Meeting the storm with awe & action
Author Lane Smith on The Star and collective survival
Hello, Rebis readers—
Today we have a special feature from Lane Smith, a transmasculine writer with over 20 years of experience as a tarot reader and as an organizer/activist on the radical Left. Lane is the editor of the Tarot & Politics zine and a member of Solidarity Tarot where they live in Baltimore, Maryland.
They’re also the author of the book 78 Acts of Liberation: Tarot to Transform Our World which covers the often-ignored aspects of tarot’s past, reviews the cards through the lenses of numerology and astrology, and invites readers to connect each archetype with collective action. Lane associates each Major Arcana card with an example from a social movement and every Minor Arcana card with a practical, actionable term to know or skill to practice.
Our guest editor recently published a rich conversation with Lane that covers everything from lazy queerness and authentic spirituality to the sexiness of devotion. In the interview, Lane talks about their relationship to The Star card, saying, “The Star points to our responsibility to make change and cause disruption and go against the grain in order to prevent empires and monoliths and total destruction, as well as to know what to imagine and do when destruction has already happened, as in the Tower. Hope, for me, is an inner fire that stays lit when I’m actively engaged in change-making with others.” Highly recommended reading!
Below, we’re featuring a short essay written by Lane, which elaborates on their relationship to The Star. They wrote a stunning piece of fiction titled “We Are Many: A Fable of the Flood,” which we’re featuring in our upcoming print anthology.
Speaking of which: we are just a few weeks away from publication. Stay tuned for information about pre-orders coming your way soon!
If you’re excited about what we’re creating, consider buying our print publications, sharing our Substack, and recommending us to friends. With the frustrating decline of social media platforms for discovery, we relying on word of mouth for growth. Thank you for your support!
Meeting the storm with awe & action
by Lane Smith
In the past few years, I have had to reconsider my relationship to The Star because the one consistent keyword I was always taught about The Star is that it signifies hope. Hope has become necessary for my survival during a time when conservatives have focused so intensely on attacking transgender people and liberals have supported the genocide of Palestinians. As someone who has had to manage chronic and severe depression my entire life, despair can become life-threatening for me. I’ve had to get to know hope very intimately so that I can access it, and doing so has made me realize that hope does not live in The Star card for me.
My reading of tarot cards is tied to astrology. I like to maintain their shared divinatory roots which were developed in the ancient Arab world, and which white European occultists tried to sever in order to elevate tarot to become more than a “mere” fortune-telling device like astrology, geomancy, or cartomancy with other types of playing cards.
The Star corresponds to Aquarius, and therefore also to the traditional ruler of Aquarius (which is Saturn) as well as the modern ruler (which is Uranus). Aquarius is a Fixed Air sign, and the element of Air relates to truth, ideas, and communication. Hope doesn’t work for me as an idea or a way of speaking to myself; much less as the certainty of a fixed truth. Hope is hope and not certainty because there is doubt present, which means that faith is required.
Faith is associated with Jupiter, the ruler of Sagittarius and Pisces. I only find myself able to access hope as a quality of Fire, or at least of mutability. I find hope in action, movement, passion, and inspiration. It has much more to do with how I meet the moment than it has to do with long-term visions of the future.
I find hope in action, movement, passion, and inspiration. It has much more to do with how I meet the moment than it has to do with long-term visions of the future.
Realizing that hope is more at home with Jupiter and the Wheel of Fortune for me left a void in The Star. I had never really developed a strong relationship with The Star, I think, because part of me always knew that the prescribed keyword of hope didn’t ring true. With that being the case, I didn’t often see The Star come up in readings, so I didn’t collect more experiences around that card that would give me additional vocabulary for it.
What has helped me to get to know The Star better is to look deeper into the stories about Aquarius. I knew that the European cultural canon that gives hope the qualities of Air (e.g., Emily Dickinson’s “hope is the thing with feathers”) didn’t resonate for me, so looking at sources that predate the Greek and Roman mythology (which underpins so much of “Western” culture) could be enlightening.
Finding out that the “water-bearer” Aquarius corresponds to the Biblical myth of the Flood, and that the constellation was known by ancient Sumerians as “The Great One”—meaning the god who nearly wiped out all of humanity with the flood and not the exceptional figure who survived—helped me discover a new keyword for The Star. That word is “awe.”
Feelings of awe have become trivialized by the colloquial use of the word “awesome.” But before anything we thought was mildly interesting or cool was “awesome,” awesome described something so big and so alien to everyday life that it would shake your bones and unsettle your spirit. Awe is described as a combination of surprise and fear, which seems like the perfect combination of Uranus and Saturn, respectively. Awe can feel more like wonder or terror depending on whether we are witnessing something miraculous or catastrophic. In the presence of something or someone who inspires awe, we feel simultaneously insignificant compared with a force far greater than us, and yet at the same time, we feel intensely that we are present in our own bodies, having a very specific, individual experience.
Sometimes we do place our hopes in someone or something that inspires awe. The Sumerian storm god Enlil, who brought the worldwide flood in the story that informs the iconography of Aquarius, was revered for their astonishing power. I think it’s important to note, though, that when ancient Sumerians saw The Great One in the sky and knew the seasonal floods were coming, they didn’t just hope and pray that Enlil would be merciful. They prepared together as a community, and that action is what helped them survive. They had sufficient awe for the power of storms and floods to take them seriously enough to change their behavior, and to be disciplined about it. That is the Saturnian and Uranian lesson of the story of Aquarius: to allow your awe, wonder, and fear to shake you, change you, and inspire you to “settle your quarrels, come together [and] understand the reality of the situation,” to quote the Black American revolutionary George Jackson. As we face climate catastrophe and multiple genocides, we are sorely in need of this kind of awestruck seriousness.
For me, it is the taking action together that is the source of hope. But the feeling of awe at staggering transpersonal power—and facing the reality of what must then be done—is a prerequisite for that action that becomes a practice of hope.
The feeling of awe at staggering transpersonal power—and facing the reality of what must then be done—is a prerequisite for that action that becomes a practice of hope.
Since adjusting my understanding of The Star as a feeling of awe that acknowledges the inhuman but very real nature of a power beyond our control, I see it come up in cases where people or institutions are put on pedestals, dehumanizing them by seeing them as superhuman. This can happen with celebrities, in romantic partnerships, and even with social movements (as when people started saying “Palestine is freeing us!”).
Putting all of our hope on an individual entity is a misuse of the energy of The Star. Instead of convincing ourselves that gods or storms or political leaders will develop compassion and stop the destruction they’ve been causing, or that one small group of people alone will save the world, we can instead allow ourselves to fully feel our surprise and terror, feel into our own compassionate humanity, and prepare to meet the storm all together in a way that ensures our collective survival.
