How The Archetypes of My Year Showed Up

The Magic in the Mundane

One of the ways I ground my year is through using Archetypes of the Year. 

That’s using your life path number plus the number of the year to find out what the themes and energies you’ll be dealing with through the year, as well as what you are supposed to be learning. At this time of year, it’s optimal to sit down with your Archetypes and figure out how they wove their way through your year, and what they taught you. 

My number was 5. 

In classic numerology, 5 is dynamic energy: it has to do with freedom and change. The way that I interpret the 5’s, of course, is through the Tarot, natch! 

The Major Arcana card that is number 5 is the Hierophant: the Shaman, the keeper of the keys, the tradition and structure of the spiritual. This card has to do with being a vessel of the divine, a deepening spiritual practice, and ancestry. The other cards that have to do with the Hierophant are Temperance, it’s Teacher Card, and the Minor 5’s.

The main energies that showed up in my every day life were the Minors. 5 of Cups. Check, hello darkness my old friend. 5 of Pentacles. Check, financial and health struggles. 5 of Swords. Check, old fears and doubts and conflicts! 

The 5 of it all was completely evident in my entire year. It felt crunchy, constricted, full of grief and collapse. There was a definite “death by a thousand paper cuts” vibe, so much so that I find myself a bit wary at the start of each week wondering what unexpected bill, terrible curveball, awful news, or disappointment will befall myself or a loved one. 

I also found out what I do when I am deep in the energy of 5 for an extended period: I avoid, I shut down, and I tend to turn the knives inward. Gentle reader, do not do this! It is only now, that a new cycle awaits me, that I feel like I can breathe, both existentially and somatically. It was a lot. I am tired. 

The Hierophant did weave through my year in various ways. 

Here’s some of the positive ways that the Hierophant showed up for me: 

• My classes become the best they ever have been. I was proudest of my work there. It was a true joy and honor to show up and get to connect with so many folks in my classes and in my Patreon. 

• I taught Clear Channels, a class on channeling and business (Very Hierophant!) 

• I saw clients again, and was pleasantly surprised that my psychic ability is still strong, plus the addition of more somatic/energetic intuitive hits 

• I joined a synagogue and continued my study of mysticism and ancient astrology 

• For the first time in my life I consistently weight trained (The Hierophant has to do with preparing your body to be a vessel) 

• On that tip, I quit coffee and stayed almost completely sober 

• I took plant medicine and experienced a whole other universe, as well as Shamans

The Hierophant’s shadows popped up as well: major bureaucratic and administrative drags, super intense (unbelievable) digital gatekeeping, stagnancy and rigidity, intense health stuff, and more ancestral healing. 

Then there was the Temperance of all of it. Temperance is the Hierophant’s teacher card. The balm, the solution, the symbol of alchemy, a card of art, a card of healing. This is also an energy of Bardo, that in-between space. 

Temperance reminds us that healing…can suck. It can be really painful to alchemize decades—or lifetimes—long wounds and trauma. Everything is on the surface, vying for a different way to relate to it. It can look like goodbyes, being completely misunderstood, and crying way more than you want. It is the answer to the Hierophant, after being brought to its knees because all it can do is pray. 

Temperance came through as angels and dieties: I got closer to a few Archangels, I did plant medicine which broke me open in a particular, devotional way.

I told an herbalist last week that I’ve yet to fully allow myself to “go hard” in the Underworld: to own it, claim it, enjoy it, have a party there. That’s when I know things will shift for me, and it’s certainly what I know I must do now and beyond. To fully embody shapeshifting: to take the rituals and routines and the embodiment of the Hierophant, and allow it to alchemize into new etheric messages, new pathways of potency and creation. 

Trust in self to find other ways, was another lesson I had to learn, am learning, am practicing. 

The key to getting out of a flattened trauma loop is to turn it into a spiral. 

Spiral out. Spiral up. 

The healing part became evident around the summertime, when I realized I had shed a huge amount of shame. I stopped feeling ashamed about certain things in my life, and focused on loving myself—and my body—the way it was. 

There’s absolutely no way even 2 years ago that I’d be sharing my personal experiences out into the void. Especially while still in process. There was a shadow Hierophant living inside of me that thought my pain always eventually needed to be in service to others: that if I could bleed my hard won hard times for wisdom, only then was it worthy. I don’t believe that at all anymore: I’m just as worthy when I’m going through it and being vulnerable, as when I’ve made it beautiful for you. 

I think used to believe that everything terrible could be turned into something beautiful: some greater lesson, some way to get closer to love. Currently, I don’t believe that. It feels like a cruel, masochistic self-development scheme. It feels much more loving to let my inner child whimper and assure her she doesn’t deserve certain things, she never did. None of us do.  

Part of my job here on the planet is to make mistakes and share them, to go through the full prism of humanity, figure out what works and what doesn’t, and share it all with the world in different ways. And that includes rebuking pedestalization, which can only come through honesty and vulnerability.

The last notes of the year remind that also, it is time to prioritize beauty, poetry, and delight. Sometimes, there’s no other way to quell the pain. 

In the last few weeks of this year, I’ll be leaning on the valuable lessons I’ve learned from these archetypes, as well as letting them guide me in preparation for the new year. I’ll let them take me by the hand, as I remember that the magic is in the mundane, and that while rituals and traditions can act as anchors, no one ever fully arrives into complete-ness. 

If this exercise feels like it might feel useful for you in this WTF kind of year, take your own time to reflect. 

For all you local to LA, I’m teaching an in-person class all about this at PRS on Saturday, December 12th. Sign up here. 

For all of you who live far and wide, the Moon Studio is presenting an archetypes of your Year class in January, as part of our New Year Jumpstart Workshop Series! Jump into your 2024 Archetypes with me and a lovely group of magic makers.