Click on any card in the grid to see its divinatory meaning below.
To read the full stories associated with each of these cards, visit Rainbow Squared on Substack or subscribe below
Click on any card in the grid to see its divinatory meaning below.
To read the full stories associated with each of these cards, visit Rainbow Squared on Substack or subscribe below
Red is about beginnings, and Red Red is like beginning squared.
Here you are at the threshold. Whether you are daunted by the possibilities before you or you feel that there are none, take the first step. The mouse is the master of squeezing through tiny holes. There may be a way in where you don’t expect it.
Of course you might fail, like this mouse did. And so this card can also be about resetting: resetting the mouse trap, restarting the cycle, going back to zero. Take your time plotting your next first move and try again.
Mice are the ultimate prey, small creatures running from one refuge to the next. They are no stranger to fear, but they aren’t afraid of it either. They are survivors, masters of their environment. Red is about survival, about the body, about being in touch with your physical form and the physical world around you. Red is blood, like the warm blood that makes mice and humans mammalian kin.
Mice are also a lesson in contradiction. Consider a particularly famous mouse named Mickey (who incidentally wears red pants). How could a mouse become the basis of a corporate media empire? Yet mice are also a symbol of the opposite: people power, strength in numbers, the little guy, showing up and trying again and again. Ever notice how a mouse problem is never just one mouse?
As a double-color card, Red Red is the first of the “major arcana” of the Rainbow Squared deck. These cards point to a grander lesson about the arc of your life, outside of the day to day. Just as the two colors line up, these cards are about alignment, and also misalignment. How authentic are you being to your body and its own rhythms? In what ways are you merely surviving when you could be thriving? In what ways are you surviving against all odds?
This is a divinatory meaning for Series Six: 01. Red Red. Read its full story here.
Red Orange is the second piece in the full Rainbow Squared series. It is also the second card in the cycle of Red, seven pieces that are all about the body, survival, and physical resources. Orange introduces fire, creation, and creativity. Red Orange is a tangled loop of creation and destruction.
A moth is also a symbol of both creation and destruction. Some moths create silk, but the more notorious moths destroy crops and clothes. In both cases, the caterpillar of the moth is responsible: silkworms make silk and larvae are the ones doing the eating. In fact, many moths don’t even have mouths or digestive systems. Instead they live off of what they ingested as caterpillars, staying in their moth form only long enough to procreate. Silkworms aren’t even allowed to make it to that stage: to create silk the cocoon has to be pierced or boiled, killing the moth before it even becomes a moth.
There are at least 160,000 species of moths. The common clothes moth or Tineola bisselliella would seem to have no redeeming qualities. The gorgeous Hyalophora cecropia (pictured here) creates silk and is the largest moth in North America, with a beauty that rivals any butterfly. Most moths are nocturnal and are thought to navigate by moonlight, moving forward by maintaining a constant angle to an infinitely far away light source. That’s one theory as to why moths are attracted to light. The problem with artificial light is that once the moth reaches the source, it doesn’t know where to go from there.
In Hebrew, the word for “moth” is עָשׁ or “ash,” pronounced with an “ah” sound like “aah-sh.” The two letters in ash are Ayin (ע) and Shin (ש). Ayin is the name of the letter, but is also how you pronounce the Hebrew word עַיִן which means “eye.” Often moths have eye-shapes in their patterns, like the ayin-shapes that adorn the wings in this image. The letter Shin symbolizes fire and transformation. Moths are drawn to light, to the moon, to the reflection of the light from the sun (שֶׁמֶשׁ in Hebrew, which starts with ש). The moth is drawn into the fire, trying to complete itself (עָשׁ = ש + ע). If the moth ever reached the flame, it would perish.
What are you destroying in the process of creating, even in order to keep yourself alive? What are you creating in the process of destruction? What beauty might be there that’s easy to miss? What are you using to navigate, and is it a reliable source? What would happen if you ever reached it?
This is a divinatory meaning for Series Six: 02. Red Orange. Read its full story here.
