🌿 This week in Sage Leaves… 🌿
Greetings, wise ones, welcome to this week’s Sage Leaves.
The Queen of Wands in transgenerational healing work carries the energy of the lineage that has finally reclaimed its right to occupy space, to be warm and creative and fully alive without asking anyone’s permission, and she arrives this week at exactly the moment when that reclamation is being most seriously tested.
Venus retrograde in Scorpio squaring Pluto in Aquarius is examining what is genuinely valued against what structural reality will actually support; the Sun entering Scorpio turns the solar year toward depth, transformation, and the honest examination of what lives beneath the surface; Mercury retrograde in Scorpio turns the mind backward through that same territory; Venus retrograde retreating into Libra asks what the Scorpionic depth work has revealed about the quality of the lineage’s most important relationships; and the Taurus Full Moon illuminates the axis of deep transformative value against material, embodied durability with full, unsparing light.
Samhain is close enough now that the veil is genuinely thin, the ancestors are near, and the Queen of Wands meets that threshold the way she meets every other one: with her sunflower in her hand, her black cat at her feet, and her fire burning without apology in the direction that matters. Alongside this exploration, you will also find the Tarotscope for October 20-26, 2026, offering guidance for the days ahead.
The Queen of Wands Card As Jungian Archetype:
The Jungian Archetype of Sovereign Creative Fire
She is impossible to ignore. The Queen of Wands sits on her throne with a sunflower in one hand and her wand in the other, a black cat at her feet, her posture open and confident and entirely unconcerned with whether you approve of her. Her confidence is innate, not performative, in the same way a fire has heat; it’s a natural property of what she is rather than an achievement she has to maintain.
In Jungian psychology, the Queen of Wands carries the archetype of what Jung called the positive anima in its most fully realized form: the feminine principle of the psyche that has integrated its creative fire so completely that it radiates outward without depletion, without apology, and without requiring any external validation to sustain it. She is the part of the psyche that has learned not only to feel passion but to fully integrate and inhabit it as her permanent role.
The black cat at her feet is not incidental. In Jungian terms, it represents the integrated shadow: the wild, instinctual, socially suspect dimension of the personality that the Queen of Wands has neither suppressed nor been consumed by; rather, she has befriended it. This integrated shadow aspect is the specific developmental achievement her archetype describes: not the elimination of the difficult and the dark, but the genuine integration of it into a personality that is richer and more powerful for the inclusion.
What distinguishes the Queen of Wands from the Knight is exactly this quality of integration. The Knight of Wands is magnificent and directionally unreliable: the fire moves faster than the wisdom. The Queen has matured enough for the wisdom to finally catch up with the fire, and the result is creative authority that is both warm and effective. She can sustain what she starts. She can tend what she ignites. She can be in a room and make everyone in it feel both seen and energized without losing any of herself in the process.
“The Queen of Wands does not ask whether there is room for her.
She arrives, she sits down, she puts the sunflower on the throne,
and she makes the room warmer simply by being present in it.”
Her Jungian shadow is the Queen whose confidence is performative rather than inhabited: who needs the sunflower and the cat and the audience to feel real, who mistakes visibility for sovereignty, who uses her warmth strategically rather than generously. The shadow Queen of Wands is still compelling. She is just not free.
What the card ultimately describes is a specific kind of freedom: the freedom of a person who has no longer needs permission to occupy space, to be warm, to be creative, to be fully and unapologetically alive in her own fire.
No longer requiring permission is not a small thing. For many people, this is often the work of a lifetime.
Reflection Prompt:
The Queen of Wands occupies her throne with total unperformed confidence and a black cat at her feet that represents the shadow self she has integrated: now, where in your life are you still asking permission to occupy space that is already yours, and what would it take to sit down on the throne, put the sunflower in your hand, and stop waiting for someone else to confirm that you belong there?
🌿Sage Leaves Weekly Tarotscope
Tarotscope for October 20-26, 2026
This week carries no Major Arcana, one court card, and a spread that moves from patient watchfulness through rapid incoming energy, sovereign creative authority, seductive illusion, self-imposed blindness, familiar grief, and finally the cold, impersonal clarity of a broken heart rendered without human agency. The astrological week is one of the most densely Scorpionic of the year: the Sun entering Scorpio, Mercury stationing retrograde in Scorpio, and Venus retrograde squaring Pluto while also retreating into Libra collectively create a week of probing, transformative, and occasionally uncomfortable depth. The Taurus Full Moon closes the week with illuminating force. Pentacles appear only once.
