow in the shit” while you do it? There is always another way. Reversed, you think that last sentence is bullshit! So be it!

Ten of Cups

The Ten of Cups is an antidote to the experience of Job in the Old Testament. The rainbow is not sarcastic; desire is not ruinous. The family is not nor could it ever be the last bastion against capitalism, environmental collapse, or whatever other evil in the world. But a family filled with love is certainly the first wall of protection against these things. Upright, the Ten of Cups is Kingdom in Creation, the active will dispersed for the good of the group. In the mutable water sign of Pisces, Mars can’t sever anything. It can only help the light warm the water, shine through its depths. Who cares if the “rainbow doesn’t last?” In the truest sense, the rainbow is always lasting. This is a card of participating in divine creation through loving connection with those closest to you. It’s emptiness expressed as fullness—there is room for everything here precisely because death, sickness, the breakdown of the material world is met with love for that world anyway. Ah! There’s the illusion of all evil: it doesn’t last when your heart is feasting on something else. Reversed: love persists even when you’ve said yes to the wrong thing. It’s in the background, waiting for you to see it, reclaim it, and use it in the creation of your kingdom.

Eight of Swords

The means of your binding are the means of your unbinding—this is a lesson from Alan Chapman’s Magia and one of the oldest magical, psychological, and human truths in existence. The Eight of Swords shows up when you feel trapped in or haunted by the same old patterns and those telltale flairs of rage, anxiety, fear, and despair over the seeming injustice of it all. The card often appears when you’re following the “pathologos,” a term coined by philosopher Pierre Grimes to describe when bad ideas or false impressions about the self, others, and the world around you take root and block what is actually there, never mind your vision of the Beautiful, the Good, and the True. Too many tarot readers yawp on and on about how the lady in the Waite-Smith version of this card should just reach up and take off her blindfold. They forget this is Glory in Formation—sometimes we need to stay still, do less, and formulate an impression of our bindings before we can move onto the glory of freeing ourselves from them. Ruled by Jupiter in the first ten degrees of Gemini, this is a card of understanding the stakes of interference, of looking as if to see, even from the first instance, even when one is still bound up in the dark. Reversed, the bindings have come undone. Did you get yourself free or did you blow up the world as a parody of freedom?

Two of Disks

T. Susan Chang calls this card “the little Devil” and when you draw it, you almost assuredly find yourself doing one of two things: 1) you spend your time performing tricks of schedule, time, and effort, and are hellbent on calling your gritted-teeth strategies for managing mundane reality “magic” or 2) you’ve got a sanctimonious or mopey little punk in your life who seems hellbent on pointing out the ways in which all your best efforts are not magic or good or true but are, in fact, totally insane. Is the mope in scenario number two right? Is there ever a time when it’s useful to perform the role of the charlatan optimist? These are some of the questions raised by the Two of Disks, which is Wisdom in Action, which, as we all know, we can’t really get to without first going through Folly in Action. Jupiter blesses the juggling of act of this card behind the scenes, from its debilitated purview of the first ten degrees of Capricorn. If you can bear your own foolishness, if you can bear the insults of the beloved jerks in your life, you do sometimes manage to find the groove, the spark, the bliss you were looking for all along. The big joke is that these lovely states are never quite where you thought you’d find them and your deluded actions have nothing to do with them other than being the first thing we always have to do to learn or enjoy anything we don’t quite get yet. Reversed, maybe you should dump the jerk? Is the jerk someone else? Or is it a part of you that needs a kiss, a blessing, and a boot?

Nine of Disks

Clarissa Dalloway bought the flowers herself. The woman on the Nine of Disks also does. She is Foundation in Action, her desire is to be self-reliant and she is good at fulfilling her desire. Venus rules the middle decan of Virgo here and bestows the powers of material management of the off-beat details to a cultivated success on the person who embodies this card. The garden grows, the hawk—the woman’s connection either to her animal nature or her divine (you decide!)—is neither hooded nor in rabid flight. It patiently awaits her attention. Upright, your attention is on the hawk; your devotion goes in the right direction; the excellence of the fixed star Spica, long associated with the card, is enjoyed in its proper place. Reversed, this card can indicate a miserly attitude toward one’s excellence in material affairs, or being driven by the sense of an absence or a loneliness that one turns into pathology by fixating on the void instead of contemplating the relationship between the garden, the self, and the bird. Such fruits await!

