My question to the cards today is about what to expect coming out of this retrograde season. Right now Mars has gone direct, Mercury will go direct this week and Uranus next week. But it seems we are not done with our reckoning with the Lower World (interpreted both as our own unacknowledged unwanted parts and as personal/societal karma). In fact, the Midheaven card may indicate we’ve not even begun to peak ?. But it seems we have help from allies, perhaps mustered in the depths of grief or sorrow, that can now assist us in working through the obstacles of the Lower World.
These obstacles are not external problems that can be solved with money or other liquid resource. They’re rejected, unwanted parts of ourselves, hidden away because they’re unacceptable to society or others, or because they cause us pain, vulnerability or unpleasant emotion. There’s something here that speaks to the most volatile, difficult aspects of adolescence. What did you—or your caretakers even—hate about yourself as a teenager, so much that it had to be cut off, rejected, buried? Maybe your whole family or culture habitually annihilates a certain aspect of who you are, and so you have learned to do it too.
The doorway or portal that appears comes with all sorts of mixed feelings and judgements that may be ancient in origin, discrimination that has been baked into this iteration of human culture for thousands of years. We are good and bad, evil and holy, healers and killers. There is no ultimate transformation from “wrong” to “right”, only the possibility of total acceptance. The antidote to the pain along the way is simply time, release of emotion, slow processing and self-love without criticism.
(Decks: Starcodes Astro Oracle, Mystic Shaman Oracle, Rose Oracle, Gateway of Light Activation Oracle, Thoth Tarot)