The Cards of the Week
Tuesday: 7 of Pentacles | Venus Rx in Scorpio Squares Pluto in Aquarius
Wednesday: 8 of Wands | Moon in Pisces trine Venus in Scorpio
Thursday: Queen of Wands | Moon in Pisces trine Mercury in Scorpio
Friday: 7 of Cups | Sun Enters Scorpio ; Sun in Scorpio conjunct Venus in Scorpio
Saturday: 8 of Swords | Mercury Retrogrades in Scorpio
Sunday: 5 of Cups | Venus Retrograde Enters Libra
Monday: 3 of Swords | Taurus Full Moon; Sun in Scorpio squares Pluto in Aquarius
Tuesday: 7 of Pentacles
Tuesday opens with the 7 of Pentacles as Venus retrograde in Scorpio squares Pluto in Aquarius, the week’s first dominant astrological pairing. The figure leans on his hoe and gazes at his crop with the wistful, evaluative attention of someone who has been working for a long time and is now in the particular liminal stage between effort and outcome, where the harvest is not yet in but the question of whether it will be sufficient has already begun to press.
Venus retrograde square Pluto is one of the more pressurized relational and material aspects available: what is genuinely valued is being examined against what structural reality will actually support, and the examination is not comfortable. The 7 of Pentacles on this day is the appropriate psychological posture for that pressure: honest, patient assessment of what the work has actually produced, without the consolation of a completed harvest or the escape of abandoning the field before the evaluation is finished.
Tuesday asks whether what you have been tending is producing what you hoped, and whether the assessment you make of that is honest or whether it is softened by your emotional investment in sunk cost.
Wednesday: 8 of Wands
Wednesday introduces the 8 of Wands as the Moon in Pisces trines Venus in Scorpio. Eight wands arrow through the air in rapid, directed flight: swift communication, fast incoming movement, the sudden arrival of what has been in transit. The Moon trine Venus in the most emotionally deep and imaginatively fluid signs available brings feeling and value into easy, harmonious conversation, and the 8 of Wands on this day carries the quality of news or development that arrives with the force of something that has been building for longer than the arrival makes visible. Wednesday is a day to receive what comes quickly and assess it with the Moon-Venus trine’s depth of feeling rather than with the surface-level speed of the wands’ flight: what arrives fast this week has slow, Scorpionic roots.
Thursday: Queen of Wands
Thursday delivers the Queen of Wands as the Moon in Pisces trines Mercury in Scorpio. She holds her wand and gazes toward the future with the warm, self-possessed authority of someone who occupies her own creative space entirely and without apology, the black cat at her feet, the sunflower in her hand, her posture carrying the settled confidence of someone who has made peace with the full range of who she is including the parts the family system preferred she keep quiet.
The Moon trine Mercury in Pisces and Scorpio brings emotional intelligence and penetrating analytical depth into easy, fluid conversation: what is felt and what is understood beneath the surface are briefly aligned without friction. The Queen of Wands on this day is the week’s single moment of clear, forward-looking, fully embodied creative authority, and it sits between Wednesday’s rapid incoming energy and Friday’s seductive cloud of undifferentiated possibility like a compass point that the week’s energy will shortly lose.
Friday: 7 of Cups
Friday brings the 7 of Cups as the Sun enters Scorpio and conjoins Venus retrograde in Scorpio, the week’s most astrologically significant single day before the weekend. The figure turns his back to you and faces a cloud filled with cups of wildly different content: some beautiful, some alarming, some possible and some pure fantasy dressed as option.
The Sun entering Scorpio is the solar year’s commitment to depth, transformation, and the examination of what lives beneath the surface of things, and its immediate conjunction with Venus retrograde means that the solar and relational energies are moving through exactly the same Scorpionic territory simultaneously. The 7 of Cups on this day is the shadow side of that depth: the moment when Scorpio’s capacity for vision becomes Scorpio’s capacity for obsession, when the probing intelligence turns toward the cloud of possibilities rather than toward the single, clear, embodied authority the Queen of Wands demonstrated on Thursday. Friday asks which cup in the cloud is actually real and which is the mind constructing what it wants to see.
