Eclipse Season: Cutting Back & Taking Out

For the upcoming New Moon in Aries Eclipse, I’m going to stray away from the chaotic eclipse energy and wait until eclipse season is done before diving into another lunation spread. I’ll resume ‘regular scheduled programming’ with the upcoming Full Moon in Libra on April 12/13.

Instead, I thought I’d walk you through my own experience with my last lunation spread, the ‘Full Moon Eclipse in Virgo’. I won’t lie. It knocked me for a little bit of a loop. Typical for eclipse season.

I worked through this spread, as I typically do during a lunation, right around the date of the Full Moon. What’s interesting is that I often pause personal divination work during an eclipse season, advice I seem to remember receiving from my favourite astrologer. :) But not this time.

I pushed against my common practice and worked through the custom spread I shared with all my subscribers. If you’re reading this and you’re NOT a subscriber, head to my subscriber page and sign up. You get a FREE lunation spread at (almost) every lunation period.

Here were my results:

The results of my Full Moon in Virgo spread from earlier this month

Card 1 - How/where do I need to check in mentally? - Ace of Swords

Card 2 & 3 - What is blocking and depleting my mental clarity? - Eight of Wands & Eight of Swords

Card 4 - What do I need to release? - Nine of Swords

Card 5 - How/Where can I get back into my own body? - The Chariot

Hmmm. A spread that contains a little bit of everything. Strong will, movement, stagnation, worry, fear and no shortage of strong cards! Serves me right for working on this during eclipse season.

So I let it sit as I often do. I pondered each card. I pondered the overall narrative - its flow, its message, its beginning, middle, and ending. I thought about which cards were speaking loudly and which ones might need to be amplified.

This process took me a better part of a week. But I left the cards out, in my sacred space, to allow for contemplation.

And here’s what I came up with.

Card 1 seemed to be a bit of an outlier. I’d typically look at an Ace as something new and fresh, like a seed being planting but not yet doing anything other than taking up space in the ground. It’s bold but it’s also pretty stationary. That didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the narrative: two eights, a nine, and a card all about moving willfully forward. So I approached the Ace from a different perspective. What if in this instance, the Ace of Swords represented the essence of the element ‘Air’: words, ideas, the intellect, our mind, communication, media. That made more sense. And then the rest of the narrative seemed to click into place.

Cards 2 & 3, the Eights of Wands and Swords respectively, spoke of what was blocking and depleting my energy. The depletion part seemed easy. The current media landscape, the information coming at me, challenging my intellect to engage. After all, I have always prided myself on being an engage citizen. I reflected on card 2 - What is blocking my mental clarity?

Wait a minute… the Eight of Wands? What in the HELL is the Eight of Wands blocking? Its is LITERALLY a card of swiftness and movement. EVERYTHING gets through. NOTHING is being blocked. So, here I have two cards: one, the Eight of Swords, and the other, the Eight of Wands, combing to tell the following mini-narrative. There is a sense of helplessness with all of this information coming. And it’s coming at breakneck speed. I’m hoping for a slow and steady and I’m encountering information coming via gale force winds.

On to card 4, the Nine of Swords. Yikes. That’s a card no one really likes to see. :) What do I need to release? This card points to the fear, the anxiety, what is keeping me up at night. Is it the onslaught of information? That seems likely. Where is it that this information is coming at me in such a ‘Eight of Wands’ manner that is causing me ‘Nine of Swords’ worry. Easy, social media. It tool me roughly a week to realize that my social media habits, and for me that’s Instagram and Facebook, had changed. I was now doing the doomscrolling that I had told myself I would never do.

Card 5 - The Chariot - speaks of How/Where can I get back into my own body? This question seemed to reframe itself for me based on the previous four cards into “How can I get OUT OF my own head AND into my own body? The Chariot offered a two-fold solution to me. And, as the only Major Arcana card of the bunch, it spoke a little louder than the others. The Chariot is a card of will. It is the card of the young warrior/traveller, trying to take hold of the reigns for the first time and guide the chariot where it needs to go. This card told me it is my responsibility to assume control over the information (swords energy represented by the Ace of Swords) that was causing this anxiety (Nine of Swords).

The Chariot is also the card of Cancer, its corresponding sign. Cancer is the sign of crab, an animal known for its sideways movement. And, since Cancer is ruled by the Moon and is also the natal placement of my own Moon, I paid a little attention to that, and looked for the comfort and security of home to help me turn off the gale of information.

So, what did I do? I immediately removed Instagram and Facebook from my mobile phone. It is usually with me. I was finding in spaces where I’d have a few spare moments, I’d head there and get sucked into the algorithmic vortex. I selected my sources of information - primarily the digital versions of edited and balanced print media - and cut out the rest. And finally, I re-established my presence in my secure reading nook at home as the only place I would consume information, restricting how fast the flow of info hit me.

You can see from my example above that I chose the ‘cut back and take out’ eclipse option. But I also experienced a week of chaos unlike any I’ve seen in quite some time… but I’ll leave that story for a possible future post :)

I’d love to know either by email (peter@peterwhitetarot.com) or via the comment section below about how eclipse season has been for you? Have you cut something back? Taken something out? Or are just standing in the midst of the chaos, watching it all unfold?

For even more Tarot information, make sure you check out my podcast ‘Tarot with Bonnie and Peter’!