Welcome to Cast Iron, a weekly newsletter about fitness, tarot and current events that hits inboxes every Monday. Each issue features a workout based on a tarot card, a tarot pull related to current events and, sometimes, a blog post or journal prompt. You’ll also find a list of my current favs at the end of each email, so be sure to check those out if you’re low on inspiration or energy. If you like my work, connect with me on Instagram and Twitter @byAlissaSmith or visit my website.
The Moon represents intuition, illusion, fear and confusion.
That may sound not so great but the card advises readers to trust themselves over irrational fears that spring forth from the depths of their subconscious.
The Moon is a warning that you’re about to be flooded with doubt and anxiety about your choices, so you have to be ready to push through on faith that you do know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
It also warns against judging your path based on your family’s or society’s definition of good and evil, which are represented by the gray towers in the back of the card. These towers may be copies of the same building we saw in The Tower, though I wouldn’t put too much stock into that concept as The Moon’s towers each have one window while The Tower has three.
The RWS Moon shows a dog and wolf on opposite sides of a river; the water represents your emotions, creativity and subconscious while the dog and wolf respectively represent your socialized and wild sides.
The wolf and dog cry at The Moon, which represents your intuition, as a lobster slowly sneaks toward them.
The lobster, a creature of pure instinct, is crawling out of your subconscious. While the question of whether lobsters and similar arthropods feel pain still is being debated, we know that it used to be a commonly held belief that lobsters were bottom feeders.
People believed lobsters crawled along the ocean floor, picking scraps off the dead and dying. It’s now known that lobsters mostly eat living creatures including crabs, mussels and other lobsters.
But I’m guessing that wasn’t common knowledge when Pamela Colman Smith was creating the RWS deck.
I’m also guessing that it wasn’t common knowledge hundreds of years before the RWS was published in 1909 when a card style that would become known as Tarot de Marseilles showed The Moon with a lobster crawling out of the card’s depths.
As such, I’ll be looking at this symbolism as that of a bottom feeder or scavenger. I believe it’s meant to represent the depths of our subconscious, filled with outdated beliefs, old traumas, innate fears and things best forgotten, rising to meet us.
It’s unclear exactly when the lobster started showing up in the cards as none are seen in earlier decks. The predecessors of the Marseilles, known as the Visconti tarot decks, were created in the early to mid-1400s.
Of the remaining Visconti decks, none are complete. A surviving moon card can be seen below; the imagery is vastly different than what we’re used to seeing today.
In the 1930s, Salvador Dali created the Lobster Telephone as part of the Surrealist movement that focused on dreams and the subconscious. (I’m not going to go into Dali’s weird sexual meaning with this piece).
Putting the weird sexualization of the lobster aside, I’m taking this piece to mean that we should pick up the damn phone and communicate with our subconscious mind. You must not allow old traumas and fears to derail the present you.
I crafted the below workout in the spirit of running from our problems while building the strength to face them. Don’t forget that your sprint speed will likely differ from the people around you; that’s normal. Judge yourself on your level of exertion, not what other people are doing.
Fit tip: There are several different energy systems that humans rely on, and I’m not talking about any woo types here. You’ll mostly be using phosphagen and anaerobic glycolysis (the breakdown of sugar into lactate sans oxygen) during this workout, which means it’ll be fast, it’ll be tiring and you’ll need to stretch, hydrate and carb up afterward.
Reading (the) Room
And once again we’re talking about racism bc white America doesn’t want to learn. Fitting that we just covered a card that speaks to unfounded, illogical and completely irrational fears.
Asian Americans, like other minority groups in the U.S., have always dealt with undue violence and discrimination. Since the dawn of the COVID pandemic, there has been a large increase* in such racist attacks against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
A report by Stop AAPI Hate says it received more than 2800 reports of hate “incidents” between March and December of last year. Both reports include first or second-hand narratives of the attacks, some of which I’ve included below:
I was standing in an aisle at [a hardware store] when suddenly I was struck from behind. Video surveillance verified the incident in which a white male used his bent elbow to strike my upper back. Subsequent verbal attacks occurred with "Shut up, you Monkey!, "F**k you Chinaman," "Go back to China" and "Stop bringing that Chinese virus over here.” (67 y.o., San Francisco, CA)
I am posting this on behalf of my dad, a 71-year old Korean adoptee. Yesterday, he was chased out of a rural convenience store after asking to use the restroom while traveling along I-5 through California to get to Portland, Oregon. (71 y.o, Northern CA)
I was in line at the pharmacy when a woman approached me and sprayed Lysol all over me. She was yelling out, “You’re the infection. Go home. We don’t want you here.” I was in shock and cried and left the building. No one came to my help. I was never even diagnosed with COVID-19.
