Embrace your multitudes: a creative toolkit for Gemini season
Including: a tarot spread, creative prompts, an exclusive creative ritual, and Gemini playlist
Hi little coven, and happy (belated) Gemini season. Thank you for your patience whilst I’ve prioritised recovering from a little bout of burnout and navigated edits on my third book. More about all of this coming in an essay soon.
Now, let’s talk about Gemini energy.
Curious, experimental and flighty, Geminis are natural explorers and masters of re-invention. Leaning into this astrological season’s particular brand of creative energy means ditching the map and trusting that the wind is always blowing you toward whoever you’re meant to be in the moment.
In his seminal poem, Song of Myself, Gemini writer Walt Whitman summed up the energy of his birth sign far better than I ever could:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Whitman’s legacy is a testament to what it means to creatively thrive with Gemini energy. He refused to be pinned into any one poetic movement and is credited with originating free verse poetry, which intentionally defies conventions and form. He celebrated the many contradicting facets of his identity, experience, and point of view instead of trying to fit into any one niche, style, or mode of operating.
But you don’t need to be a Gemini like Whitman to take this season’s lessons on board. Because you contain multitudes, too.
There’s more than one way to be yourself, to express yourself, to thrive as yourself — and Gemini season is here to help you commune meaningfully with your multitudes, to accept all the contradictory truths within you, rather than box yourself in.
We can look to two Geminian archeytpes to help us understand, accommodate, and make the most of Gemini energy this season: the Zodiac Twins and the Lovers tarot card.
“Gemini” is Latin for “twins”. Gaze up to the Gemini constellation and you’ll see what appears to be two stick figures holding hands — twin lines connecting Castor and Pollux, stars named after a pair of mythic brothers.
Geminians that they are, Castor and Pollux’s story is a tangle of possibilities and versions.
Collectively, the brothers are known as the Dioscuri or the Tyndareus, and, despite their common association with the Twin symbolism of the Gemini name and sign, the story of Castor and Pollux’s conceptions, births, and identities is not at all clear cut.
The most popular version of their origins paints them as half-twins — born to the same mother and different fathers - the god Zeus and the mortal king Tyndareus. One mortal twin, one divine. However, plenty of off-shoots of the myth cast them as full twins, or as half-brothers of different ages. Sometimes, they hatch together from an egg. In his epics, Homer imagines them as Persephone-adjacent figures linked to the land of the dead, alternating between life and death daily: each spending one day alive while the other spends a day dead. On some occasions, Pollux has a different name - one almost too on the nose for our thematic purposes: Polydeuces… multiples doubles.
Very well then, they contradict themselves.
Or maybe…. they don’t. Maybe it’s time to shed the idea that being many different things at once is a contradiction, so much as it is a bouquet of possibilities. An opportunity to be at peace with the piecy-ness of life. Of us. And of course, of our creative identities.
In a conversation with a therapist some years ago, I first lighted on the frustrating and marvellous reality that different things can be true at once. I wanted to be seen by others in a certain way — delicate, fragile — and felt frustrated, misunderstood, abandoned that I appeared my peers otherwise. On the surface I was bold, unflappable.
The conversation was serious, infuriating at points. But also lightened by a silly parallel in my working life: I was a staff writer for BuzzFeed at the time, and the infamously viral blue dress/gold dress debate had erupted online. Two things, true at the same time. Polydeuces.
I imagined the story of my life first as that dress: blue to me and gold to others. Then, the quick repetitive scroll back and forth that the other perspective like a magic trick. The identity crisis once I’d seen the flip side: am I blue or am I gold? I can’t possibly be both and yet... I’ve seen it.
Then, I sketched my understanding of myself as an ancient city rebuilt over itself a hundred times, not a neat modern grid. Not this, or that, but everything. Toyed with the idea that the streets my memory and imagination cross have a thousand names, and simultaneously move in different directions. That I could be fragile and unflappable at the same time. That I contain multitudes, and doesn’t everything?
It can be difficult, as a person, and as a creative, to let go of the neat idea we have of who we are. Of what we want to say. Of what motivates us and defines our style, our voice, our lane, the kind of work we deliver. But what if, like some versions of Castor and Pollux, some versions of us are dead today but alive tomorrow, alternating forever? What if we aren’t one thing? And what if we stop contradicting ourselves and instead start doing the opposite: verify, corroborate, confirm ourselves. Exactly as we are in the moment, in all our piecy, blue-gold, two-sides-of-the-coin glory?
So, what then of the Lovers? Like the Gemini twins, there are rich multitudes to draw from here.
Also like our friends Castor and Pollux, the Lovers card is born from contradictory origins.
The Rider Waite Smith version, pictured earlier depicts the Biblical drama of Adam and Eve, cast from the Garden of Eden. The origin of free will. The results of a desire to know — and be — everything.
The card can be read as a reflection on the consequences of our choices. I have often spoken of it as a call to assiduously choose what we love, what we want, and commit to honoring what we’ve pursued, even when it’s not easy.
Meanwhile, the Marseille Tarot, which predates the RWS, is a little more pedestrian. It captures a love triangle — a young man split between two women. Overhead, Cupid poises a bow — soon, the young man will have his mind made up for him.
These two sides of the same card feel like opposites: free will versus fate. A frustrating juxtaposition for beginner tarot readers flipping between guidebooks, I’m sure.
But maybe, in this contradiction, the card confirms the truth: The stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and how we came to be here, about what we love and what we choose, contain multitudes. And if, amidst all of this being and choosing and loving and trying, we contradict ourselves? Very well, then, we contradict ourselves.
Creative Prompts for Gemini Season
Use the following prompts as jumping-off points for your own creative exploration of Gemini 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 Geminian Twins and the Lovers 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 mood board that captures elements of the multitudes within you
Don’t worry about cohesiveness, instead endeavour to celebrate all of your contradictions
Take a series of selfies this week, capturing you as different versions of yourself.
More creative resources for Gemini season (including a tarot spread, a creative ritual for Gemini season, Gemini playlist & more) are available below for paid subscribers.
If you’d like to dig deeper into what creative gifts Gemini season has to offer you, and get access to future creative tools for every Zodiac season, you can become a paid subscriber to The Shuffle for just £1/$1.25 a week (annual subscription rate). Subscriber support means that I can keep regular resources like these coming, and continue to focus on developing quality writing & resources at the intersection of spirituality & creativity.