What the SEVEN of Wands and Eight of Cups Are Telling Me This Eclipse Season

My mom bought me my first tarot deck when I was a teenager — the MerryDay Tarot, from a shop in Salem. It's not a traditional Rider-Waite deck; it's got its own strange, wonderful imagery — dragons, seasons, nature woven through every card. I still have it, thirty years later.

I think about that gift a lot. My mom saw something in me, some sort of spark or fascination, and she leaned into it, even though I was, if anything, a kid who played things too safe. She always pushed me to think differently, to take chances I wasn't sure I was allowed to take. She didn't hand me tarot as a party trick. She handed it to me as a tool to get out of my own head, out of the one angle I could see something from, and into a wider view.

That's still what the cards do for me. When I read for myself, I'm not looking for a spread that predicts what's coming. I'm using the cards — along with my own intuition and connection to my guides — to step outside my own perspective for a minute. When you're in the middle of something, you're stuck looking at it from exactly one angle: your own, your ego's, the version of the story where you're the main character and everything is about you. Tarot gives me the other vantage point — the one where I can actually see what I'm circling instead of just feeling it.

Why this eclipse season is asking for the same thing

Eclipse season does, structurally, what tarot does for me personally — just at a much bigger scale. It's an astrological invitation to get outside your own ego, your own single angle, and see what's actually true instead of what you've been telling yourself.

This eclipse season isn't one event — it's a pair, and each half carries its own tarot card. The solar eclipse landed at 20° Leo, in the third decan, whose card is the Seven of Wands — Valour. On its face, it's a figure holding high ground, defending a position against pressure from below. But this is a Leo South Node eclipse, and South Node eclipses ask us to release, not defend — so I don't read this card as instruction to keep fighting. I read it as a mirror. It's showing you the posture -- the face or persona -- you're stuck in: still guarding a position, still proving you deserve the ground you're standing on, still performing readiness for a fight that may not even be coming anymore. The card isn't telling you to hold the line. It's asking whether you still need to.

The lunar eclipse that follows lands at 4° Pisces, in the first decan, whose card is the Eight of Cups — walking away from something that looks complete and stable, because some part of you knows it isn't actually finished. Not a collapse. A quiet leaving, in search of something the visible success can't give you.

Put those two together and you get the arc of the season: first, notice the face you're still defending out of habit rather than truth — then ask whether you're willing to walk away from it, toward something you can't fully name yet. That's the same ego-removal tarot has always done for me, just written across two eclipses instead of one card pull. And it's not a question you can think your way through from inside your own perspective — which is exactly the point. You need to see it from outside yourself before you can tell which part of the arc you're actually standing in.

If you want that outside view right now

If any of that is landing — if you can feel yourself somewhere in that arc but can't quite name where — that's exactly what a reading is for. Not to predict what happens next, but to get you the outside vantage point you can't give yourself right now.

I'm running 25% off full readings (30 minutes) through this eclipse season (ends early September 2026). Reach out and let's book a time.

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