Tarotscopes for May
Work to do, burdens to drop with the Eight of Pentacles and Ten of Wands, reversed.
“This bitch isn’t going to die, but she’s going to wish she were dead,” the mystic said to herself as she perused my chart.
I had asked her to look at my horoscope after my diagnosis, kind of wanting to know if death was stopping by anytime soon, mostly just wanting to know more about how to attend to the struggle of chronic and acute illness alongside writerly ambition and anxious motherhood.
When she recounted her impressions of the various natal placements, time-lord techniques, and external transits, I felt both grateful and alarmed. I’d be around for a little while longer yet; there would be more time, it seemed, to leave behind more than a legacy of one-off essays and newsletter musings, a sick toddler and unsupported partner. But the extent to which I’d be wishing for not another, single second upon this earth seemed … less than exciting.
The groan in my brain, so general and un-particular to me it’s a bit gauche: Haven’t I faced enough?
So many ways to answer that, although I only reach any kind of truth about the feeling of suffering through the rhetorical exhortation itself. If you’re anything like me, you, too, might have spent a lifetime of teaching yourself to shut the fuck up instead of allowing your clichéd pleas for aid and witness be heard by so much as the chairs in the empty room within which you sat, much less another human being.
One of the beauties of the tarot, though, is that it creates space for such exhortations. The cards exhort themselves, the Minor Arcana in myriad normal and and too-plain-to-speak-of ways, and yet the magic only happens if we do. If we do speak of them.
The Eight of Pentacles is the card of Sun in Virgo. Upright, it shines a light on the excellence that comes from hard work, the artistry that arises from an unperturbed focus on the details of the present. Reversed, it can turn our attention to how supposedly little concerns have the ability to open up holes in the bottom of our lives, draining away light, and sound, and pleasure, and the soft touch of a kind friend who “just gets it.” Persistent focus and dogged determination can take us a long way in achieving results. But the problem with the Eight of Pentacles reversed is that it often transforms living into nit-picking. It also reminds us that the results we seek, even when we achieve them, rarely actually live up to the … living of things. These days, for example, I can call myself post-cancer—I got to keep my hair!—but that stationary “achievement” has little to do with what it felt like to get here.
What that felt like was the Ten of Wands, reversed (“this bitch isn’t going to die, but she’s going to wish she had.”) I had to drop all of my dreams—publishing a book this year, finding a job, supporting my partner’s burgeoning art practice—as well as my responsibilities—taking care of my son throughout his own illness, teaching my students at the university, paying my bills. I had to trim everything down into a radical trust that care does not exist along a give-and-take binary, that work can be set aside for a little while so that my arms might be more free for embrace, to be embraced themselves.
Upright, the “Lord of Oppression,” as the Golden Dawn called the Ten of Wands, is about too many burdens for one person to carry alone. Reversed the card calls down that golden thing that lives, invisibly, in the heart of the body, namely, its ability to draw strength and energy from other bodies, like, unlike, and kind-of-like it.
Because the tarot intersects with astrology at the level of the decans—the 10-degree swaths of each zodiacal sign that astrologers and magicians have turned to for insight since at least the 2nd century BCE—each tarot card exists, 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 the Eight of Pentacles and Ten of Wands, reversed, show up in our lives in May, and what is there to do about it?
Read for your rising sign, and let me know how things go.
For those who sign up for an annual subscription to the newsletter in May, you’ll receive a 20 percent discount on your subscription, the proceeds of which will be donated to the CARE Clinics for Abortion and Reproductive Excellence, the group that supports the independent abortion clinic in Nebraska that helped me and thousands of other women in the state for more than 50 years.
Taurus Rising: Just as you’ve begun to feel hungry to shore up the connection between mind and body, “soul” and lived experience, the Ten of Wands, reversed in your Eighth House is asking you to learn something important about death. This could be the mortification you feel when you have to rely too heavily on other people’s resources, or the simple weight of the knowledge that summer is coming, but the bills are still due. You’ve kept your head down, working diligently on your creative projects, on raising your kids, or figuring out how to experience pleasure amidst the trouble with your one-on-one relationships, but now it’s time to look up. The Eight of Pentacles reversed in your Fifth House has helped you to establish a prudent vision of when to attend to creative output and play, but you can’t actually enjoy either if the focus is so wholeheartedly on a critique of what you’re doing wrong. Venus and Jupiter in Aries blesses your mental harshness with some ease, some extra sleep, and support, even if you have absolutely no idea where it’s coming from, or why it decided to bless you now. If you feel hungry, eat. If you’re worried about death, orgasm. Subscribe to Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. Follow along An Alphabet for Gourmets by M.F.K. Fisher. Read everything Johanna Hedva has ever written, including this wonderful horoscope for Frieze Magazine talking about Death and “little deaths,” the mysticism of the Eighth House, and the Oracular Funkiness of the Twelfth. This is your land now!
Gemini Rising: Here’s a mantra for you for the month of May: I derive creative intelligence from the mess of my home, my past, and my relationships. The Eight of Pentacles, reversed in your Fourth House of home, ancestors, and family lineage, shows that much of your focus has been to smooth out the sharpness of your past, clean the corners of your apartment, and integrate the rejected parts of your child self into who you are today, to perfection. But of course, the reality is that all of this good effort creates mess. If you’re left, at the end of the day, looking around at the detritus of your striving, you should know that you’re on the right track. Issues with partnerships add a heaviness to this “surveying the lay of the home base,” though, and this month will ask you to realize that it’s impossible to be the grounding influence for someone all of the time. Trust that Mercury’s retrograde in your First House will cause the communication breakdowns that are necessary to reveal what isn’t working in your relationships, and at home. Venus and Jupiter in Aries will bring new opportunities with friends, groups, and creative audiences—but you can’t reap the blessings without setting aside the confidence-eroding behaviors of playing perfect for the people who are supposedly the mainstays in your life, past, present, and future. For inspiration, read Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World, a book about how hunger and fluidity are the building blocks for creative intelligence. Or dip into Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, and revel in the in-between, the impossibly and nearly-but-not-quite understood.