🌕 Scorpio Moon Reflection: Braving the Torch of Our Rage
The cards for this cycle are Strength crossed by the Page of Wands, King of Cups, 3 of Cups Rx, the Tower, 5 of Wands. Recreate this spread while you listen, sit with it a spell.
The Scorpio full moon illuminated the role of rage in this spread, for me.
A millennia of oppression of our mothers and daughters has brought us to this moment in time. Their rage lives deep inside of us, alongside the memory that societies weren't always hierarchical power structures.
Our blood and bones remember how to live in partnership with each other and all of life.
The Tower falls when we each find the courage to integrate this deep, ancestral rage. Emotional intelligence and self-compassion (King of Cups) helps to shed the false selves conditioned by the patriarchy. Our worth and value are not determined by our looks, our child-bearing abilities, or our usefulness to the white supremacist colonial imperial patriarchal project. This conditioning has shaped us through generations, and it’s time to burn it all away.
Jupiter in Cancer is showing us two approaches to care: one that centers all of humanity as equal, and one that seeks to protect the self through the demonization of the other.
In her research study, Cracking the Code of Genocide: The Moral Psychology of Rescuers, Bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust, Kristen Renwick Monroe identified these two approaches as core to the moral psychology of the oppressors, the bystanders, and the rescuers, or individuals who sought to protect Jews and other victims of the Nazis. Bystanders and oppressors strongly identified with an in-group, and saw victims as members of an out-group. Rescuers, on the other hand, had an expansive view of humanity, seeing all people as deserving of safety, rights, belonging, and care. Renwick Monroe relates the oppressor-bystander ideology to an individual’s own fear and sense of victimhood.
Cancer is a sign that knows its own vulnerability, and seeks to protect itself, this can be done through a hardening of the shell, or through collective care.
As we see before us, the grievance of victimhood combined with the spite towards the “out-group” of immigrants, people of color, trans and queer folks, and anyone who doesn’t support the over-arching white christian nationalist project of the state, results in the violence of ethnic cleansing and is pitting neighbor against neighbor, today. That old question, of what we would do if we were alive during the holocaust, can be answered through this lens of care and belonging. Do we feel the need to protect ourself by siding with the oppressor against a so-called enemy? Or do we root into our shared humanity, even if it makes us as individuals more vulnerable.
No one is protected unless we are all protected.
It takes emotional intelligence to brave confrontation with our fears, to root into shared humanity and compassion for all life, to protect our neighbors (King of Cups). The life-affirming and goddess-worshipping societies of our deep past are the model, we remember, we remember.
So long as these hierarchical, violent systems exist, there will always be another out-group. Braving the torches of our fear, our rage, our grief, we can light a new way, a very old way. The Pages never know quite how to be skillful with their suit, but they have the audacity to try and the desire to learn. I am looking at these figures in the 5 of Wands as us, many Pages, carrying the torch of our rage outwards, saying no to injustice, to imperial violence here and abroad, no to patriarchal bullshit and oppression.
All of those Towers burnt in the blaze of our brilliant, radical care.
In this reading I reference the book The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler and the Emerald Podcast by Josh Schrei. Music, as always, by Beth Bradfish. Thank you for reading and listening. May you be brave and bold in your care.
