The Prodigal Sun

An astrological tarot journey through my second Jupiter return

There comes a time in a man’s life when he comes home for the first time since he left, all those years ago, when he was really only a boy. It never happens in the way he expects. But he realizes, for the first time in what might be ever, that he recognizes the face in the mirror.

I used to think the word prodigal was synonymous with a successful return, but the actual biblical parable follows the entitled youngest son of a king, who leaves home with his father’s money and gambles it all away on depravity. Eventually he ends up a poor beggar back at his father’s feet. The core message to me here is not the selflessness of the father, who graciously takes him back, or the repentance of sin from this wayward son, but rather that the act of leaving was what forged an opportunity for metamorphosis—of both the son’s life and the father's legacy. The son receives a truer inheritance upon returning than the money he gambled away; the father’s act of faith is an enforcement of that lineage and connection.

While my father and I never had such a rupture—we talked on the phone weekly and most years I visited more than once—and I faced not depravity but privilege and kindness living with my mother and stepfather in the East, the act of leaving did change my chemistry. I had no plans of coming back. I had the silly idea that the past was just that, and the future something else entirely. I forgot the only rule of the whole universe: everything is cyclical. There is no birth without death just as much as there is no death without birth.

This focus on cycles and archetypes is what really drives my interest in things like astrology and tarot; they help remind me that life is full of predictable and manageable patterns. In the parable of the prodigal son I relate to the unexpectedness of return, and I find the story to be a reflection of the astrological transit of Jupiter, and the father as a representation of the kind of Saturnian, divine masculinity and structure that is sometimes required to support the expansion of the second turn of youth.

Jupiter and Saturn: Sky Daddies of the Universe

You see, at the age of twenty-three you enter what is called a twelfth house profection year, the last of the twelve house transits you repeat continuously throughout your life. In modern tropical astrology, the twelfth house is often associated with the last step before the unknown, the frontier between the spiritual realm and reality, where utilizing separation through the creation of boundaries is necessary for growth. This is a time for the discovery of hidden enemies both outside of and within you. It’s a cycle that matches up to the 12 ish year cycle of Jupiter, who rules philosophy, travel and transmutation. In other words, constant growth and titration toward something new, which Ancient Astrologer Vettius Valens (via @ illuminiah on TikTok) called “upward trending,” and the specific, Sagittarian connotation of Jupiter’s influence “double bodied,” by which he means mutable, changeable. To be clear, profection years are not necessarily connected to Jupiter’s cycle, but it’s a notable pattern and auspicious in my interpretation.

The first Jupiter return happens at 11 and the second at 23 (and so on in increments of twelve throughout life): a period of expansion before you enter the next phase of major identity upheaval or concretion in the year of the first house and the self. Big transits like these stack up, their themes echoing through the years, and play a part in preparing you for even bigger ones, like your Saturn return around age thirty–a very popular topic in the astrology niche on the internet hive mind lately with Saturn’s recent shift into Pisces (working on Saturn in Pisces playlist if you’re interested in getting to know these vibes from a musical perspective—and please feel free to send suggestions if you have them!!) As @ laurenashastro put it in her March 14 TikTok, “Saturn and Jupiter are two sides of the same coin. If Jupiter shows you where you get lucky in life…naturally excel…see opportunities, Saturn is where you feel restricted, and where there are delays.”

To take it a step further, Saturn would not be able to impose his boundaries without first exposing you to the possibilities that exist. How can you make choices before you’ve seen them? First you must take to the road, metaphorically or not, and then you will be able to sit where you land, whether that is where you started or high up on a mountain on the other side of the world.

The Journey

*all tarot card photos by me of my copy of the Weiser Tarot deck

(the Raider-Waite, recolored)

At age 11, I had no idea that in two years, when Jupiter would transit my second house of material circumstance, also called my second house profection year, my identity would transfigure to revolve around the fact that I moved away from New Mexico to Connecticut at the age of thirteen. I spent that decade of my life a spiritual nomad, a transplant; I longed for both places at once, and the various people I was always leaving behind traveling from one to another, and then eventually within Massachusetts and New York as well. It was a path I excitedly and wholeheartedly chose—two thirds of my parents moving halfway across the country, new house, new school, new friends, new greener landscape, what could possibly be more exciting? Yet the alienation of novelty worked on me for those first few years.

Even once I’d settled in, done well in school, made what I thought to be lifelong friendships, spoke up for what I believed in (a bit loudly and wrong, but with spirit), questioned my sexuality, dissociation plagued me. In college, I made peace with the fluidity of my queerness, both internally and externally, fell in love for the first time, and yet my face remained blank and formless in my own mind, slipping away from my own recollection like a stranger’s.