Saturday: 8 of Swords
Saturday delivers the 8 of Swords as Mercury stations retrograde in Scorpio, the week’s third dominant astrological event. The blindfolded woman stands surrounded by a fence of swords in ground she could leave if she could see clearly enough to know which direction to move, her constraint real but also maintained by the decision not to look.
Mercury retrograde in Scorpio turns the planet of communication and thought backward through the most probing and transformative sign of the zodiac: the mind is now moving inward and backward through Scorpionic territory, revisiting what has been felt but not spoken, what has been perceived but not yet named, what has been understood at a depth that the forward-moving, surface-oriented mind has been avoiding. The 8 of Swords on this day is Mercury retrograde’s psychological embodiment: the intelligence that is capable of seeing what the blindfold is concealing, choosing to keep it on rather than face what the seeing would require.
Sunday: 5 of Cups
Sunday brings the 5 of Cups as Venus retrograde retreats from Scorpio back into Libra, the week’s fourth dominant astrological event. The figure stands before three spilled cups with his back to you, absorbed in the grief of what has been lost, while two full cups remain behind him unacknowledged and unreached for.
Venus retrograde re-entering Libra after its time in Scorpio’s depths is a significant shift: the retrograde examination of what is valued moves from Scorpio’s probing, transformative register back into Libra’s realm of balance, relationship, and relational aesthetics, asking what the Scorpionic depth work has revealed about the quality of the week’s most important relationships and connections.
The 5 of Cups returning this week carries the weight of its previous appearances in this reading series: the pattern of orientation toward loss rather than toward what remains has not yet been resolved, and Sunday’s Venus retrograde shift back into Libra is specifically designed to illuminate the relational dimension of that pattern.
Monday: 3 of Swords
Monday closes with the 3 of Swords as the Taurus Full Moon rises and the Sun in Scorpio squares Pluto in Aquarius, the week’s most concentrated single astrological moment. Three swords pierce a heart in a stormy sky, and the card’s absence of human agency is its most important feature this week: there is no figure to examine, no psychological posture to assess, no one’s decision-making to interrogate.
The 3 of Swords simply shows the heart, the swords, and the storm, which is the week’s most honest final image. The Taurus Full Moon illuminates the Scorpio-Taurus axis with full, unsparing light: the axis of what is deeply, transformatively valued against what is materially, sensory real and durable. The Sun in Scorpio squaring Pluto in Aquarius adds structural, collective pressure to that illumination. Monday is not a day for resolution. It is a day for being honest about what the week has cost.
Themes of the Week
This week’s arc moves from patient watchfulness through rapid incoming energy, sovereign creative authority, seductive illusion, self-imposed blindness, familiar grief, and finally the impersonal clarity of grief without a face.
The Scorpionic density of the week’s astrology, the Sun entering Scorpio, Mercury retrograde in Scorpio, Venus retrograde in Scorpio squaring Pluto, and then Venus retreating back into Libra, collectively create a week of sustained interior pressure that the cards reflect with unusual honesty: the 7 of Cups’ cloud of undifferentiated possibility, the 8 of Swords’ chosen blindfold, and the 5 of Cups’ recurring orientation toward what is spilled are all versions of the same underlying pattern, which is the preference for a managed, softened, or avoided version of what is true over the direct, unsparing confrontation with it that the Scorpionic astrology is specifically designed to facilitate.
Suit Composition and Absence
Wands appear twice, in the 8 of Wands’ rapid incoming flight and the Queen of Wands’ sovereign forward-looking authority, providing the week’s fire and creative momentum. Swords appear twice, in the 8 of Swords’ self-imposed constraint and the 3 of Swords’ impersonal grief, providing the week’s painful but necessary clarity. Cups appear twice, in the 7 of Cups’ seductive multiplicity and the 5 of Cups’ recurring grief, confirming that emotional processing and the question of what is genuinely available versus what the mind is constructing are the week’s central psychological territory. Pentacles appear only once, in the 7 of Pentacles’ patient watchfulness at the week’s opening. There are no entirely absent suits this week, but the near-absence of Pentacles is significant: the grounded, practical, material dimension of reality that Pentacles represent is almost completely unavailable as a resource in a week this densely Scorpionic. The earth that would provide ballast for the week’s depth and grief is barely present, which is part of what makes the 3 of Swords’ Monday landing feel as stark as it does.
