Hey readers! I’m Catherine, a staff writer on Allston Pudding. I wanted to combine my love of the Boston music scene and my practice as a tarot card reader by starting this Tarotscopes column. What are Tarotscopes? (Hopefully) once a month I will be doing an intuitive collective tarot reading by pulling a few cards for the weeks ahead and crafting a local music playlist to compliment it. 

What is tarot and how does it work? Tarot is the practice of using a specific deck made up of 78 playing cards to receive messages about the future. Most readers, myself included, use the cards as a tool to channel their intuition and determine how to best to prepare for the future and work on personal growth. Read on to see the cards I pulled for November!

VI of Cups:  Childhood, innocence, pleasure, the past

Judgement: Judgement, personal growth, release, acceptance, transformation

Notable Dates:

Mercury Retrograde: October 31 to November 20

Full Moon in Taurus: November 12

New Moon in Sagittarius: November 26

At first when I pulled these cards, I can’t lie—I was a little stumped. Of course, I love it when I intuitively understand a spread immediately, but some of the most interesting readings come from pulls that don’t click right away. It wasn’t until a few hours later, when I caught myself binge watching Degrassi and reminiscing about my high school days, that the answer hit me like a ton of bricks. Mercury retrograde.

In technical terms, Mercury retrograde refers to periods when the orbit of the planet Mercury changes and appears to be moving backwards. For those not familiar, Mercury is the planet of communication, information, and technology. When Mercury is in retrograde it means that these areas of our lives are negatively affected, like a car breaking down or a miscommunication with a coworker.

The VI of Cups represents innocence, childhood, and the past. If this retrograde has you feeling sentimental, no worries! It’s perfectly fine to feel longing for simpler times in your life, but a big reason why Mercury retrogrades can be so turbulent is that they so often dredge up unwelcome blasts from the past. People experience texts from an ex out of nowhere, or they bump into someone they’d lost touch with. If a retrograde brings up these kinds of people, thoughts, and feelings, it’s usually because they’re unresolved. It can also be a reminder of who you were in the past, and how you’ve grown as a person.

 So, while the VI of cups tells us it’s okay to go down memory lane the Judgement card urges us to tread lightly before acting on our nostalgia. You’ve fought long and hard to make it to where you are now. Before you engage with the past, consider whether it will be constructive or just lead you back to your old habits. If you’re tempted to return to something from your past, remember why you cut it out of your life in the first place. When you’re confronted with a problem you thought was put to bed, now might be a good time to consider whether or not it’s been truly resolved and how you can move past it once and for all. 

So to get you through another rocky retrograde, here’s a playlist for all the miscommunications, texts from your ex, and technological setbacks that may lie ahead. Together we’ll get through this.