UNDER THE STICKER, what came up from the bottom of the stairs
I made an effort this week to get back to my makers corner, testing out a new concept for my tarot pouches ahead of my stall at The Tarot Fayre this July. I’ll be bringing along my oracle artwork, ritual pieces and other strange treasures, which feels quietly thrilling after so much of this work living in the interior world for so long.
The Tarot Fayre
Saturday 18th July 2026, St Augustine’s Arts & Events Centre, Brighton
Exciting lineup of six talks and full day tickets now announced
I also got further along with my Tarot Majors Demystified workbook, arriving at card six, The Lover. I found a gorgeous image which moved me in that somatic, body-felt way, it seems to hold the starlight and magnetic feeling of two people and a warm encounter.
“The starlight feeling of two people in a warm encounter”
The Lover, Tarot Card VI
The correspondence of Gemini is alive in The Lover, Tarot card six. I think that many of us think of Gemini as this giddy butterfly lightness, the persona scattering a continual summer buzz of frivolity, but there is a twin imprint here, the myth of Castor and Pollux exists, reminding us that Gemini is never only lightness, but the attempt to hold heaven and the underworld in the same story.
I have spent time immersed in astrology again this week, seeing where the progressed chart yields new psychological concepts, both for myself and my sitters. It has been enriching to reconnect to Lilith and find her situated bang on my progressed Gemini ascendant, sitting tightly conjunct this point. This felt like an incredibly rich discovery because, the week prior, a women’s art group I am connected to seemed to implode just at the point of reckoning into something functional, and as a newly contributing member I was conscious of checking with myself whether I had played some role in this split.
Something about it left me wondering if I had become a kind of catalyst or protagonist within the dynamic, the forbidden voice, the uncontained intellect, the one who speaks what polite systems suppress. It felt that way. I spoke to my partner afterwards about working within exclusive women’s groups, which I find challenging on one level, perhaps partly connected to my own *astrological signature, which has always carried a certain tension around identity, polarity and belonging. At moments, I even found myself thinking about it through the lens of inverted patriarchy.
*Progressed Lilith exactly conjunct my progressed Ascendant with Natal Lilith in Gemini square Jupiter — which an astrologer once described as the pressure to integrate the parts of yourself that don't fit into neat philosophical boxes. The messy bits that can make others feel a little uncomfortable.
What came up from the bottom of the stairs
Within my work at the Tarot Academy last week, I undertook a past life regression. It was a self hypnosis recording by a wonderful therapist called Iona Russell, part of my past lives module study, and not a performance of mysticism but something genuinely old surfaced and asked to be looked at.
The image that came: a woman very much of the interior, my life before as the eldest daughter. The man had left, for the adventure, the road, the wider world, and she remained. And what filled her life, what took up the most space in the regression, what felt most hers?
Books and manuscripts, possibly tarot cards. Knowledge tended privately, in a vaulted cloistered room, while the world's great adventures happened elsewhere.
I recognised her immediately. That's the uncomfortable familiar part, similar to when one of my book club mates gave me a badge that reads;
‘‘A reader lives a thousand lives’’
Rose Wylie
Lilith and Gucci Boy, 2024
Oil on canvas
Diptych
Overall: 81 1/2 x 120 1/2 inches (207 x 306 cm)
The cloistered self isn't only a past life pattern. She's the part that learned, early, that the interior world was safer than the exposed one. That staying in the recesses, in nooks, in basements, the arcane corners, was a way of feeding something real without having to defend it to anyone.
My 12th house Moon at 29° Capricorn has always needed exactly that too. Quiet arcane rooms. The permission to tend hidden things.
The sticker beneath the sticker
By now you might guess that I am fond of uncovering old esoteric books, worn ones bound in old linen with yellowing pages.
Last week in a charity shop I found one published in 1970, written by Laurel Lowell, cousin of Percival Lowell, the astronomer who discovered Pluto and designed its original glyph. Written to share her understanding of the dark and mysterious planet, its true correspondences, its meaning in signs and houses.
Later, at home, I peeled the price sticker from the back cover.
Underneath it — another sticker.
The Unicorn Place.
This stopped me for a moment. Because in my twenties, I worked Saturdays at The Unicorn Place. Dusting crystal balls. Wrapping tarot decks and candles. Occasionally choosing the didgeridoo music for the shop floor when the mediums weren't around — their frequencies, I was informed, resonated higher.
