May has two full moons exactly bracketing the month, and the second of these, on May 31, is a Blue Moon. It’s supposed to be rare, and it is, but in an “every couple of years” way and not a “hundred year flood” way.
Still, people who do moon energy work get very excited about it and attribute extra-magical influence to a Blue Moon. I think we have quite enough celestial oomph any average day in the mid-twenties so far, so I do not plan to ask specifically what bonuses the Blue Moon has in the back of the truck it is beep-beep-beeping down our driveway to dump in the yard, but if it offers, I’ll sure read it.
Otherwise, Full Moons are the intro to two weeks of busyness. You wanted it? Or you didn’t want it but you fixated on how much you didn’t? It’s here! Now what you gonna do about it? Our cards advise:
- 6 of Cups reversed
- Knight of Cups
- 8 of Swords
- Emperor reversed
- Lovers reversed
- Fool reversed
- King of Swords reversed
Oh. Well, then.
The good thing about having five reversed cards in a seven card spread is that I could, reasonably, sweep them dramatically off the table and ignore them as if they did not exist. It’s an option. A reversed card is unable to act, frozen, sapped.
A reversed card is like a piece of fruit you pulled off the tree to see if it was ripe, and then finding it sour and inedible you can’t reattach it to the branch and leave it a few more days. Technically, it’s a plum and plums are nourishing and flavorful. But you can’t eat this one, so it offers nothing, and you’ve gained nothing.
All five of those reversed cards, like the fruit plucked too early, are still good examples of what not to do. They’ll stay on the table for now if we need them for context.
This leaves us with two tricky, tricky cards upright: Knight of Cups, and 8 of Swords, both of whom bruise like plums if you don’t handle them properly.
Knight of Cups, like all knights, absolutely has to have something to do or he’ll get into trouble. The suit of Cups is about our emotional life and spirituality, so a Knight of Cups with nothing to do can quickly go from devoted boyfriend to the ex who secretly slashes your tires in hopes you will have to call him for help. It’s crazy ex-girlfriend territory when you mishandle your Knight of Cups energy, or the Knight of Cups in your life.
Maybe that is why we have so many reversed cards; Knight of Cups can so overwhelm people, with drama and the sheer ferocity of their feelings, that we freeze just like those reversed cards. When emotional displays are over the top, or when we are swamped with theatrics and histrionics, it can be so unnerving that not only do we not know how to react – we fear reacting at all, worried about making it worse or drawing attention to ourselves and getting a double dose.
I’m not trying to be super-mean to the Knight of Cups, but not only is he surrounded by these reversed, inert cards, he is also joined by 8 of Swords.
8 of Swords is at worst a terrible card, and at best a card of enlightenment. When it is negatively aspected, meaning surrounded by cards that don’t offer any support, it can signify the bad karma that comes when we realize we’ve gotten ourselves into a terrible state simply by what we’ve chosen to communicate. By what we believe? Eh. No, what we’ve chosen to communicate, which may not be at all what we know to be true.
8 of Swords is the card of accepting our own nonsense. This is how we get into trouble, and regret it deeply.
If either of these cards appeared in a spread that offered them hope and helping hands, that Knight of Cups would find suitable places to blaze with passion and perform courageous deeds, and the 8 of Swords would lift his or her tear-stained face to the sun and slip between the menacing blades that surround them, just that easy, and be free of the prison deceit has erected.
But like in a bad dream, the Knight of Cups and the 8 of Swords in this spread find themselves the only ones awake and all their fellow diners unconscious and collapsed across the restaurant. No amount of shaking will wake them, and so the 8 of Swords crawls under a table and the Knight of Cups attacks the bolted wooden door with a butter knife, shouting himself hoarse and screaming at the 8 of Swords to get up here and help him, which makes her cry more, and instead of working together they are both distraught heaps of incompetence.
I’m not going to go into these reversed cards in detail, except to say they include three Major Arcana cards, and these are big cards with shared themes of trust, responsibility, and the capacity to listen to one’s instincts. Lacking also: a clear eyed sense of the realities of the past, and the skill to put experiences into words that support rather than cut down people.
Oh, Blue Moon! What the hell? This brings us back to the original premise of the reading, which was to find out what the Blue Moon is hauling in here in response to what we’ve been percolating. The answer has to be: conditions suitable for emotional distress, misplaced effort fueled by undisciplined feelings, self-recrimination, and feeling caught in a version of our lives created by words and stances we may not even believe.
I would say the next two weeks set up an environment that will make it easy to get overwrought, say things we don’t mean, duck responsibilities, and find ways not to show up. If we sense that happening, the question has to be, “How did I get here?” What has contributed to the urge to skip out or abandon any sense of self-possession?
That’s a lot to work with and also the opportunity, brought by what we’re told is an intense influx of universal energy, to work on these issues if we already have them, to be ready for them if they arise, and to ultimately get ahead of and disarm them – in our own lives, at least, if we can’t pull the rest of the world off the burner.
(My last post was about how to work with lunar energy. You might want to double back and read it.)
