As we settle into September…
This is a general collective reading of the energy of September. Below is my own interpretation of the cards that appeared before me.
As always take what resonates, and set fire to the rest!
We’re coming off the lunar eclipse in Pisces, August 28. An eclipse skips the knock and holds the door open, waiting to see whether you’ll walk through it or stand in the frame explaining yourself to no one. Hopefully you took the invitation and crossed through. Whatever needed releasing, released; whatever needed shedding is, with any luck, in a pile on the floor and not still folded neatly in the closet, waiting to be needed again. There is grief in eclipses, and also mercy, the sky rearranging itself so you don’t have to be the one who decides.
We arrive in September still a little wrung out from that, and almost immediately the calendar hands us a New Moon in Virgo on September 10. Virgo doesn’t traffic in the grand gesture the way Pisces does. It has no interest in your dreamy vision board. It wants to know if you did the laundry. This new moon leans us toward health, routine, the quiet architecture of an actual life: organizing the shelf, tending the body, being of some real use to somebody. Kabbalistically, this is Earth doing what Earth does, taking the vision and making it earn its keep in Malkuth, which translates to Kingdom, the tenth sephirah where abstract spiritual energy takes concrete, physical form.
The same week, Uranus stations retrograde in Gemini, the planet of sudden change will move us inward instead of outward to focus on our internal worlds, toward how we think, how we talk to ourselves, what information we’re actually letting in versus what we’re just performing having read.
Then on September 22, the Sun crosses into Libra and we hit the Fall Equinox, one exact, held breath of day equaling night, about as close as the calendar gets to a Kabbalist’s idea of perfect balance, Tiferet’s brief moment in full sun, mercy and severity resting in the same weight on the same scale. Four days later, the Full Moon in Aries enters hot, personal, impatient, the exact opposite temperature of the equilibrium we just tasted. A day after that, Mars moves into Leo, so whatever the Aries moon sets alight, Leo is going to insist on performing it for a crowd.
Threaded underneath all of it is a harvest current. September sits at the hinge of the wheel, Virgo’s diligent gathering-in giving way to Libra’s equinox, the exact moment the year stops to weigh what it grew against what it planted back in the early promises of spring. This is a month built for reward, for sacred thresholds, for finally being handed the thing you did the actual, unglamorous work for. It wants to feel like completion, the closing of a spiritual cycle.
But there’s a block. The Four of Pentacles energy keeps showing up quietly behind all of it, and we’ve pulled this card before. The figure clutching coins to the chest, the crown, the head, not because there isn’t enough, but because letting go has started to feel indistinguishable from losing. That grip is exactly what’s keeping the Four of Wands from standing upright this month, and exactly what’s keeping the World from fully arriving on schedule. You cannot walk through a sacred threshold with your arms full of the last cycle. Completion is an offer. It is only waiting on you to open your hands first. Palms up, bitches!
It’s a month built like an alchemist’s vessel, something gets sealed, heated, and asked to hold its shape under pressure before it’s ever allowed out into the air. Basically, we release, then we go inward, and only then are we handed the stage. All the world’s one, or so I’ve heard.
We start in the past with The Lovers, a figure between two choices, an angel overhead, and nobody else who is going to make this decision on your behalf, however sweetly they offer. Robert A. Johnson would tell you this card was never really about romance. It’s about the specific, unglamorous moment you stop outsourcing your values to someone else’s approval and choose from your own wellspring instead of for an audience. In alchemy, this is the conjunctio, the sacred marriage. Did you prioritize pleasure last month, real, full-bodied pleasure? Or did you overindulge at the buffet of it and mistake the overindulgence for devotion?
Sitting in the present is the Ace of Pentacles, a single hand out of a cloud, holding one coin, one seed, one very literal, very grounded opportunity. This is the material world’s answer to a choice made well. Pentacle aces reveal themselves slowly; they arrive sitting in your open palm looking almost too ordinary to be the beginning of anything. On the Tree of Life, an Ace is Kether, the crown, the root, the spark before the thing has taken any shape at all, but here it’s Kether already leaning toward Malkuth, spirit already halfway into a body. The offer being extended to you right now is real. Don’t be so busy watching the sky for a sign, or the cup for a fish, that you miss the coin already sitting in your own hand.
Looking ahead, the Four of Wands reversed. Upright, it’s the homecoming, the celebration, the wedding arch, belonging that’s been earned and is finally being marked out loud. Reversed, the structure’s still there, but something about the celebration got postponed, made private, or skipped over entirely. Maybe the milestone gets hit and nobody throws the party. Maybe you built the foundation and moved in before it was finished. In alchemical terms, this is the vessel sealed but not yet fully cooked, the athanor still doing its deliberate work in a room nobody’s watching. It’s a homecoming that arrives more sheepishly than you expected, or later than you wanted, or without the fanfare that would have made it feel real. It still counts.
Overarching all of it, we’re back with The Seven of Cups, the same card that marked August, now returning as the theme of the whole month instead of a single moment inside its weather. When a card repeats like this, it’s rarely because the lesson stuck the first time. Last month it was cups in cloud, floating possibilities, the shadow hiding in the abundance of choice. This month it isn’t a passing temptation, it’s the sky itself. The Lovers already made their choice. The Ace already put something solid and real in your hand. And still, here’s the fog rolling back in, patient, insistent, asking if you’re sure. Sallie Nichols called this the psyche drunk on its own possibility. Alchemists had their own name for the trap: aurum vulgi, common gold, fool’s gold. September wants to know whether you can tell the difference now, or whether you just got better at hiding the bottle.
