The height of this moonth’s cycle comes with the full moon arriving overnight Saturday, May 30th, to Sunday, May 31st, (exact at 4:44 am ET on Sunday, time zone converter) and offers a revelation about how the lunar energies initiated on the May 16th new moon are developing. This new moon, guided by its association with Tradition (the Shining Tribe Tarot’s version of the Hierophant), invited us to let ancient traditions birth the new. Out of the full moon revelation about this developing energy, we are issued an invitation to return a gift to the world in the final weeks of the lunar cycle.

The exact moment of the moon’s fullness comes in the sign of Sagittarius which corresponds to the Tarot’s Temperance, the 14th Major Arcana card.

The wisdom figure most commonly depicted on this card is an angel holding a cup or some kind of vessel in each hand while pouring liquid between the cups. Through color symbolism (a dark and light or red and blue cups) or the angel’s stance (standing with one foot in water and one on land), we viewers of the card are guided to recognize an integration of what is seemingly opposite or disparate.

The expression of the angel is focused, possibly serene, certainly determined.

This morning I woke up thinking about another angel: the angel of history. This angel might be a twin to Temperance but is fraternal, not identical. They both exist in the flow of time but can interact with the flow differently.

The angel of history is a figure in the essay On the Concept of History, the last work of the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin written in 1940 as he attempted to escape the Nazis advance through Europe.

It is a short work but dense and while philosophy is not my field, because the angel of history is inspired by an image, Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, I draw upon my Tarot training as imagist to offer these musings focused on this figure. Also, Benjamin was interested in the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism seems to inform his work. These are also influences of the Tarot.

In the 9th part of his essay Benjamin introduces the image and the idea:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Benjamin’s angel witnesses history’s patterns and sees them as part of something bigger. The problems of his times and ours and the times before us both are not strange anomalies but continuations. So, the Nazi’s deadly final solution for the Jews in Europe or the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capital or the October 7th Hamas attack followed by the 663 days of war on Gaza are not isolated aberrations. They are a single catastrophe; they are connected back through history to the events that created poisoned seed with sour seed upon seed stretching back through time. Because victors write history they leave out the connections. They erase from the record those who were conquered. They vilify those who resisted.

Benjamin critiques those who are shocked at Fascism’s abuses, those who wonder how Fascism could rise within the progress of the 20th century. I hear an echo of this when we in the US, say that our current atrocities–concentration camps for immigrants, Jim Crow’s return with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, reproductive rights for women rolled back–are “not American” when they are central to the catastrophe of our history.

Politicians may invoke this the most. They want us to believe in the possibility of progress and to trust that they are the ones who can deliver it to us. But Benjamin names progress as the storm that keeps hurling the angel of history from catastrophic past into catastrophic future.

Benjamin continues his essay exploring philosophical concepts of history (sometimes his language loses me), but I want to stop at this line of his: The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.

The angel of history may be constantly blown back, but there is an angel who can plant themselves in the moment alongside the dead, working toward wholeness, tending what’s smashed: the Tarot’s Temperance angel.

Temperance is intimate with Death, follows this archetype in the numbering of the Major Arcana. Comfortable with seeming opposites, the Temperance angel is not afraid to bring the dead to the living.

With the dead delivered back into our presence we can seek their counsel for how to be with catastrophe. They made their way through their own catastrophes while living. No doubt they developed seeds of solutions and remedies for repair while living and if we would incline our ear toward them, they could share with us this wisdom. Also, having been in Death their understanding of past catastrophes and their role in them is expanded in ways we earth bound ones can’t really know but still could benefit from receiving whether through conscious understanding or trusting in an energetic flow. The dead want us to be free, to be whole, to be healed.

Will the dead give us the solution we want? No, looking for one quick fix leads to the false progress that blows back the angel of history and fills the mouth of our leaders with false promises.

The work of wholeness is more complex. We need to balance the dead’s desire for our freedom with the Devil’s mission to entrap us.

The Devil, too, is an angel and follows Temperance in the flow of the Tarot. Often identified as Lucifer, his name means light bringer, but the Devil’s light is only illuminated in darkness. The catastrophes of history are the Devil’s darkness. They are huge and heavy, great chains we’ve inherited. It would be easier to lose ourselves in The Devil’s temptations: to soothe ourselves with binge watching TV, spiritual practices that let us bypass oppression and suffering, or lap up a whole carton of ice cream. But the Devil’s dark opens a different way. Our eyes can grow accustomed to a different light and without a burning glare we can see catastrophe’s truth in our history. Without other eyes watching, we can grieve, make apologies, can take in our own pain and the pain of others. Maybe we fall apart for a while here. It’s fine. The dark becomes a cauldron of release.

In this time of the full moon, the Temperance angel invites us to join them in standing between the freedom offered by the dead and Devil’s trap turned cauldron of release. To remain standing here, instead of being blown into a future of repeating catastrophe is hard work. We see this on the determined faces of Temperance angels. We might call it alchemical–Alchemy is sometimes a name given to Temperance–in that we are moving the lead of history’s catastrophe through a process that will transform.

Because Temperance works with and accepts opposing forces what is created is not totally new, but an integration of its constituent parts. The catastrophe of history is still there–the truth of its hold is part of the healing–but, combined with the dead’s desire for our freedom and a new ability to see in the dark, the future is not something we are blown into but something we can influence by aligning with mundane and spiritual forces. As we are walking Tradition’s path this moonth and beginning our elemental journey toward the Summer Solstice, we might reach out to the wisdom of rocks or connect with the power of place to find our way into this alignment.

To gather wisdom under this moonth’s full moon, you can engage with one, some, or all of these practices:

• Moon bathe by sitting or lying under a window or outside on the ground. Feel the unique strength of the moon’s light. Let go of your thoughts and soak in the glow.
• Take out any reading or your reflections from the new moon and look at them in a new light. How does your understanding of the cards shift now that time has passed and light has changed? (If you haven’t done a moonthly reading yet, feel free to do this one.)
• Bring out Temperance and new moon-connected Hierophant / Tradition card from your Tarot deck and connect them to your new moon reading / reflections. You could place/imagine these cards on either side of your reading or above and below and then look at how they add meaning into the story your original cards offered you.
• Contemplate questions inspired such as: What seemingly opposite forces are active in my life? How could I integrate them? What support do my beloved dead offer for integration? How can I open my eyes to see in new ways? Where am I standing in the flow of history? What is history asking of me? How can I have the courage to face what history asks of me? What can be born of my hard work to integrate and heal? You can, of course, pull cards in response to these questions.

When you are done, remember to offer gratitude for what you have received. Consider what gift you now want to return to the world. Pulling a card for guidance on the gift is always a fine thing to do. In the coming weeks and before the moon returns to dark around June 11th, offer your gift to the world.