The Eights
Our discussion of the sevens reminds us of a neat trick to help us learn the Minor Arcana through numerology: the numerological meaning of the cards for any given number can be tied very closely to the meanings of their corresponding cards in the Major Arcana. So if the sevens are tied closely to the themes in the Chariot, the eights are tied closely to the themes of Strength (Key VIII, or Card 8, in the Major Arcana).
Strength’s principle themes were of channeling your inner power and strength, in the face of colossal hostility. It meant being brave enough to stick your hands into the lion’s maw and not flinch. It meant standing up to bigotry, misinformation and hate — which people identifying under the asexual and aromantic umbrellas often encounter in the form of aphobia, and the littany of misinformed “facts” often circulated around social media and in popular culture about what asexuality and aromanticness is, and how those who identify as either ace or aro (or both) are supposed to exist in an amatonormative and cisheteronormative world.
These themes continue in the eights of the Minor Arcana: these cards are about channeling your power and your strength — not just to overcome the limitations you are struggling against, but to transcend and rise above them. It means not just standing up to all of the aphobic haters you come across online, or in your friends and family groups but also realizing that in the end, they simply just don’t matter. Their opinions about asexuality or aromanticness can’t touch you.
We see this in the Eight of Swords, one of the cards I personally relate to so much in the tarot. Especially in this day and age, who doesn’t relate to the person at the focal point of the card, surrounded ominously by the barricade of swords? You don’t have to be ace or aro to feel that at some point in your recent life, you’ve felt like you’ve been bound and blindfolded, a wall of blades behind you, separating you from what once felt safe and comfortable. That’s true especially now, in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is all too easy to feel trapped by a situation, a relationship, or even a specific person. That the pandemic has been (and for many, continues to be) one such source of confinement is a given. But there is also the claustrophobia from being with caustic family, toxic parents and housemates, or even partners whose emotional and romantic connections with you have sadly dried up and withered away. Emotional, financial or familial obligations, are strong motivational forces that can pull you back towards toxic or even abusive relationships — especially relationships where a sexual mismatch has been discovered, or with immediate and closer family members who are queerphobic or aphobic.
And yet, look closer at the figure in the middle of the card. Are they really confined by all of those swords? The line of swords forms a gap where their body — our body — is. The cloth the binds our bodies doesn’t look as tight as we first think it is. The cloth itself…it isn’t a rope is it? It looks and feels quite thin, fragile even. It almost seems like if we struggled or moved our bodies enough, we could just shake it off, take off our own blindfold, turn around, and and realized we could have just walked back to the security of the castle behind you all along…
And as if to further reinforce this, the pools of water on the rocky ground beneath us just barely touch our feet; a symbol that even though we may not be fully conscious of how close we really are to freedom, our inner intuition is all too aware of this uncomfortable fact: When it comes to situations in which we feel trapped, whether it be by lonliness, or aphobia, or any of the numerous parts of our life that we feel are enveloping and engulfing us, a path out to freedom is closer than we think.
I really don’t want this to come across as minimizing the legitimate suffering of people in our community. The crippling effects of loneliness and isolation are real. The withering and acidic effects of living with abusive family, friends or loved ones are real. Aphobia is real. The pandemic is real. These are all things that, try as we might, we must learn to live with as best we can. And nothing is ever going to change that. At the same time though, I personally do think it is possible (and I do stress, “possible”) to have a mindset that is not solely focused on what we lack. It is possible to have a mindset that is not focused on the where and how of our suffering in our life.
Without diving too far off of the deep end and into “woo woo” territory (and while doing my best to avoid the pernicious trap that is Toxic Positivity), mental and emotional exercises like regular meditation and self-reflective gratitude lists (e.g. listing things to be grateful for) are important and surprisingly effective first steps (but not, I will add again, panaceas) to help us with this. Counselling and therapy are also powerful tools to help us change our mindset. These particular resources are not always accessible or available to all due to cost or location, but in some areas, therapists can be found which do offer sliding-scale or more accessible graduate student pricing. The widespread use of Zoom means that distance therapy is now a much more viable option for more people, and failing that, self-guided therapy programs like WRAP (Wellness Remedial Action Plan) do exist.
All this is to say that like many other scenes in the tarot, if we feel bound, blindfolded and trapped, it is not permanent. One way or another, we will get free. This too shall pass.
Speaking of passing, this takes us to the Eight of Cups, another of my favorite cards in the tarot. Here, we are walking away from a neatly arranged line of cups. They stand well ordered, minus of course the one cup on the second row. Interestingly enough, the second row of cups looks incomplete. Numerically this is necessary since the number has to add to eight, but the gap between the second and third cup is hard to ignore.
