Full Moon Revelations: The Hierophant Encounters Death
A poem at the threshold of this Solstice's initiation into Love. Info on this year's Walking the Ways. Full Moon practice prompts and invitation to explore your spiritual leadership.
Greetings, my fellow seekers!
Because I love After Kathleen Raine’s Amo Ergo Sum Because I love leaf unfurls deep green to drink radiant sun, day’s pilgrim of the sky. Because I love oak branch prickled with light forms acorn, seed of the next season. Because I love catbird and crow mix hidden sweet and sharp among the leaves. Because I love the stream is cool where boy and girl crabwalk the rocks, squeal when foaming water hits them. Because I love there is rock, eternal in its breaking. We live in the shatter. Because I love in the shatter I put my rock heart down by the dark bird dead, breast pointed to the sky. Because I love in the shatter there is a river undammed rimmed with lace and gold, all weeds, twinning. Because I love in the shatter a nest is made from broken twigs, some down and twists of trash. Because I love in the shatter blackbird, that catbird, larks and a sparrow, insistent in their song at dawn, break light out of night, stars fall as we rise into a day as yet untouched and tempting us to live, yes, live, as if we mattered. Published in The Black River: Death Poems
I offer this poem of mine to you because it holds both this full moon day associated with Death (full moon post is below) and the coming Solstice season’s invitation to walk the path of Love.
If you have been a reader for a while you know that I offer retreats-in-everyday life around the Winter and Summer Solstices. We will once again be making our way toward the Summer Solstice with ritual, reflection, attention to nature, and carrying cards, but how I am delivering this program will change a little this year. We’ll start and end the season through the Shining Tribe Exploratorium May and June sessions and there will be an in-person event at Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary in Easthampton/Northampton, MA on June 21st. Here are all the details.
Walking the Ways of the Summer Light 2025
The sun rules the summer season and, like the plants, we humans can respond to its exuberant invitations: reach for the light; grow to new heights; express ourselves and our delight; sing, dance, travel, paint (or whatever form your creativity takes); let our bodies love another and the earth upon which we walk. The explosive sun also invites us to release our anger, rise up against injustice, shake off our constraints.
If we take up the summer sun’s invitations, we can transcend the boundaries of body, mind, and spirit to seek integration and wholeness within ourselves and in connection to others. While winter is the season for change through inner work, the summer gets us out and walking the ways for growth.
One day isn’t enough to celebrate the season of the sun so for the past 11 years at Soul Path Sanctuary we have Walked the Ways of the Summer Light beginning the 4 weeks before the Solstice moment. Each week leading up to the Solstice, we wisdom wander in the place where we live inspired by a different element and gathering questions to support our soul tending. Then gather virtually to share our experiences.
When we arrive at the Solstice on June 20th, we select one of our questions to seek an answer to. After the Solstice, we embark on a pilgrimage—which might be a big trip or finding a spot in our neighborhood to sit and observe—to seek an answer to our question.
While the sun is the star of summer, the moon through its changing travels brings a unique gift each year. This season the new moon arrives on the first day of Walking the Ways, Monday, May 26, and, through its correspondence with the Tarot’s Lovers card initiates us on the path of Love which travels through the Solstice before delivering us to the next new moon on June 25th.
Love. What is it?
The most common love stories more often than not offer only small and proscribed visions. Love = romance. Love is only between and for certain people. Love is just a feeling.
But the writer, teacher, and social critic bell hooks tells a different story. One where love is more complex and dynamic as are we when we seek to love. hooks tells us that love is not a feeling, but rather a verb, a practice. She writes:
Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.
Interesting how closely this aligns to the mix of meanings given for the Lovers card where the earliest Tarot tradition highlights the meaning of choosing even more than love.
hooks also writes: There can be no love without justice.
Here hook obliterates false barriers set up between the personal and the collective. We may directly experience love as being held within our personal relationships, but these relationships exist within a larger whole. This larger whole must be just for love to exist.
Justice, like Love, comes into being because of will, the will of the collective to uphold truth, balance, right order, and all to have equal access to Justice’s protection. The work of Justice is never done, is constantly negotiated, always being renewed. So, the same must be true for Love.
The entwined existence of Love and Justice are under attack certainly in the US and in so many other places in the world.
So, this Solstice season let’s defend Love and Justice.
Even better: let’s cultivate the renewal and expansion of their life-giving qualities. Let’s keep giving our Love away as we move toward the Solstice.
Walking the Ways will be offered as a container to support growing your understanding and practice of Love in these ways:
~ Virtual sessions to close and open the season for paid subscribers of The Shining Tribe Exploratorium on May 25th and June 29th at 12:30pm ET (time zone converter). In our opening session, we will dive deep into Rachel Pollack’s vision of love from her Lovers card and I’ll go over the practices and elemental weekly flow of Walking the Ways.
~ Weekly posts on The Shining Tribe Exploratorium for any subscriber (free and paid) to prompt working with the elements to deepen your practice of Love, connection to the natural world, and knowledge of Tarot.
~ In-person gathering on Saturday, June 21st from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm at Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary in Easthampton/Northampton, MA. Save Sunday, the 22nd, as a rain date. We’ll be connecting in love to the land and picking questions to find an answer to. We’ll spend a good chunk of time out in the sanctuary. There are trails and an accessible boardwalk/path for doing the right amount of movement for you. Sliding scale offering of $6 to $60 (Get it? 6, The Lovers!). Registration deadline is June 13th because you’ll need to do a little prep.
