2026: The Year of the Magician

Most people know me as an astrologer, but tarot was how I got started with the magic of storytelling. One of my professors in graduate school was Rachel Pollack, and her keynote talk on the archetype of the Hanged Man my first semester changed my life. It took me from being a wallflower in the ballroom of enchantment (awkwardly quoting Jung at anyone who would listen to me) to a weaver of enchanted stories. 

When you share your life in public the way I do, you need to keep some things for yourself. Hollywood is littered with the empty husks of people who forgot the difference between their public persona and their true selves.

Tarot has always been at the heart of my work. For the most part, though, it has been a private influence. I’ve talked about Rachel’s influence on my work. I’ve published a few essays on tarot. But I don’t talk much about my personal tarot practice or things that I learned in readings. 

Until now.

This year, I’m going to crack open the door and share a bit of my private tarot practice with you.

My Zeitgeist Altar

Card of the Year: A Tarot Ritual for the New Year

Every year for the last 15 years, I have calculated the tarot card of the year for myself and for the collective. As much as I love working with astrological transits, I find that meditating on the cards of the moment helps me to tune into the archetypes of the zeitgeist in a more intuitive way. I have a deck (The Wild Wood Tarot) that I use only for drawing cards of the day and cards of the year. I keep my zeitgeist cards on a small altar over my desk, and I look to them to recenter throughout the day. 

One of the things I love about cards of the year is how simple it is. You find the card of the year by adding up all of the numbers in the year and finding the major arcana card that matches that number. You find your personal year card by adding the numbers of your birth month and day to the number of the year in the same way. 

Sometimes, you get a number that is bigger than 21, and you have to keep adding numbers until you get a number that matches a card. Sometimes your first card matches a card, but it can still be reduced. In those circumstances, you get 2-3 year cards.

For the collective, 2025 was the Year of the Hermit (2+0+2+5 = 9)

For me, 2025 was the Year of the Devil (2+0+2+5+0+5+1+0 = 15) and the Year of the Lovers (1+5 = 6). 

The Card of the Year tells the story of the year in an elemental way. 

With the Hermit and the Lovers as the cards of the year for me, the tension between the need to relate and the need for solitude was one of the biggest themes of 2025. I was happiest when I found creative ways to resolve their contradictions, and I was most unhappy when I was forced into solitude and felt lonely. 

I can put these lessons in astrological terms. Jupiter spent half the year in Gemini, overwhelming everyone with words, words, words, words. And when Jupiter moved into Cancer, it shifted into my 12th house. 

But the archetypes of the tarot helped me to personalize the invitations of Jupiter, to see them as characters in a story instead of grand cosmic forces. 

It helps sometimes to step outside of yourself and look at your struggles from the outside, seeing yourself as a character struggling with conflicting needs that manifest as internal conflict (“I want to be alone and with others. Ack!”) or external conflict (“I want to be alone. Stop bothering me!”). 

2026 is the Year of the Magician. 

It is technically also the Year of the Wheel of Fortune. (2+0+2+6 = 10,  1+0 = 1)

But The Year of the Magician has a certain… well… magic to it, doesn’t it? 

When I look ahead at the astrology of 2026, seeing the Magician as a unifying archetype adds clarity to a messy soup of transits: Mercury will be retrograde in water signs, and we will need containers to help us manage all of that soupy emotion. There will be a Neptune-Saturn conjunction inviting us to work with spiritual forces that cannot be contained. The north node enters Aquarius reminding us that the path forward is to build containers. (Yes, I will be talking a lot about containers this year.) Venus will go on an underground journey/sewer crawl in Scorpio. And we will continue to grapple with the ongoing mini triangle with Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto… with the God of the Sea at the center. 

All of these transits are about water and power, specifically the power of containing and channeling water. 

I believe growth will happen in magical containers in 2026.

We will need cozy, safe spaces with stable, well-defined (but not rigid) boundaries where emotions can flow and deep, creative, emotionally authentic work can happen.

The Magician is a powerful archetype to channel this year because the Magician uses containers + emotional energy to create change in the world.

The Magician tells enchanting stories that shape our understanding of what’s possible. 

The Magician performs rituals that paint a better world in symbols and imagery before that world has arrived. (You can’t be it if you can’t see it!)

The Magician weaves together wisdom and intelligence, speaking the language of ancestors and magical traditions, working within and reshaping lineages, reclaiming the treasures of the past and making them into something individual and new. 

In 2026, we are being invited to level up as Magicians. 

We are living in a time when we desperately need people who are capable of imagining better futures, specific futures that capture the imagination and are practical enough for communities to work toward together. 

We need people with visionary narratives powerful enough to inspire communities to gather and do hard things. 

We need people who think like librarian mages, searching the attics of history for forgotten treasures, scouring dusty old books for words of power. 

We need people with the patience of old wizards, secure in their power, and with the bloody-mindedness to lock themselves in a tower until they understand the secrets of the universe. 

We need people who can spin stories of enchantment and make them true.

I want to help you find your inner Magician. 

As an astrologer and community builder, one of my favorite things is creating spaces where people feel safe to cocoon like caterpillars. I would like to help you connect with the vision and passion necessary to become a Magician we need… whatever that looks like to you.

Let’s meet your inner Magician over a cup of tea.

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