The sticker under the sticker, from The Unicorn Place, Pluto by Laurel Lowell.
The reason I was there wasn't really the Saturday money, though I was a student and I needed it. I was there because I needed the energetic connection. The only books in the house I grew up in were the complete works of Shakespeare in red-bound volumes, chosen, I think, more for display than reading. I never saw anyone read in my household. So you find the rooms that hold what you are elsewhere.
There was a psychic astrologer who worked there. I don't have the reading recorded as this was before we documented everything, but I remember what she said.
Have courage. You have an enormous creativity.
I'm going to be honest with you about what it's like to hear that. Even now, writing it here, something flinches slightly. Something wants to qualify it, soften it, add but of course everyone has their gifts — a diplomatic retreat from the exposure of being seen clearly.
That flinch is worth naming. It's how women learn to shrink from praise that arrives without apology. Nobody in my family at that time had language for the creative life I was quietly constructing in basements and bookshops and tarot shops on Saturdays. So hearing it from art teachers and astrologers felt enormous and also somehow illicit, like receiving a gift through a window rather than the front door.
Pluto, approaching my Aquarius Ascendant by transit, has been burning off that diplomatic coating. Quietly. Incrementally. Returning to retrograde now until October, as if to say — not yet, but we're not finished here.
I opened the Lowell book the way I'd pull a tarot card. Not knowing where it would fall.
It fell open to ferns and moss. The plants that grow in shadow, that cover ancient rocks, that carpet forest floors where the air changes temperature from one side of the path to the other.
It's what surrounds me in the studio right now, and what I have been painting. Exactly the landscape I'm walking into in the Ardèche in June.
Planzolles, the forest floor in the Ardeche, France.
Pluto retrieves what always belonged to me. Apparently that includes forest floors.
What Brighton lost this week
And then, Raining Books.
One of Brighton's last dedicated independent second hand bookshops on the edge of the North Laines is now boarded up. Gone, I can’t think of any other bookshops like this one left in the centre of town; a dark, dusty cavern of old books spilling onto the floor in unruly stacks.
I used to take my read books to this street of bookshops when I was short on cash and they would buy them back off me. A reciprocal relationship with knowledge. Books leaving, returning to circulation, coming back in different forms. Like the Pluto book itself and the sticker beneath the sticker.
I walked past the boards and Brighton felt tacky to me in a way I didn't want it to.
I know that's not fair to the whole city. But there's a real question underneath the grumpiness and I don't want to let it dissolve into politeness:
Where are the fringe spaces now?
Is there not one independent second hand bookshop in a city that grew its identity on making room for the strange, the queer, the artistic, the marginal. The Unicorn Places of the world, the occult shops, the basement bookshops, the weird corners where young women in their twenties could spend a Saturday feeding something in themselves that nobody at home had language for, these spaces are where hidden knowledge lives when the dominant culture hasn't decided it's commercially viable yet.
When they board up, the message received, even unconsciously, even by people who never went in, is that there is no longer a place for what you carry.
Plouton, the Greek name behind our Pluto, is primarily a fertility word. The underworld is where seeds go before they become anything. The shadow is not the opposite of growth. It's the condition for it, if the compost is right.
But seeds need somewhere to land.
Coming up
It's May. The festival is here. Doors flung open all over town, creative brilliance spilling onto sun-warmed pavements, that particular gleam that makes everything feel simultaneously possible and slightly unreal.
The underworld did its work, recalling the traces of my regression where I went back to a cloistered past life, found a book that knew my name, stood in front of a boarded-up bookshop and felt the loss of something that mattered.
This Taurus New Moon feels less pastoral than revealing. With Mercury closely involved, what has remained unspoken inside collective and relational spaces may now insist upon form. Perhaps that is why Gemini keeps appearing for me this week through The Lovers card, through Lilith on my progressed ascendant, through the strange tension between belonging and speaking plainly. Taurus asks what we truly value enough to embody openly, rather than keeping tucked away in the basement rooms of the self, to stop keeping the strange thing in the basement just because that's where it was safe.
The cloistered woman doesn't need to stay in the interior room. She can bring what she tended there up and out into the open.
Time to come up into the garden.
Fi 🜂