You could do one, two, or all of these offerings. Those coming to the virtual sessions and in-person gathering will get an overview booklet that lays out all the happenings and practices of the season.
Don’t hesitate to ask me questions. I’d love to help you put a plan together for cultivating Love in the summer season.
Full moon blessings to you,
Carolyn
Events
May 26 - June 29: Walking the Ways of the Summer Light
May 31: Presenting with JuPong Lin, Rachel Teferet, and Mona Shiber at the Mass Poetry Festival in Salem, Massachusetts on “We, the poets, grant you refuge:” How Palestinian Poetry Inspires Activism. Mass Poetry Festival is 2 days of poetry workshops and readings. There are various affordable options for coming for a day or if you are a student or whatever you need is. Registration and more info here.
June 14: The next national day of action.
July: Omega’s Wisdom of the Tarot with me and Mary Greer July 21 to 25 in Rhinebeck, NY. This week is part-workshop, part retreat, and part community reunion. Each year the topics and activities emerge from the needs and interests of the group. Rachel Pollack and Mary did it together for 30 years and created some of their favorite Tarot practices during the week. For the past 3 years, I’ve been doing what I can to carry the torch for Rachel and bring my own Tarot takes. This year I am looking forward to expanding material on working with the magic inherent in the world. I attended this week in 1999 and it changed my life.
November 2026: Kingston Tarot Lenormand Conference November 13 to 15, 2026 in Ontario, Canada. Registration is open to allow for a very economical payment plan.
Full Moon Revelations: The Hierophant Encounters Death
The height of this moonth’s cycle comes with the full moon arriving on Monday, the 12th (exact at 12:56 pm ET, time zone converter), and offers a revelation about how the lunar energies initiated on the April 27th new moon are developing. That new moon, guided by its association with the Hierophant, 5 of Pentacles, and King of Pentacles invited us to be kin with all our fellow humans as well as the more-than-human world. Out of the full moon revelation about this developing energy, we are issued an invitation to return a gift to the world in the final weeks of the lunar cycle.
The exact moment of the moon’s fullness comes in the sign of Scorpio associated with the Tarot’s 13th Major Arcana card: Death.
When the Hierophant encounters Death, the structures and beliefs that uphold religious and spiritual institutions are called to transform, to let go of worn out ways of acting and embrace new ones.
In 2021 during another lunar encounter between the Hierophant and Death I mused:
With institutions so broken by the many Tower collapses of our times and the need of a grieving planet so great, we will need many spiritual leaders to help us through and birth the next becoming. We all have a part to play. How will you answer the call to a new kind of spiritual leadership this moonth and beyond?
Under this full moon is a good time to reflect on how you have been answering this call.
If you don’t think of yourself as a spiritual leader, I still urge you to do this reflection. The new leadership we need will not look like the old, will not be defined by the past so what you are doing in taking care of your family, screaming for change, creating art, pushing the envelope at work, or being kind to a stranger may really be what reflects the spiritual leadership we need.
If you do wear some kind of spiritual leadership hat (maybe you read Tarot for one or 10 or a hundred people this year), you might look at the shadow ways you have been developing as a leader by considering what you learned from making a mistake or how a failure has become a fertile area for growth.
You could, of course, pull cards or explore these alternative versions of the Hierophant to identify the ways you are a spiritual leader for these times.
You may want to engage in Visio Divina to find the layers of wisdom within the cards.
Our other usual practices for moon contemplation to further explore these themes are (do one, some, or all!):
Moon bathe by sitting or lying under a window or outside on the ground. Let go of your thoughts and soak in the light.
Take out any reading or your reflections from the new moon and look at them in a new light. How does your understanding of the cards shift now that time has passed and light has shifted? (If you haven’t done a reading yet, no problem, just do it now under the light of the full moon. You can try the one from the new moon.)
Bring out your Hierophant and Death cards from your Tarot deck and connect them to your new moon reading / reflections. You could place/imagine these cards on either side of your reading or above and below, and then look at how they add meaning into the story your original cards offered you.
When you are done, remember to offer gratitude for what you have received. Consider what gift you now want to return to the world. Pulling a card for guidance on the gift is always a fine thing to do. In the coming weeks and before the moon returns to dark around May 24th offer your gift to the world.
Soul Path Sanctuary Library
These essays offer inspiration and practice prompts to support the loving flow between the living and the dead. They are available at no cost in the Soul Path Sanctuary library. Feel free to share with anyone who could use support on their grief journey.
Broken Open Heart in the Imaginal Realm
Speak Soul-to-Soul
49 Days and the Green Door of Death
Eternity Box: Anniversary of a Death
Soul Path Sanctuary Offerings
Question-Focused Tarot Sessions
I am offering these 60-90 minute interactive sessions to explore a focus question by phone or Zoom. Cost: $100. If interested, contact me about timing and to receive your focus question prep sheet.
Soul Path Mentoring
Offered through on-going hour-long sessions usually at monthly or seasonal intervals. My studies and life experience make me a mentoring match for:
Developing a spiritual practice
Integrating Tarot into your spiritual practice
Grief accompaniment
Embracing your creative process, especially for writers
Moving through a life transition
Sessions are conversations guided by questions and can include Tarot (or not).
I’m happy to have a conversation with you about if you are interested in exploring this kind of soul support practice.
Looking forward to seeing you at Mass Poetry!