If we look at the figure, they are wearing a red colored cloak (red on garments being a symbol of desire, vitality, action, passion and self-confidence). Their head seems to be turned up at the moon (who is looking back at them); note that this figure looks nothing at all like the figure in the Five of Cups; this person isn’t walking away in sorrow or mournfulness, but rather, in self-assured determination. And why are they choosing to walk away? The two rows of cups give a clear answer. While they are ordered, neat and tidy, that gap between the second and third cup on the second row tells us that something is clearly missing. Pamela Coleman-Smith could have drawn that third cup beside the other two, and we still could have been able to see the figure walking away. But the gap tells us that inspite of the seeming neatness and tidiness of this little arrangement, it is still incomplete. It is still missing something important. What that something is is hinted at with the moon, who seems to look on at us in approval for what we are doing. The Moon is a card of illusions; of seeing things which aren’t there, and believing that things aren’t there when they’re actually all too real and quite plainly in front of us.
What we are leaving behind is something we thought we needed, or thought we had to do (as seen in the cups), and what we are heading towards is our higher purpose — what we actually need, spiritually.
Again, my apologies for veering slightly in to “woo woo” territory, but what I mean by “higher purpose” is a place of greater personal development, peace and happiness for which our intuition or inner selves are striving to reach. Maybe our in-person conventionally allo friend groups or social life isn’t what we need; perhaps we need to really seek out the company or social groups of fellow arospec, acespec or queer folk who can genuinely understand what we’re going through as we navigate ourselves in the greater amatonormative and cisnormative world. Maybe this might be a time to go back to our time as The Hermit and engage in more inner work to further understand and better get to know who we are and what we want out of life and relationships. Maybe it’s time for us to sit down and do some additional reading about the aro or ace experience (and books like Julie Sondra Decker’s The Invisible Orientation or Angela Chen’s Ace would be great places to start).
On a different level, maybe what we thought we needed was a conventional dating life. Thinking about what I encounter among my ace friends both online and offline, I can’t help but sometimes imagine the neat arrangement of cups at the bottom to mimic the neat arrangement of dating apps we may have in a app folder on our phone. After putting up with the aphobia, the constant harassment and objectification, and of course the requisite wave of unsolicited genitalia photos, and the constant stream of disappointments, we’ve decided that it’s now time to say goodbye. And rather than kiss dating goodbye, we can shift what might have thought we needed in conventionally sexual dating, to and transform it into something else: perhaps an exploration of the possibilities of queer theplatonic partners, or a further deepening and enrichment of the connections we already have. Either way, we have started our journey of going past and beyond the expectations set for us of what we “should” have in our relationships, and into what we really want. For ace and aro people, it is not an easy or clear journey to take, but an important one nevertheless.
Speaking of journeys, we come to the Eight of Pentacles: a journey of a somewhat different (and yet, still similar) kind.
The Eight of Pentacles is all about doing the work. The Three of Pentacles includes the Master Craftsman in its triune picture of creation; here the craftsman is still an apprentice in training, working away at their production line-like set of pentacles (another visual pun at play here, where the numerical imagery of the card is worked into the symbolic illustration of the card itself by Pamela Coleman-Smith).
This is again a statement about personal work (though of course in the course of a reading it could also refer directly to professional work, or career progress). If other cards talk about work in the sense of building community, this is about building community but on a smaller scale. This could take the form of building a safe space for yourself by working on establishing physical boundaries (like reconfiguring the furniture or arrangement of items in your room or shared living space to afford a greater sense of privacy), or establishing a safe space for yourself and others at work or school (like arranging a space, either online or offline, for you and other queer or ace and aro folks at your workplace or place of study to meet up). For creative ace and aro people this is an especially powerful call to work hard on your art; to work hard at your manuscript or short story drafts or blog posts, or essay collection (if you’re a writer), or your sketches and paintings, or your music (whether or not your write your own). If you felt especially called by the Ace of Wands to start a YouTube channel about your experience and musings as an asexual or aromantic, or to start a crowdfunfing campaign to stimulate your art, this is the call to keep working hard on your creations, be it visual art, writing, music, electronic media (like a video game) or any glorious combination of all of them.
The Eight of Wands actually tells us what can happen once we get all of that going: progress, and lots of it, and quickly. “Rapid Action” is what always comes to my mind personally when this card comes up. Rapidity of thought, and rapidity of motion. Once we get the momentum started in the Aces or in the Three of Pentacles going through the Eight of Pentacles, that’s momentum that can build and build and build if we keep investing the effort to keep on going. That’s what we see here in the Eight of Wands. A few essays here and there may become a new book about asexuality or the asexuality spectrum. A few sketches here and there may soon become a new expansive canvas about what it is like to navigate and fight through amatonormativity. Some explorations of music, art and video may all of a sudden come together into an experimental video game on asexuality or aromanticness that might go up on itch.io, or brand new content for your ace or aro-themed YouTube channel…the possibilities are boundness, set only by what your imagination and passion are driving you to do. And it’s just your luck: they’re putting the pedal to the metal. Enjoy the ride.
