Typewriter Tarot-Scopes: October 2023
By Cecily Sailer
We enter October on the tails of a full moon in Aries — the fire sign that loves to initiate, dazzle, and captivate! In the coming weeks, we continue (in the Northern Hemisphere) our descent into cooler days and longer nights. We are also in the midst of Libra season — the air sign of scales, balance, harmony, and justice.
Libra’s Tarot card is Justice, in fact, an archetype that reminds us to account for our values and the actions we take in service of those values. When we are unable (for any number of reasons) to live in alignment with our values, our spirit suffers, but waits patiently in the wings for opportunities to find harmony between what we desire for the world and our ability to take action in that direction.
Soon (on October 14), we will experience a solar eclipse, which brings powerful energies of revelation, reset, and reckoning. Then Halloween, or Samhain, or día de los Muertos (depending on your traditions and leanings) will close out the month. This is the time of year when the veil between worlds — living and spirit — grows thin, our dreams grow stranger, we touch in with our loved ones on the other side, and we indulge, often with catharsis, in the realities that feel too much to dwell upon day to day — monsters, secrets, mortality, and mystery.
This month, I felt drawn to the Lucille Clifton Divining Poets deck for our messages. All the cards in this deck are text-based, and all the text comes from Lucille Clifton's poetry. (Other decks in this series feature Emily Dickinson, Rumi, and William Butler Yeats.)
Photo of Lucille Clifton in The Paris Review by Rachel Eliza Griffiths in a feature titled “Listening for Ms. Lucille.”
Lucille Clifton was an acclaimed poet, Black woman, feminist, and teacher. She was born in 1936 in Buffalo, New York, and published her first book of poetry Good Times in 1969. Her poems express and explore the cultural and racial experience of African Americans in the United States, as well as experiences around gender, family life, and the spiritual gifts of perseverance and self-love.
Clifton’s books have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize multiple times, she served as the poet laureate of Maryland from 1974 to 1985, and she won the National Book Award in 2000. You can find some of her books here: Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, and Generations: A Memoir.
Clifton was also a medium, and began communicating with spirits first through a Ouija board experiment with her daughters, where they witnessed the spelling of Clifton’s mother’s name, Thelma. Clifton moved on to automatic writing as a way to communicate with spirits, then became able to communicate more directly, receiving messages about the future of the planet and humanity. This article in The Paris Review offers a fascinating portrait of Clifton’s spiritual writings. Her collection Two-Headed Woman takes its title from an African American phrase that describes a Black woman who can walk in both the spirit and the material worlds.
The Divining Poets deck based on Clifton’s work was curated by another Black woman poet, Tracy K. Smith, who studied with Clifton in a poetry workshop in the 1990s. Smith writes about her time in that workshop in the introduction to the deck:
I felt newly awake and alert, having emerged (I thought) from a period of grief following the death of my mother. And so when Clifton, in her candid, generous way, began speaking of her own losses — particularly those of her mother and husband — something keened in me. Her vocabulary for the experience of surviving loved ones wasn’t centered upon letting go or making peace, but rather sustained communication. I sat rapt, envious, hopeful, listening to Clifton describe her own initiation into a fierce and forthright form of knowing.
We send gratitude to Lucille Clifton for bringing her work and magic into the world, and for walking that liminal boundary between this world and whatever sits beyond… and reporting back through her art and teachings.
October Tarot Reading for the Collective
This month’s reading is short and sweet. I thought it might be challenging (for me, at least) to triangulate three snippets of text from the Divining Poets deck, and I wanted to bring in something that wasn’t fully language-based, so I pulled one card from the Lucille Clifton deck, one from The Wild & Sacred Feminine Deck, and one from the Supra Oracle deck by uusi. Here’s what came through…
The Threshold from the Supra Oracle deck by uusi, “the small gatherings / gathered in sorrow or joy” card from the Lucille Clifton Divining Poets deck, and Pachamama / Reciprocity from The Wild & Sacred Feminine deck.
I believe we are being asked, with these three cards, to step into a new realm / paradigm / way-of-being that deepens our relationship with our own bodies, and particularly with the Earth — the body that creates and nourishes all bodies on this planet.
