This week on Fortune’s Wheelhouse, we greet an old friend. For me and probably for many of you, the Queen of Swords is special. As tarot readers, more of us identify with her than we do with any other card (I ran a poll once, is how I know). I bought my first tarot deck on May 3rd, 1997, and she was the first card I ever saw in a reading, and the first card I pulled for Card of the Day. She’s tough, she’s clear-eyed, and she’s wicked smart.
Whether you call her the Ice Queen, the Wolf Queen, the Dancing Queen, the Queen of Swords is as formidable as she is graceful. The watery part of air, she pierces through illusion and perceives patterns invisible to most. Associated with the final decan of Virgo and the first two decans of Libra, she borrows the Hermit's solitude and the measured symmetry of Justice. Peace and Sorrow, the 2 and 3 of Swords, are her familiars.
In our conversation, we discuss the balance of night and day and the Thrones of Air, the equinox, the festival of Mabon, the Green Man, wordsmiths, seamstresses, and warrior maidens, Black Maria, Fanny Kaplan, Pallas Athena, Pique Dame, the Devil's nutting day, cumulostratus clouds, the winged heads of children and the severed heads of bearded men heads, butterflies, hexagram 28 (dà guo, Great Exceeding), obsolete constellations, widows and divorcées, the Viking queen Hjørdis, BS detection, the Ox and the Ox goad (or the Fool and Justice), the renunciation of community, accuracy in superficial things, and the love of music and words.
The Libra Queen of Swords is our only Venus-ruled Queen, and Venus rules perfume, so I'm doing a very special perfume giveaway for this week’s episode. The perfume is called Autodidact, and it originally developed as a custom zodiacal perfume for a Libra Moon listener from our Fortune's Wheelhouse Academy group.
The scent is that of an oak-paneled library filled with leather-bound books and roses, its windows flung wide above a seaport spice market. It is the scent of adventure, and the love of learning, or, if you like, the intoxicating scent of brainiacs. You can sign up as a patron and find out more about the drawing at www.patreon.com/fortuneswheelhouse.