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Dear reader,

Adrift into an indefinite period of my “thirties”, its feels rarified to have a craft that can only improve with time. As a writer in the oracular arts, I orient towards longevity, impact and care-ful construction. Writing is how I produce time, at least when I don’t compartmentalize my life to write. My writing is unruly, in the way that it destabilizes any sense or sort of sequence about the time one does this or that. Writing is a way of life, unfolding time, all the time.

When I can sit down and write for long stretches at a time, it’s rather sitting down in reverent devotion to the muse, listening patiently for revelation. I must disengage from the daily rush of preoccupations and become as a vessel. Working with only twenty-six letters, I must somehow make music. But as cartomancers know, some sound requires the reader. Though I’ve much to mature, I have time.

I’m not sure this is what they mean by “aging successfully.” Time’s effect on writing is inverted by the body. In a misogynist world of racial capitalism, aging is a pathological crisis. Its something to be avoided—or at the very least delayed—at all costs.

When a consumer culture devalues maturity and experience to exalt a young adulthood it leave us with abject old bodies, but no elders.

Legacy can’t be conflated with a facelift. But in the decans of Virgo both the awareness of time and its consequences come. Virgo, the mutable earth sign, the end of a material process, corresponds to the Ten of Pentacles. This card concerns the elderly, the grandparents, domesticity, intergenerational wealth, inheritances, land and property, trees, time, and definitely death. ­This card opens discussions on the biopolitics of aging, what it means to be “elderly”, and how we understand relations of care.

While Mercury is the exalted ruler of this decan, Venus, planet of: value(s), aesthetics, beauty, desire, ornamentation, women, femmes, nonbinary queers and transgenders, is here in her maximum fall. Here the hands praying to God are leprous.

The Arabic Picatrix describes this decan as a “phase of old age, weakness, immobility, chronic illness, uprooting trees, and the destruction of buildings,” while the Latin Picatrix says it is “a white man, with a great body, wrapped in white linen, and with him is a women holding in her hand black oil. This is a face of debility, age, infirmity, sloth, injury to limbs and destruction of people.”1

From the Three Books of Occult Philosophy: “A white woman and a deaf or old man, leaning on a stick. This is the signification of weakness, illness, the loss of members, for the destruction of trees, and the plundering of the earth.”2

The Liber Hermetis: “It is like a mummy, its whole body is like one who has been buried.”3