The Threshold card feels like a portal opening, beckoning us to step through, like we are being asked to leave an old way behind and open to learning new ways, taking different actions, looking at the world differently in some way and living in accordance with that new perspective. We are certainly moving through a threshold collectively, with the impacts of human-made climate change materializing in ways we haven’t yet experienced, as promised by scientists for the past half century.
So long as we’re here, we always have time for action, but in terms of action to mitigate climate crisis or collapse, the window for this threshold is closing soon, if it hasn’t already. We will soon be living in a very different world than the one we grew up in, especially if we don’t collectively express and act upon our love for the world and all of its beauty, marvel, magic, and provisions for survival.
The Lucille Clifton card, and the phrase “the small gatherings / gathered in sorrow or joy” feels like the relational side of Libra season. I’ve heard a lot of people in Austin where I live, wherever I go, talking about the heat, talking about the rain (when it rains), joking about “hot-utmn” instead of “autumn.” But I think we also need to be having conversations about the joys we derive from the Earth, and the sorrow we might feel for what we may be losing, for the fears we hold about the future, and desires we feel so deeply about how we want to be in relationship with the planet that is our home.
Pachamama / Reciprocity looms over this entire reading, even though it sits there at the end like a punctuation mark. Pachamama is the archetype for the Earth Mother among the indigenous people of the Andes in South America. She is a goddess revered among in Inca mythology, responsible for fertility, earthquakes, the making of mountains, the flowing of rivers. She is the creative power that sustains life on earth.
The guidebook for this deck offers a quote for each card, and Pachamama’s comes from Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a seminal text for Earth-witches. The quote from Kimmerer reads: Knowing that you love the earth changes you… But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.
We serve ourselves, others, and the planet when we strive for reciprocity in our relationships, when we are as giving with ourselves as we are with others, when we offer ourselves (our work, time, attention, love, support, creativity) to others who connect with us and share their gifts in return. How can we foster reciprocity in relationship with the Earth as well — how can give as much as take? What would it be like to use only what we need?
I believe this message, shepherded perhaps by the spirit of Lucille Clifton, is an invitation to connect with Mother Earth in some way we have not before — giving an offering, changing consumption or waste habits, sharing strategies, tips, and ideas with friends, signing up with groups who teach about climate justice, activism, and restoration. This month, for the first time, I’ll be volunteering to help restore habitat on the Vireo Preserve for Austin Water Wildland Conservation, and I’m excited to support the cultivation of bird habitat, meet some other nature nerds, and learn more about the land around me.
What would it look like for you to deepen your relationship with Pachamama this month? To honor all the gifts Earth has given you? And to gather with others “in sorrow or joy” to honor, attend to, and protect the planet we call home?
October Tarot-Scopes
In using the Lucille Clifton Divining Poets deck for this month’s messages, I centered the language on the card I pulled for each sun sign. Each Tarot-scope is series of questions (unfortunately no answers provided!). But trust that the answers live inside of you. Some of the questions get a little heady. Use them like meditations, or rooms where you can ruminate. Play with them, invite them into your dreams, channel them into your art, take them to your Tarot deck, discuss them with your closest confidantes, journal about them, or use them in any way that serves you!
The creative ritual this month is the same for all signs: reflect on the questions in your Tarot-scope, pull a card for each if you like, and write a poem inspired by the questions for your sign and the phrase from your Lucille Clifton card. If you’re feeling ambitious in the wake of the Aries full moon, you could work with the Tarot-scopes for your sun, moon, and rising signs, and include all three snippets of poetry in your own work. Craft your poem like a spell you’re casting for yourself or the world at large. Read it to the waning moon!
Four cards from the Lucille Clifton Divining Poets deck (from left to right, top to bottom): “you are not / your brothers keeper / you are / your brother,” “to be the madwoman / at the rivers edge,” “circle beyond the ironwork / encasing your human heart,” “all of us are / all of us.”
LIBRA — you are not / your brother's keeper / you are / your brother: What have you learned recently about all that does not separate you from other people? What does it feel like in your body when you feel the inherent “kindred” connection between you and a human you hardly know? What have you learned about the relationship between loving yourself and loving someone else? (See the bolded paragraph above for a creative ritual to work with this card.)
