A Winter Solstice Reading
Winter Solstice Spread by Coleman Stevenson
A threshold reading for the longest night and the returning light.
1. What has been washed away in the previous season: Something that’s finished, cleansed from your life/psyche, something you no longer need.
Queen of Swords: The Ice Queen, logos without eros, loosens her grip. A season of hardness, emotional frost, and necessary sharpness comes to an end. Ice queens ruled static realms where nothing grew under them. I find them to be necessary antagonists rather than villains. They're guardians of boundaries that must eventually thaw. Discernment isn't being washed away, just the emotional frostbite.
2. A message from the Darkness of the Longest Night: Something you need to know in order to move forward.
The Lovers: Conjunction. The Lovers at the darkest point of the year is heiros gamos, a sacred marriage that happening in the darkness, not in the daylight. The way forward is through relationship, reciprocity, and integration. This is about relating rather than judging. Alchemically, this is conjuntio following decalcification. Once rigidity dissolves, opposites can touch without annihilating each other. In the Winter Solstice myth, this can also indicate work that happens when nothing appears to be happening.
3. What to bury: Like a bulb that will flower in Spring, something to prepare for, work on; a new possibility to consider.
Judgement: Putrefaction. An old way of seeing is laid underground like a bulb. Perception itself is changing. What's buried isn't the old self but rather an old, interpretive framework. Judgment underground becomes a sort of incubation for symbolic vision where one can see life mythically rather than literally. In Alchemy, this is the putrefaction before resurrection where vision must rot before it can become revelation. Most importantly (like the last reading), no action is necessary at the moment, but one can trust that perception IS changing.
Judgement, The Aquarian Tarot
4. How to support root growth: What you need in order to feel rejuvenated/rested for the next season.
Eight of Pentacles: Cibation. This is NOT about productivity. This is a re-education of the nervous system. This card helps the psyche relearn safety after long vigilance. This is a type of restoration that comes through devotion without the drama. Small acts. Repetition. Boring kindness (ha). Learning how to tend to yourself in ways the old mindset never allowed. In the Winter Solstice myth, roots grow because nothing else can. The work might be tedious and invisible, subterranean, but it is necessary. This card gently corrects the Queen of Swords by saying, "You don't need to be sharp to be effective."
5. Rebirth of the Sun: What will be revealed as the light returns.
The Fool: Fermentation. Not naïveté, but new materia. Pre-conceptual life. In the Dark Exact Deck, this would be the Omega Fool for me. A return to life without armor. This is an earned openness where the Self emerges as a "trust in process". In the solstice myth, even the reborn sun is weakest at first, and the light doesn’t conquer the darkness, it coexists with it.
Observation: There aren't any "mother" card here, like the Empress, High Priestess, or Queen of Pentacles, suggesting that this nourishment and nurturing comes from within this is about learning self-regulation and self-trust rather than reliance, and that's the kind of wisdom one can find from the Winter Solstice, not comfort, but patience.
This is a solstice of decalcification, softening whatever became rigid and allowing warmth back into places once ruled by ice. It returns slowly and changed.
This Winter Solstice spread was created by Coleman Stevenson and can be found in A Small Collection of Specialized Spreads, Volumes II & III.