Between March and October, the group learned about 32 incidents in Georgia alone.
A December report says that “while the overall number may seem small, it mirrors a significant trend found in states across the country in 2020: Asian Americans being blamed for the COVID-19 pandemic and facing racism and discrimination as a result.”
This comes as no surprise considering former President Donald Trump used racist language to talk about the pandemic and riled up his racist supporters so much that they raided the nation’s Capitol last month.
The executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, a coalition of California community-based groups, told NPR that Trump’s racist rhetoric whetted hate against Asian communities.
“Oftentimes, perpetrators have used the exact language of the prior president, words like ‘Wuhan virus, kung flu, China virus, China plague,’ “Manju Kulkarni told NPR in a Friday article. “And sometimes they have even weaponized the former president himself saying ‘Trump is going to get you, go back to your country.’ … ”
The Asian community hasn’t been safe since the pandemic began. (And, if we’re being serious, some of white America has struggled to see Asian Americans as equals for much longer than COVID has been locking us in our homes. Remember Japanese internment camps? Semi-related, NPR reports the first Civil Rights case involving an Asian American victim didn’t even take place until the late 1980s when a 27-year-old Chinese American man was beaten to death with a baseball bat.)
On March 13, Trump declared COVID a national emergency. A day later, an Asian man and his two children, then aged 2 and 6, were stabbed and wounded in a COVID-related hate crime at a Texas store. An employee also was wounded in the attack.
Less than a month later, an Asian woman was injured in an acid attack by a stranger. And the attacks haven’t stopped.
Just last month, an 84-year-old Thai man was thrown to the ground and later died of his injuries, a 52-year-old Asian woman was shot in the face with a flare gun and a 91-year-old was forced to the ground by a man accused of assaulting two other people.
*increase: the spike in hate crimes likely is higher than reported considering many victims may not report abuse to authorities.
So, what’s the question for this week? Asking why racism continues to permeate the country like an autoimmune disease seems pointless. We know why and we know who the perpetrators are. The issue is that the ignorant rarely ever uncover and correct their own ignorance.
So let’s ask something else.
How we can dispel harmful COVID rhetoric? You already know how. As a lover of truth and justice, I understand that righteous indignation may drive you to confront the cruel at inopportune times. If that happens and you find yourself struggling with the desire to prioritize your safety, know that another person’s cruelty is never your fault.
A card for those harmed by such racist behavior:
The Seven of Swords is double-edged. It tells you to be wary of those who cut corners for personal gain while applauding you for being resourceful.
More importantly, the Seven of Swords is a thief. They snuck into an enemy’s camp and stole as many of their swords as they could carry + two. The swords represent knowledge, language, curiosity, communication and the like; to steal these from a group is to remove their information, methods of communication and ability to fight.
This reminds me of getting harmful sites shutdown, reporting online harassment, of finding solace with and guidance from people who have struggled with the same battle. The resourcefulness of the Seven of Swords is reflected in actions like volunteers standing up to escort older Asian Americans to deter attacks.
The Seven of Swords isn’t a solution. It’s about survival and relying on your mental power more than anything else.
On another note:
remember that whole joke of an impeachment trial? Check out this AP article.
What I’m loving this week:
The Lawyer Who Is Most Definitely Not A Cat
This is a nice peek into the lives of Jo, Claire and Andy, three roommates who happen to be witches. I found it online as a comic with five short chapters. I see there was news about a second arc being released as a “trade” but you and I both know I don’t know what that means. Regardless, this is a quick and cute read.
Articles you may want to check out:
This relaxing piece on SK YouTubers
This in-depth article about news deserts in South Carolina
This piece about the WH deputy press sec threatening a female reporter (he’s since resigned)
This essay about how there’s no cure for burnout
This article about how MLMs are using the pandemic + economic stress to gain huns
This week’s deck is Linestrider Tarot by Siolo Thompson.
How can you support Cast Iron?
Share this newsletter and leave a comment below! Tell me what you liked, didn’t like, want to see, etc. I want to know how to make this newsletter the best thing about Mondays. If you have a story or topic idea, drop me a line at Hello@AlissaSmith.red.
How can you support me?
Hire me for freelance writing gigs. You can find some of my clips here.
Schedule remote tarot readings and/or personal training sessions with me.
Buy a copy of COVENTRY, a secular witchcraft zine run by me and my friend, Megan Castro, an Atlanta-based artist. Our newest issue covers truth, bias and conspiracy and how these concepts sometimes appear in witchcraft communities. Our spellcrafting zine currently is available as part of a collab with Folk Care, a company founded by an Atlanta-based herbalist.