first, an apology: gemini season is in full swing, which means my social calendar is fuller than it otherwise is, and also yesterday felt incredibly like a saturday. so today’s newsletter is a day late! let’s get to it.
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i went through an egyptology phase when i was in my early teens; it was a brief phase, but the role of anubis has stuck with me ever since. the canine-headed god administered the weighing of the heart of the dead against a feather of truth. if the heart was heavier than the feather, the deceased was deemed impure and devoured by a waiting goddess.
perhaps it is not surprising that i loved this idea. libra is the only sign of the zodiac that is represented by an object and not a being - of course i would latch on to stories about scales, about balance, about judgment. (why yes, i did learn that my name means “judged by god” at an early age, and yes, it did have some sort of effect on me.)
i came back to the myth when i was doing a self-portrait project while living in dc. it seemed right to me that the heart was what was judged in the afterlife - after all, its activities were also what i was most concerned with. a feather, my heart: which would be heavier? surely my heart, which did feel so heavy those days.
which brings us to blind justice with her sword turned into scales. she, too, seems to be weighing feathers, but justice in tarot is less about judgment and more about balance. it reminds me of what martin luther king jr. said about the arc of the universe bending toward justice, but it also reminds me that we must do the bending.
because justice is about balance, but it is also about decisions. as the guide for the mesquite tarot says, “it’s also a call to action, a weighty one: consider the way your decisions now might affect what is to come.” justice can be furthered in each decision we make, even when it doesn’t seem obvious how. choosing justice, balance, when we can makes our hearts lighter, in the end.
may all your choices this week be easy, my darlings. good luck.
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this week’s deck: the wooden tarot