A cup full of sky: a creative toolkit Aquarius season
Including: a creative spell, a tarot spread, journal + art prompts, and an Aquarian playlist
Hi little coven, and happy (almost) Aquarius season.
Aquarians are iconoclasts. They have an innate ability for rejecting the status quo and finding their own way in the world. They know how to make the most of who they already are; not who they’re told to be, or even who they think they should be.
So I’m dropping into your inbox today to invite you to do something radical: restart your year. I know we’re barely 20 days into 2024, but fuck it. So often the beginning of a new year sinks before it can swim, so laden is it with the pressure of expectation and reinvention.
True Aquarius energy is about taking full permission to meet yourself, as you are, to value the ingredients you have and magic your magic with those, instead of assuming you have to become something or someone else in order to shine and thrive.
Whether you were born under this sign or any other, let today be the dawning of your personal age of Aquarius: a cycle-breaking period that calls you to summon vulnerability, honor yourself as you are, and ultimately redefine reinvention — stripping from it the expectation to improve, and instead seeing reinvention as an opportunity to get playful, curious, and creative with everytrhing you already have going for you.
For inspiration this season, you might look to beloved creative Aquarians who have innovate through communing with their own creative desires, tastes, and questions — think quirky but commended artists like Miranda July, Yoko Ono, and Jackson Pollack.
And of course, your can look to the Water-Bearer archetype that symbolises Aquarian energy in the Zodiac, and is echoed in the Star card of the tarot.
Aquarius is a fixed air sign known for its intellect. But this Zodiac archetype is made up of significant layers of complexity thanks to the imagery used to represent it: the Water-Bearer. The visual language of the sign is anything but airy and fixed: it flows.
The Aquarius constellation is located in a celestial area that astronmers have referrred to as Sea or “the watery part of the sky” because of the number of water-associated constellations there: “Capricornus, the Sea-Goat; Aquarius, the Water Bearer; Pisces, the Fishes; Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish; Cetus, the Whale; and finally Eridanus, the River.”1 In the Star card, seven stars populate the heavens, perhaps as a nod to this community of seven constellations.
Considering Aquarius’s place as an Air sign in a Sea of stars, we could think of the Aquarian Water-Bearer as a bridge between Air and Water energy. The tarot’s Star takes it even further, bringing the elements of Earth (the ground that recieves the water) and Fire (the burning stars) into the mix.
Aquarius then, isn’t a sign ruled by Air and intellect, but a sign that sees its intellect and Air energy as parts of a larger whole.
Creatively speaking, the Aquarian ability to see beyond one’s assigned igredients and claim an identity that encompasses more than the most obvious and basic elements of who we’re told we are, or who we’re told we should be, can facilitate any number of break throughs. Here are some lessons Aquarius is teaching me this season:
You don’t have to show up in the expected way.
You don’t have to show up at all, if the work doesn’t resonate with you2.
The Aquarian Water-Bearer is most commonly believed to represent Ganymede, a prince of Troy who was kidnapped by Zeus and put to work as a cup-bearer to the Gods.3 Ganymede is worth a study; there’s still a lot of knots to untie regarding his nuanced legacy in art and queer history. But for our purposes, his general lack of agency in myth makes him a lukewarm mascot for Aquarian energy. There are other Water-Bearers to learn from.
There’s Enki, the Sumerian god of water, replenishment, creativity and intelligence, who is often depicted equally embodying masculine and femine traits, echoing the Aquarian creative ideal of moving beyond your assigned features.
There’s the Biblical women for whom water becomes a metaphor for rare emotional intelligence: Rachel doesn’t just refresh the stranger Jacob, she shows the same kindness to his animals. Mary Magdelene offers comfort and intimate care Jesus is often denied when she kneels to wash his feet.
There’s the founder and first of Athens, Cecrops I, who outlawed the sacrifice of living creatures to the gods, and offered them water instead — a combination of Aquarian innovation and deep feeling if I ever saw one.
And there’s the Star of the tarot, a mystical vision often associated with the act of self-care in modern tarot lore.
One thing that I always find fascinating about this card is this: while there is, undeniably, a gentle, vulnerable element of this card, hard work is also present. Look back to the figure’s kneeling position. Notice the way one foot hovers above the water, meaning their balance is rooted entirely in the other leg — any yoga or barre practicioner will know how much strength and control that requires! Consider the cold bite of the clear night against their bare skin, and the focus it takes to see their task by the light of the stars alone. Imagine the strength it takes to hold their vessels steady as they do the hard work of resfreshing the soul (represented by the pool) and their material needs and community surroundings (represented by the earth).
The Star calls upon many elements — not just air, not just water, not just earth, and not just fire. She fills her vessels with the stuff of sky, nourishes the ground with the flow of her vision, does it all by the light of the stars. She does it all naked, as if to say: “This is all I am, and everything I can do with it.”
Your creative challenge this Aquarian season is two-fold: first, you need to release yourself from the abitrary expectations and shallow reiventions that barge in with the new year, and allow yourself to show up to who you really are, and start there. Second, you need to get curious about all the ways that who you are transcends one specific way of being; you need to bring all the disparate parts of you into play and see what kind of mosiac appears when you allow your many pieces to come together to support you.
Be all you already are, and trust there’s nothing you can’t do with that.
Creative Prompts for Aquarian Season
Use the following prompts as jumping-off points for your own creative exploration of Aquarius season. These aren’t homework — try what feels good or interesting to you, and know you have my permission to ignore the rest.
Journal about the Aquarian Water-Bearer and the Star tarot card.
How do these images make you feel?
What memories, desires, and questions, do they bring up for you?
What similarities and differences do you notice between them?
Create a collage that brings disparate things you love into balance with each other.
Don’t be afraid of clashing aesthtics; don’t even try to make sense. Just allow the many parts of you to show up on the page.
Get yourself a pottery kit or join a class, and design your own water bearing vessel
When it’ss ready, fill it with water and display it in your home. Make it a home to flowers, or float tealights on the surface of the water, as a reminder that there’s more than one element at play in your creative experience.
More creative resources for Aquarius season are available for full-access subscribers to The Shuffle below.