“Betwixt and Between”: Liminality in the Seven of Cups, The Hanged Man, Temperance, and Six of Cups Tarot Cards

Lately, I’ve been thinking how easily we default to the Death card in the Tarot or to the astrological eighth house when discussing transformation. The natural zodiacal connection to Scorpio and Pluto seems inescapable, particularly when you’ve had the pleasure of experiencing Pluto transit one of your angles.

One of the challenges in talking about Death or the eighth house is that the single reference can be reductive. In my experience, a profound personal transformation occurred in relation to my fourth-house/tenth-house axis, stirring up questions relating to the fourth-house ruler in the second. It was all about my values, my foundation, hopes and dreams, and what I wanted to prioritize in life. Instead of looking to the eighth house, the trigger resided elsewhere in the chart, reminding me that astrology, as much as Tarot, is nuanced, interlinked, and extremely complicated.

The idea of liminality came to mind when journaling about the current transits. With Mars’ ingress into Scorpio back in 2021, I’ll confess to heightened feelings of anxiety, arising without basis or provocation. It reminded me of being caught in a between-space, characterized by uncertainty, groundlessness, and even confronting a metaphorical abyss without a clear pathway to emergence. For me, these feelings were tied to larger life questions as Pluto transits through my fourth, but I imagine others have felt the same way at…