Tarot for the Imbolc New Moon
This waning moon has come, for me, with a feeling of surrender. I’ve hit my limit with pandemic fatigue. My 13-month-old has another endless cold (or something?), which means he hasn’t been in daycare for a week. Some old pain patterns in my body are flaring, which makes sense after going through the most violent case of food poisoning I remember ever having a couple of weeks ago. I’ve sort of given up, you know?
There was some sweetness in the surrender, for me: a little less care (/fear) about whether or not I’d catch the baby’s cold (or Covid). A little less expectation about what my day to day life was supposed to look like. But after a week of being home with the baby, continually having to cancel my clients and classes, surrender is starting to shift into despair. I feel swept out into the ocean of the moment. Like driftwood, unable to swim, only to float, and find out later where the current has taken me.
But a new moon is coming. Inevitably we dip into the darkness with each new moon, and that is to help us shed our outer layers and reveal what’s on the inside, what’s new and possible within us. This new moon aligns with Imbolc (Feb 1st to 2nd), an ancient holiday celebrating the midpoint between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. It’s also Groundhog Day, Candlemas, and Chinese New Year: all over the world, we celebrate the the shifting of the light, the moment where we start to stir from our winter darkness. Like the mythological queen Inanna, who travels to the underworld to find her lost love, we have to remove a layer of clothing—a crown, a robe, a dress, the jewels, the shoes—before we will be allowed to enter, naked, to the place where we meet the death of ourselves. Only then can we be reborn again on the other side.
So let’s see what the cards have to say about all this on the Imbolc new moon.
Past position: Nine of Swords
This card is from the Tarot of the Divine by Yoshi Yoshitani. The card represents the Greek myth of Oedipus, in which the Oracle of Delphi proclaims that baby Oedipus is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. His father sends the baby away in order to prevent this, which begins a cascade of events that result in Oedipus killing his father and marrying his mother by mistake because he didn’t know who they were. If his father had ignored the story the oracle told and held his baby close with love and affection, he would have avoided the prophecy.
For me, this card is about how we allow our stories about the future to create that future for us. It is the classic card of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this moment of suffering, how much am I expecting things to continue to go this way? How is my behavior aligning with the expectation of a terrible future? What if I set the story aside and chose to move forward from love and care instead?
Present position: The Five of Cups
Here, we see La Llorona, a Mexican mythological figure whose jealousy of her husband causes her to drown her own children and then wallow in grief forever, punishing herself for all eternity, wailing in ghostly perpetuity. With this card, you often see a mixture of full and empty cups. Here, the empty cups have spilled into the water—they could be filled, but La Llorona won’t stop her wailing long enough to notice that she could right them and refill them. Where have we gotten stuck in our grief and old stories about ourselves? How have we been filling our own cups? Where is there emptiness in our lives that we have been refusing to see, let alone to try to fill? How could we give ourselves permission to forgive ourselves for whatever happened in the past?
Future position: The Empress
With this card, we meet the Mexican saint Our Lady of Guadalupe, who has a relationship with the Christian Mother Mary. The Empress is about mother energy: fertility, abundance, love, safety, and protection. She is all about the wisdom of the body and the abundance of healing that can happen on the physical plane. The halo around Our Lady’s head suggests the dawning of the light that comes with Imbolc. There is light and hope and new possibilities on the other side of this energetic shift, bringing exactly what we need to refill those empty cups. Are we remembering hope, possibility, and the light of change? Are we allowing ourselves to be mothered by whatever support is available to us (human or divine)? Are we connected to our own fertility, our own ability to create (whether that’s creating life or creating art/connection/thought/hope etc)? How are we listening (or not) to the inherent wisdom of our bodies around what we need to heal ourselves?
All together, these three cards tell a story about what we are willing to see and not see and how we are nourishing ourselves (or not) in the places that feel empty right now. Indeed, the energy is going to shift on this Imbolc new moon. The light will begin to return, and we can nurture a seed of hope within our bodies. However, we must be aware that the stories we’ve been telling about the past and the future may not be completely true or, if they were true for a time, may not be relevant anymore. We may need to tap into our own creative energy in order to refill our cups and see a bright, hopeful future in a new possible way. The energy is there to support us. We may just need to look up from our wailing and receive it.