Numerology and Recurrences
The numbers present are 7 (7 of Pentacles), 8 (8 of Wands), 13 (Queen of Wands), 7 (7 of Cups), 8 (8 of Swords), 5 (5 of Cups), and 3 (3 of Swords). Five prime numbers appear this week: 3, 5, 7, 7, and 13, an extraordinary density that carries the consistent signature of forces that resist simplification and must be met directly on their own terms.
The double 7 of the 7 of Pentacles and the 7 of Cups is the week’s most significant numerical pairing: both cards carry the energy of assessment and illusion respectively, one looking honestly at what patient labor has produced and the other turning away from the viewer to gaze at a cloud of undifferentiated possibility. Together they form the week’s central question: what is the mind actually seeing when it looks at what the work has produced, and is it seeing clearly or is it constructing what it wants to see?
The double 8 of the 8 of Wands and the 8 of Swords presents a similar paired question in the register of action and constraint: rapid incoming movement on Wednesday against self-imposed blindfolded stillness on Saturday. The 5 of Cups returning from previous weeks carries the full weight of its pattern: this is the third or fourth time this card has appeared in recent consecutive readings, and its insistence on being seen is the reading series’ most persistent signal. The orientation toward what is spilled rather than toward what remains is not a one-week phenomenon but a sustained pattern that Mercury retrograde in Scorpio is now specifically designed to illuminate from the inside. It asks: what do you need to let down and let go before you can move on?
Conclusion
Mercury retrograde in Scorpio beginning on Saturday is the week’s most structurally significant event for the period ahead, and the 8 of Swords is its honest psychological embodiment: the intelligence capable of seeing what the blindfold conceals, choosing to maintain the blindfold because removing it would require acting on what is seen.
The Taurus Full Moon on Monday illuminates the Scorpio-Taurus axis with full force, and the 3 of Swords is its honest mirror: the week’s grief rendered without a face, without a decision-maker to examine, without anyone’s psychological posture to assess. Just the heart, the swords, and the storm. The Queen of Wands on Thursday showed you what is available when the blindfold comes off and the cups are set aside.
The question the week closes with is whether that vision is still available when Monday’s illumination makes the cost of the week’s avoidances visible.
Reflection:
The 7 of Pentacles opens the week by assessing honestly what patient labor has produced, the Queen of Wands holds her forward-facing sovereign authority briefly on Thursday before the 7 of Cups turns away and the 8 of Swords pulls on the blindfold, and the 3 of Swords closes the week with a heart pierced by three swords in a storm with no one present to acknowledge the cost: where in your life is the pattern of the 5 of Cups, now appearing for the third or fourth consecutive week, pointing most directly, and what would it take to turn around from what is spilled, remove the 8 of Swords’ blindfold, and look at what the 7 of Pentacles’ honest assessment and the Queen of Wands’ clear authority have been trying to show you?
The Queen of Wands as the Jungian archetype of sovereign creative fire does her most important work at exactly this kind of threshold: Venus retrograde in Scorpio squaring Pluto in Aquarius is examining what the lineage has genuinely valued against what structural reality will actually support; the Sun entering Scorpio turns the solar year toward the honest examination of what lives beneath the surface of the family’s story; Mercury retrograde in Scorpio turns the mind backward through that same territory; Venus retreating into Libra asks what the depth work has revealed about the lineage’s most important relationships; and the Taurus Full Moon illuminates all of it with the unsparing light of what is materially, embodied reality.
The Queen of Wands meets Samhain’s thinning veil the way she meets everything: with her fire burning clearly in the direction that matters, her shadow integrated at her feet, and her warmth available to the ancestors as much as to the living.
In clinical herbalism, this is the moment to work with quince, now at its aromatic peak in the autumn cold, a fruit whose high pectin content and astringent, mucilaginous properties make it one of the most underused digestive and respiratory allies in the traditional pharmacopoeia, and whose slow, patient cooking into preserves mirrors exactly the Queen of Wands’ own quality of sustained, creative, transformative tending applied to what is worth keeping through the winter.
I will be offering free Lenormand readings in Second Life over Samhain weekend, first come, first served, and I would love to see you there. Take care, be well, and good-bye for now,
—Dr. Winkler
That’s it for this week! Look for Sage Leaves in your inbox on Tuesday afternoons (North American time.) We look forward to exploring more about Tarot, Healing and more! Take care, be well, and good-bye for now!