I like to think of my time in the East as my Temperance era, culminating when I dabbled in big city life and a long distance relationship. Like the major arcana card demonstrates, it was an alchemical transformation, in my case to learn the importance of separation, discovering the boundaries of binaries within myself as much as in melding with another person.

The fusion showed me the cities love can build in your heart; it took me by surprise when it landed, and I ignored it actively for a long time, but by the end I was convinced ours was my destiny.

I wanted a shortcut to eternal peace, having found it fleetingly and desperate to keep it as intact as possible. I think sometimes when you grow attached to someone you can forget where you end and they begin, and when you’re young, when you never had time to define your edges in the first place, there’s an emptiness in your union–filled, likely, with wonderful things you created together, but none of them truly your own.

This period is what I consider paralleled to the Devil card. Not because any maliciousness existed between us, but because we were holding on to something that had us both in chains, like Adam and Eve in the card. Yet our last summer together, when I lived in her apartment, helped her move, then lived in the second one too, set on what I was certain was my perfect happiness—a lover, a child (cat), friends, an author’s future among the skyscrapers of the Big Apple. And then, vaguely, like a mirage in the distance of my own mind— marriage, suburbia, a house with a garden, Christmases with the in-laws…

None of it was mine, and all of it was. None of it because that community was my partner’s, and I thought it was enough to fill the missing pieces I left in New Mexico every time I came back. I felt like my heart was in two places because it was, and no amount of partnership could replace that. As much as I loved her community, I felt strange and out of place, and they did nothing but confirm their perplexity of my behavior and existence. I changed myself to fit, ignoring some truths so deeply my other calibrations were off. So all of it was also mine because I built up this delusion, which in my debilitated Virgo Venus fashion, discounted any joy not invested in reassurances of a certain future together. I sensed her hesitation, the distance growing between us, was frustrated with her lack of communication, which by the end broke down entirely. And still, I put my plans into those spaces because I was terrified of the alternative. I was sure I already had everything I wanted.

How could one be so certain and so doubtful all at once?

Thus, my partner ending things was both highly and anxiously anticipated as well as the biggest shock of my life. This was the moment that I refer to as, and you might notice the major arcana’s succession progressing here, my Tower moment, which I consider to be Saturn’s first notable intervention in pointing me toward the current course of my life. Sudden and unexpected upheaval, destruction, abandonment, grief of untenable proportions. But also, in that strike of lightning, a clarity of inspiration, both to see the truth of the past and to start anew. The recognition that the nightmares of abandonment that had plagued me for the past year were premonition, that the eclipses lined up perfectly with rocky periods in our recent past, that the day it all ended was 11-11-22, almost 3 years exactly since I’d made the first moves…

All the time I spent in resentment about how my relationship ended–as my dad confidently claimed when I first arrived (I did not believe him), about one month for each of the years we spent together–I remained convinced it could have ended differently, would have, were the roles reversed. But you know what? They weren’t. I wasn’t the one who did it—what needed to be done. And I’m not sure that I could've been.

The deeper truth is, I don’t think I would have been brave enough to return to New Mexico had my heart not been broken (thoughhhh the Roswell New Mexico show reboot definitely played a part in enticing me). I went like a wounded animal retreating by scent alone to a burrow that sheltered them as a kit. I needed family—my sister, my dad, my community, my homeland—though it hurt to leave behind the ones I’d left with.

In that fleeing, I realized the key to my life is following that instinct, which I had been denying in attempt to cast myself onto a path of supposed to’s.

thanks twitter

An autopilot fugue programmed by fear. I don’t know why I was scared to consider the possibility of returning. I moved away and I thought I was meant to keep doing that, moving further and further to learn more and more. Of course this land doesn't belong to me any more than the East Coast’s does, but coming back to the nature that nurtured my infant curiosity, my wild and romping imagination, was coming home, and I've realized there's plenty to explore here. The endless skies and mountain views and magical oases and cliff caves in badlands: they’ve all got so many esoteric secrets to whisper, so many lessons to offer me. The people are cool too, but as someone with Venus in the second house, land affects everything about my life.

I don’t think it has anything necessarily to do with the land itself being more magical than anywhere else. I simply never realized how the desert’s questions awakened a fire in me, and my move across the country, while educational and enlightening in so many ways, made me forget I ever craved those answers. I was focused on a different kind of learning, which involved leaping out of the nest and flying where I saw others go. I needed to escape the eclectic bubble of my childhood in order to realize, like the Amish who return from Rumspringa, that where I began truly is where my values lie, and now I have so much opportunity to explore it with fresh eyes, filled with nostalgia but a clarity as well, since my relationship with this place was hardly marred by the anguish of adolescence. I can get reacquainted on my own terms; starting over can be so freeing and gratifying, because all you need is what comes with you, and what you grow there.