Underneath it, in the shadow, sits the Page of Cups, a young figure staring into a cup with a fish popping out of it, delighted, a little stunned, brand new to feeling things this deeply. Pages are often messengers, students, beginners, forever. The shadow question here isn’t “why do I keep getting lost in illusion,” it’s “why do I keep treating every new feeling like it’s the first one I’ve ever had.” You’re not new to this! The Page of Cups approaches each cup in the Seven with wide-eyed wonder instead of discernment (there’s our favorite word again!), wants the surprise of the fish rather than the information of what’s actually inside. That’s why the Seven of Cups came back. The choices didn’t get harder. Something in us keeps re-enrolling as a beginner, mistaking a fresh feeling for a trustworthy one, which, in Kabbalistic terms, is simply Netzach, the sphere of desire, victory, and glamour, refusing to graduate into Hod’s clearer, far less flattering light.
The invitation this month is to let the Lovers’ clarity and the Ace’s plain, grounded offer be enough, no further audition required. To let the Four of Wands’ quiet homecoming be the homecoming, even without the red carpet. The astrology this month is arranged to work from the inside out before it ever asks you to shine from the outside in, Virgo before Libra, Uranus turning inward before Aries lights the match, the long private simmering before Leo asks you to serve it at the party, hot and garnished.
Meet that heat, when it comes, not with an adolescent bullishness but with the unhurried decidedness of a wise sage, somebody who’s already done the sorting, and doesn’t need a cup to be gold to know it’s the Holy Grail, or the Goblet of Fire.
Numerology of the month: 20
Keywords: the awakening, judgment, precognition, obstacles overcome through patience, call to action, diplomacy, emotional sensitivity, attunement, high intuition, purpose driven, karmic struggle, rising from illusion.
This month’s number is 20. In Kabbalah and Hebrew numerology (Gematria), the number 20 corresponds to the Hebrew letter Kaf, which symbolizes the open palm, untapped potential, and a transition into full spiritual or moral accountability
In Chaldean numerology, 20 is known as the Awakening, and also, more sternly, the Judgment. The old tablets picture it as a winged angel sounding a trumpet while the sleeping rise out of the ground with their hands folded in prayer. It’s not a punishing number, but it is an insistent one. Twenty, reduced down to its root of two, has a desire for taste. It wants beauty. It wants pleasure. It genuinely believes the world could be better, more finely made, more aligned. This is the compound number of lighting a candle with the intention of activism. The obstacle here is one of focus. Twenty falls for one idea completely and then quietly forgets a second idea was ever an option. It doesn’t have hobbies. It has devotions. And it will describe both with the exact same unblinking conviction.
It’s also, unapologetically, a number of aesthetics and hedonism, good taste as its own kind of spellwork, pleasure treated as a legitimate line of inquiry instead of something to apologize for later. Just watch the swing. Left unchecked, that same hunger for beauty tips over into melancholy and then grief, the specific flavor that shows up once the room isn’t beautiful enough anymore to distract you from what’s actually happening underneath it.
The tablets also tie this number to unusually vivid, sometimes precognitive dreaming, which tracks with a Seven of Cups month; the unconscious doesn’t go quiet just because the conscious mind chose something. If anything, it gets louder.
In the I-Ching, Hexagram 20 is Guan, Contemplation or Overview, the cleansing THEN the liberation. Cultivate learning and beware of failing to recognize patterns.
Introspection doesn’t stay contained to the person doing it. It leaks. It becomes a frequency you’re emanating without meaning to, and other people pick it up whether or not either of you clocks it happening. Don’t underestimate this force.
Learn to tell the difference between what’s deep in you and what’s just performing depth, and you’ll start spotting that same difference everywhere else without even trying.
True leadership begins with internal alignment.
In the gap between one thing ending and the next thing starting, between each empty cup and it’s promise of possibility, don’t rush to fill it. Sit in it, awake, renewed. Watch what’s actually happening instead of what you assume is happening, the rhythms underneath, the cycles that were running long before you showed up to interrupt them. That’s where the real laws live. Look at yourself and the challenges in September less like a problem to solve and more like a lens to sharpen. This is a moment for seeing clearly. It is also, whether you’re ready or not, a moment for being seen.
In a world that moves quickly, choosing to pause, to reflect, to go internally, is no small thing. Whether you read every word slowly or skim what calls to you, I’m grateful you are here.
A Few Questions to Sit With
For those beholden of pen, the journalers…some questions to help guide you into the month.
- What did I choose last month, and am I standing all the way inside that choice, or still keeping the other door propped open?
- How do I tell the difference, in the moment, between a choice I’m making and a choice I’m just letting happen to me?
- Where is a plain, unglamorous opportunity already sitting in my open hand that I’ve overlooked because it didn’t show up dressed as a miracle?
- How do I tell the difference between watching myself with real attention and just watching myself perform having an opinion?
- Where have I mistaken reacting quickly for seeing clearly? What would it look like to watch this situation the way wind moves over treetops, touching everything, forcing nothing?
- What would it look like to want one thing completely this month, instead of wanting six things a little?
- If the Seven of Cups is back, what’s the version of the lesson of conscious choice I skipped the first time through?
- How do I let myself be seen for what I’ve actually built, instead of downplaying it before anyone else can?
“See” you next month!
Mind The Mess On Mondays 