Major Arcana

The Hierophant (5)

One of the most important aspects of being a teacher is learning how to convey the double nature of the wound: On the one hand, it creates suffering for the person who bears it. On the other hand, it opens the person to the objectivity of life itself, and openings always have the potential to heal, to embolden, to create magic. The Hierophant card is ruled by Venus and associated with zodiacal Taurus, it understands that wounds are never only and foremost places of death; attended to rightly—attended to with care, diligence, and ritual consideration—they are also places of beauty, self-correction, and blessing. On the Tree of Life, The Hierophant mediates the path between Wisdom and Mercy and so understands the difference between praising or blaming the sufferer and allowing the suffering to be both exactly as it is—shitty, inconceivable, painful—while also working magic behind the scenes. This is what Audre Lorde describes in her memoirs about life with cancer. She is enraged by her illness and the cultural circumstances that helped give rise to it. She also sees it as a profound gift. A righting of priorities. A direct experience of pain so that she can tend to the pain of others with uncharacteristic grace, strength, and beauty. When The Hierophant shows up, you are in the presence of a teacher or of a part of yourself that knows how to teach you to move through suffering to beauty, or to find the beauty in suffering, depending. Reversed, you’re caught up in the shadows of our contemporary education, religious, or other institutional systems that perform a parody of teaching in service of re-entrenching harmful ideas about the nature of the self and reality, wisdom and mercy. There’s someone or something you can trust in your life. You know this! Why seethe over the people or things that you can’t?

The Lover(s) (6)

“To be: this is to love. To be alone: this is to love oneself.” This is one of the most important secrets of The Lovers card, as described in the anonymous author’s Meditations on the Tarot. Ruled by Mercury and associated with astrological Gemini, the Lovers offers its querent a love letter to one’s own self. The planet Mercury, as the god Hermes’ astrological companion, bestows the right words, ideas, or thoughts to inspire self-love even in the face of old patterns of indifference, dysmorphia, and regret. Gemini, the mutable air sign of the Twins, offers the power to extend that love to other people. We make ourselves, other people, and the world around us real through love. This card bestows that reality, as well as the clarity, delight, and perspicacity of mind to follow through on the choices you need to make for the greater good of a reality based in love rather than anything else. Don’t be fooled by the light, airy, trickster-ish quality of this card—it carries with it the weight and responsibility of free will. If we can make the right choice, we can also always make the wrong one, too. How beautiful! How loving! To live in a world where there is space even for our mistakes, our evils, our ability to destroy that world. Reversed, this card asks if you’re participating in the latter out of a misunderstanding of who and what you are. On the Tree of Life, the Lovers guides the path between Understanding and Beauty. If our understanding is incorrect, we literally live in and perceive a less beautiful world (to misquote Iris Murdoch!) How can you offer yourself the beauty of being carried in the center of your own heart, without creating shadows out of other people as you do so?

The Chariot (7)

Ruled by the moon and arising under the auspices of the zodiacal sign Cancer, the Chariot teaches us two things. One: it shows us the possibility—the probability—of being successful even in the midst of severe conditions. And two: it warns us of the dangers of mistaking mastery of severity for a good life. This is the card that travels between the primordial sea of our first experiences with our mothers and the unwavering courage it takes to walk a path that appears to be entirely our own. The chariot is also the body—it reminds us that the body is only the smallest expression of who we are and, at the same time, how we treat our bodies is a primal indication of whether we’re actually seeking the highest expression of ourselves. The ancient druids asked to be buried with their chariots, the proper vehicles of the soul on its journey back to its source. The body is an expression of that mystery. How we care for it—and for our material lives—reveals our readiness to participate in that mystery, here and now.