The period of instinctual healing after tragedy was, of course, the Star and the Moon: the Star relating to physical regeneration and the Moon accepting one’s shadow by returning to instinct. I also associate this period with the Eight of Cups, a minor arcana which depicts the moon shining on a figure walking away from the viewer up a steep hill. In the foreground five cups support three more cups, with a space between two and one, suggesting a missing ninth cup representing a lack, an unfulfilling emotional path that the figure had to turn away from, towards a more difficult, but ultimately more fruitful, endeavor.

Saturn’s influence is especially clear to me here in matters of time, the thing required most for healing heartbreak. Saturn is an outer planet who brings obstacles and struggle, but with commitment, long-term reward. Saturn is an embodiment of the divine masculine, like the benevolent King in the parable who waited for years to graciously accept his son despite his failures, helping him implement the structure he needed to be successful in the future. Ancient Greek Jewish philosopher Philo compared this to God, who gives his children “...time for reformation, and also keeping within the bounds His own merciful nature” (Wikipedia).

While the grief of losing love was nearly unbearable, I can also say I’m grateful for it. This meme from @moonsoultarot on twitter is the perfect depiction:

Forgiveness, I realize, can be a personal endeavor, a path on which I embark for myself. Forgiveness is not necessarily acceptance. And thank god, because I know, so much more deeply, who I am and what I need.

Now I’m getting real into marking eras with music—somehow not something I ever felt capable of doing before—

so here is another playlist 🌞 ,

vibes for this particular Sun era.

Finally, the summit of this journey, where I emerged into a world of shocking brightness, is of course ruled by the Sun. I’m not sure exactly when the shift took place, on or after, but certainly around my trip to a primitive skills gathering in Arizona—community that was and is my father’s world and something I very much grew up around. Moving away meant hardly any of that was in my life, but a little over a decade later (perhaps a Jupiter’s orbit—twelvish years) I returned. That week I relearned how to listen to the Earth and look for medicine everywhere I go. I remembered that when you go out walking, the land tells you where you want to be. I made new memories of flashlight tarot readings in a tent I’d only ever shared with my ex and was taught how to make a pine needle basket with my hands.

I use it to hold my pills in the morning <3

I met the coolest people who were interested in what I had to offer, with so much of their own. Who led fulfilling lives based on their passions that broke the barriers of my understanding, who inspired me to dream bigger than I thought possible. I washed camp dishes with a group of singing teens from a commune in Southern New Mexico. Our first morning there, I went to a Mormon church service—I like to learn about people from their own beliefs. I found out that saguaro cacti are technically trees, because of the wooden vascular system you can see in their exposed roots, woody as an oak’s. By the end of the week, I had a best friend from Wisconsin who loves cats as much as I do, and paints like a brighter Georgia O’Keefe.

I’M SERIOUS!!! I bought these as prints from her and they are gonna hang on my actual physical wall in my room. They make me feel so many things. Space AND the ocean?? Jellyfish in the desert?? They evoke the saltwater that used to cover the mountains, a history of land change and fossilization. Sick right?

"Jellyfish" (right) and

"Bubbles" (below)

Sophia Scaffidi circa 2021

I mean the MOONS?? The surrealism?? The detail?? They just sparkle with magic.

After all the time I spent in the darkness of my own shadow, licking my wounds, slowly coming to terms with my new-old life, these experiences were like sunlight. I had this epiphany that identity is a fantasy, which doesn’t make it any less real. Your facade, what others perceive (think, rising sign as the structure of your life, versus the sun sign as your aura, the light you emit through that structure), is the other side of the moon’s dark and subconscious reflection into the depths of yourself (the beating heart within the structure), your private inner world. They inform each other and make up the ever-shifting pattern we call identity, or ego, or self. There is no possibility of effacing such a thing; it simply is.

I returned from the trip to the ultimate confirmation of my physical self; a years-long dream of being tattooed by a close (Scorpio) friend of mine was fulfilled and I received these incredible scorpions:

my dream (the reference)

the execution (drool)

designed and tatted by Jessi Szabat

@jessimaytattoos on ig <3

I didn’t realize until afterward it was a perfect move to seal in this enlightening era: the zodiac of my sun, which also happens to be my chart ruler (Leo rising), proudly emblazoned on me like a flag.

My prodigal return was, in many ways, to myself.