SCORPIO — to be the madwoman / at the rivers edge: How is your madness (your anger, your nonconformity, your fringy-ness) a superpower for you? How is it an asset to those around you (whether people appear to appreciate it or not)? And if you are a madwoman at the river’s edge, what gifts do you leave for the gods of the river? And what do you ask of them in return? (See the bolded paragraph above for a creative ritual to work with this card.)
SAGITTARIUS — circle beyond the ironwork / encasing your human heart: If there is ironwork encasing your heart, who put it there, and why? What does it look like? If you were a welder, what would you do to that ironwork so as to change it? When your heart can fly beyond the bounds of this casing, where would it go first? (See the bolded paragraph above for a creative ritual to work with this card.)
CAPRICORN — all of us are / all of us: For all the people, places, and things you encounter this month, you have an opportunity to ask: How am I like this / them? How are we part of something much bigger than I can fully perceive? When I notice these things, what becomes possible? What feels available to me that wasn’t here before? (See the bolded paragraph above for a creative ritual to work with this card.)
Four cards from the Lucille Clifton Divining Poets deck (from left to right, top to bottom): “what entered the light was one man. / what walked out is another,” “chaos fell away / before her like a cloud,” “there is no planet stranger / than the one I’m from,” “what will become / waits in us like an ache.”
AQUARIUS — what entered the light was one man / what walked out is another: What were you before? And what are you now? Or what are you becoming (in your imagination and aspiration)? As you moved through this threshold, what could not travel with you? And have you honored that and said goodbye in the way you would like to? (See the bolded paragraph above for a creative ritual to work with this card.)
PISCES — chaos fell away / before her like a cloud: What if it were that easy? If the chaos just fell away? What if you are like the energetic version of an ice-cutting ship, sailing through the ice-scapes of polar waters? The clouds of chaos kiss the bow of your ship, and you sail on… What chaos would you like to fall away? (See the bolded paragraph above for a creative ritual to work with this card.)
ARIES — there is no planet stranger / than the one I’m from: What if you are one badass alien?! Here now, on planet Earth, to let us know something, to show us something, to wake us up to something? What is it you came here to deliver or share? And what do you want to take back with you to your strange home planet? (See the bolded paragraph above for a creative ritual to work with this card.)
TAURUS — what we will become / waits in us like an ache: If the ache inside you were a creature, what kind of creature would it be? What does it look like? How does it move? Is there anything it needs right now? And if you were to ask it: what do you want to become, what would it say? (See the bolded paragraph above for a creative ritual to work with this card.)
Four cards from the Lucille Clifton Divining Poets deck (from left to right, top to bottom): “as possible as yeast / as imminent as bread,” “something hopeful rises in me / rises and runs me out into the road,” “words tumbling together / up the long stair, home,” “wake up girl. / you dreaming.”
GEMINI — as possible as yeast / as imminent as bread: What if the bread is already baking? What does it feel like to sit in the time and space between preparing the dough and the bread being baked? Let’s say the timer’s about to go off, and very soon a beautiful loaf of bread will float from the ovens of creation into your life… What do you want that bread to be, taste like, represent? (See the bolded paragraph above for a creative ritual to work with this card.)
CANCER — something hopeful rises in me / rises and runs me out into the road: When you run into the road, what runs out to meet you? Where does the road bend toward hope? How do you rise when hope moves through you? If hope had another name, what would it be? (See the bolded paragraph above for a creative ritual to work with this card.)
LEO — words tumbling together / up the long stair, home: Do you recall a time when you stumbled upward? Where did you end up? What words tumble together when you think of that time? If you were tumbling upward now, what do you hope is waiting for you on the landing? (See the bolded paragraph above for a creative ritual to work with this card.)
VIRGO — wake up girl / you dreaming: What are your dreams today? What if all you had to do was dream the dream, then wake up and do something to build that dream in the real world? What do the earliest, embryonic shapes of this dream look like? When you wake from the dream, where do you wish to start? (See the bolded paragraph above for a creative ritual to work with this card.)
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About Cecily sailer
Cecily Sailer is the creator and founder of Typewriter Tarot. She’s a creative magic coach and mentor, Tarot reader, witch, bird-lover, and writer based in Austin, Texas.