November is the hinge of the year. In the Wheel of the Year we have just stepped through Samhain, the threshold where the old harvest is counted and the lights go out in the fields.

The living tend their dead, the dead tend our memory, and everything leans inward. It is the time of reckoning and keeping. It is also the month when the cold clarifies our priorities.

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The Ten of Disks is a bright shock of gold arranged as the Tree of Life, the coins stamped with Mercurial emblems, except at Hod where the solar cipher interrupts the chorus and promises a way through. Crowley is blunt about what this card signifies at the end of a cycle: “great and final solidification,” the energy of a suit fully spent in matter. Yet he immediately points to the remedy inside the image itself. Mercury in Virgo appears not as mere commerce but as the Logos and intelligent will that can wake solidified wealth into usefulness. He even calls the card “a hieroglyph of the cycle of regeneration.”

On a practical level, this is the card of endowments and legacies, the moment when success must be stewarded, or it stagnates. In his commentary, Crowley notes that when wealth accumulates beyond a certain point, it either becomes inert or must “call in the aid of intelligence to use it rightly.” In other words, this month is not only about having resources. It is about arranging them so that they live again.

Harris’s painting amplifies the lesson. Every sephirah bears a mark of Mercury, save the place of Mercury itself, which bears the sign of the Sun. That single departure is the escape hatch, the spark of purpose that can reanimate the whole structure. The card, therefore, behaves like a teaching diagram. It says: collect, count, consolidate, then illumine with intention.

Astrologically, it is Mercury in Virgo, a meticulous, serviceable intelligence applied to material reality. Geometrically, it resonates with Conjunctio, the figure of the sacred joining. Behind the counting-house mood is a devotional question: what will you join your wealth to so that it breathes?

Last month’s Ace of Cups poured the raw, luminous potential of Water into our hands. In The Book of Thoth he said that Ace is the essential Grail, “the root of the powers of water,” the feminine vessel that receives the descending dove and can become water, wine, or blood according to need. It is the matrix. It gives feeling its holy form.

If the Ace was inspiration, the Ten of Disks is incarnation. It is what happens when the wave becomes grain and the grain becomes bread. The move from Ace of Cups to Ten of Disks reminds us that desire and devotion only become durable when they are given structure. The Ace opened the heart. The Ten now asks for account books, schedules, estate plans, studio calendars, and ritual containers that actually hold a life. The grail was the pattern. The coins are the proof.

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