Justice (Adjustment) (8)

When Demeter is searching for her daughter, she sits down beside a sacred well to grieve and to rest. As she does so, a woman with a round belly and an affinity for dance approaches. This woman is Baubo, and she entertains the Goddess of the Grain with bawdy dances that distract, sustain, and refresh her, even in the midst of her heartbreak. The Justice card, as Aleister Crowley has written, is the counterpart to the Fool. She is the dancing partner of the crazy, lonely mad person who has set out on an impossible journey. She is Saturn in its highest form: Justice/Adjustment knows the virtue of mirth and hilarity in the throes of grief. She is Venus in her airy home: Her dancing steps are not out of tune with life but exactly in accordance with it. Beauty is found here through the proper reaction to nature, humanity, and the divine, all three. Justice/Adjustment understands intimately the laws of karma, the sorrow existence brings, and the wondrous release of both of these when in the presence of the divine. Reversed, there’s a fixation on severity, loss, and a lack of nourishment, in every sense of the word. Fasting only works when it’s directed at the divine. Laws are only just when they come from somewhere else. Humans are required to respond in kind! Sometimes that means with a full belly and a bawdy dance; sometimes the just response requires something more serious and tempered than that. Upright, there is a delight in knowing one’s tune, in singing one’s own “song of the stars.”

Court Cards

Page or Princess of Disks

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, the little girl protagonist knows, without a sliver of a doubt, when her mother is about to rage at her. Same thing in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.⁴ Each girl child in each book possesses a full, precognitive understanding of both the situation at hand and where it will inevitably lead in the future. The perceived failure comes from being seemingly unable to prevent the bad outcome from coming true. This is earth of earth, the power of complete and accurate appraisal of something without being able to ascertain how to speak about that knowledge for the greater good of all. The Princess of Disks intimately knows what it’s like to live in a shattered vessel. She also understands what is needed to put the pieces back together again. What seems to be lacking is the full power of speech, which is why this page or Princess has been associated with absolute silence or the curse of speech down the ages. How do you move through something like this? Is there someone in your life who has been telling you the truth, but you’ve refused to listen? The Princess of Disks has the power to put the Kingdom in Action for the benefit of the many and the healing of the Self. Paradoxically, this power is delivered through silence, waiting, and seeing. Reversed, she uses the transition of Aries-Taurus-Gemini to startle, brood, and rage herself. Better to use this card to be the mothers the girl children in the memoirs above wanted to have, and did indeed have glimmers of, shimmering between the episodic madness.

King or Knight of Disks

The protagonist of Dion Fortune’s Moon Magic is a brilliant, daring, incisive doctor who saves many lives and heals many others as a result of his uncommon wisdom. The problem is everyone hates him because he is overly critical, brutish in conversation, and secretly hates himself. He has no clue where his wisdom actually comes from or how to honor it so he stoops through his life in the first half of the novel, begrudgingly collecting accolades, winning material honor, and making money that doesn’t assuage the bitterness of his life. It’s not until he meets a priestess of the Moon that he begins to understand the true nature of his mind and where his healing ability comes from. The King or Knight of Disks is Wisdom in Action—great at cutting through the bullshit of life to find everyday solutions, even better when he or she understands that incisive talent is a gift from somewhere else. Upright, the King or Knight of Disks deals with the hiss squad of the last decan of Leo by humbling pointing to an authority that originates from a source much greater than the individual human being. That’s what the two decans of Virgo are best for! Reversed, this card is a person who delivers the perfect advice or solution in exactly the wrong way, making enemies even as they “heal” or “problem solve” or “garner success.”

Tarot cards recently added to the interruptions tarot book on top of construction paper gods and monsters created by my five-year old, an old journal, notes, the dust and detritus and love of life!

1. As told in Christopher Bamford’s introduction to Tomberg’s Christ Sophia, the book I’m currently reading and loving.

2. Have I gushed enough about the novels of Dion Fortune yet? Have you read her yet?? The Goat-Foot God is an antidote to depression, maybe one of the best and only ones I’ve ever found!

3. Every tarot reader says this, and I’m sorry to report it’s true!

4. I published some academic writing on Lorde’s Zami and Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, on mothers, daughters, and angry affect in 20th- and 20th-century literature, here and here.