Hyperallergic's Art Tarotscope for the Fall Equinox
What must we embrace as the autumn leaves change color and the nights get a little crisper, a little darker?
Hyperallergic’s tarotscope series is a combination of tarot with astrology, a reading for the collective readership combined with cards for the major astrological signs, grouped by their elemental associations. These are developed by AX Mina, a Hyperallergic contributor and producer for Five and Nine, a podcast about magic, work, and economic justice. These tarotscopes have a special focus on the arts and creative practice, for each solstice and equinox, to mark the turning of the seasons.
At the twilight of New York City’s characteristically soupy summer, I had a chance to visit the Morgan Library’s amazing tarot show, which offers 500 years of perspective on a deck system that still feels so contemporary in its relevance for both artists and tarot practitioners alike. As the long nights of fall begin, I can sense that major waves of change on the political front are on the horizon. By December, many of the conflicts and uncertainties we see today will have had a chance to play out on the world stage.
In honor of the Morgan Library’s prized collection, this season’s tarotscope is read using the 15th-century Visconti-Sforza deck, likely hand-painted by Bonifacio Bembo’s studio for the eponymous Milanese aristocratic family. Because it’s an incomplete deck of just 35 cards, I used a combination of a stand-in printed deck and a large language model (LLM) to draw just those 35 for this reading, rather than the standard 78 cards of tarot today.
I drew the cards on the longest night of the year, the beginning of the fall equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, in this ninth month of the Wheel of Fortune Year (in the tarot system) and the eighth month of the Horse Year (in East and Southeast Asian lunar systems).
For this equinox, we read with a simple “Past Present Future” spread, if only because the turning of the seasons to fall always puts me in a reflective mood. The first card represents the recent past, the second our general present, and the third an indeterminate amount of time in the future. I drew additional cards for the astrological signs to add further color to these shades of future.
And we start with an inquiry: What must we as artists embrace as the autumn leaves change color and the nights get a little crisper, a little darker?