Body Power. The power in your body, the power of having a body. Your body not only belongs to you, your body is you. What you do with your body is your choice.
As the first color cycle of Rainbow Squared, Red can also relate to youth and primary experiences. As the first instance of Yellow, Red Yellow can be an initial claiming of Power, stepping up to be embodied as your full self. How are you still becoming your own person? How can you honor your inner child and its freedom? How can you honor the inner children of those around you, or even actual children?
A braid can represent the uniting of past, present, and future, combining in your physical body as the braided strands in your cells, your DNA. How does your body connect you to those who came before you? Even if you don’t know anything about your many ancestors, you are braided to them just by being alive in your body.
How might ritual honor or heal your connection to the bodies that created the bodies that created you? Perhaps you even have access to ancestral practices around braiding or weaving. Making challah, a braided bread for Shabbat, is one example of a Jewish ancestral practice. Even if it's something your parents or those who raised you never claimed, might there be a tradition you can embody as your own? What practices do you find yourself drawn to without quite knowing why?
If this card appears in a reading, ask yourself: how are you honoring your body’s power? How are you ignoring or suppressing it? Do you or your dominant culture have beliefs about your body that sap that power? What physical actions can you take to honor bodily autonomy for you and the communities around you?
This is a divinatory meaning for Series Six: 03. Red Yellow. Read its full story here.
Have you ever looked at a dollar bill before? I mean really looked at it? Among the elaborate anti-counterfeit curlicues and repeating serial numbers, there is one design element that distinguishes the dollar bill from the rest of United States currency: leaves. Leaves framing the presidential portrait, leaves sprouting around the “1”s in the corners.
In Spanish, a “sheet of paper” is an “hoja de papel,” and “hoja” means “leaf.” The leaves on the dollar bill symbolize the paper bills themselves: growing, spreading, circulating, piling.
Money itself is a symbol, after all. Some of the first “greenbacks” were created to finance the Civil War, when the Union chose to print unbacked paper money rather than go into debt to foreign creditors. So this green money is itself a representation of a belief in money, a belief in symbolic energy exchange.
If Green shows up in a reading, it isn’t always about money. But paired with Red for Survival, Red Green can be about resources and livelihood: what you do for money, what you do to put bread on the table, what you do to earn the means to survive.
Green is primarily about another kind of energy exchange: love. What if doing what you love put bread on the table? What if bread on the table was independent of what you did? If everyone had what they needed, might that create space for every act to be done in love?
Dollar bills point to another kind of transaction: the hand-to-hand transactions that happen on the scale of everyday life, like a cookie from a kid at a bake sale or a placing a bill in someone’s empty cup. As money like so many things becomes increasingly digital, exchanging physical money is a direct connection. Who could benefit from direct attention and care in your own community right now? What can you choose to share rather than to hoard? Red Green is a reminder to slash through the abstractions and stories that distract us from tending to what’s actually happening right now.
Red and Green are complementary colors, one of the powerful pairs that between them contain all the primary colors: in this case, Red and Blue + Yellow. These are the colors needed to mix any other, the necessary ingredients to depict life on earth. All three mixed together make the color of earth, brown, the color to which everything returns and the rich soil from which everything grows. What soil are you growing in? What in it is composting and what is simply rotting?
This is a divinatory meaning for Series Six: 04. Red Green. Read its full story here.
Red Blue is Body and Communication. From the moment we are born, we learn to use our voice as a means of survival, crying to receive care and connection. The constant feedback of the umbilical cord is replaced by our own vocal cords, a phenomenon known as the acoustic umbilical cord. Crying out to be heard and then being listened to builds the fundamental trust that ultimately allows us to communicate.
What care are you crying out for? Who or what are you crying to? Who or what is listening?
Are your feelings coming out as unspecified cries, or are you able to know and articulate what is going on for you in the moment? For example, is your anger coming out as shouting at those around you, or are you stifling your emotions in order to please others? Red Blue can invite you to look at your communication patterns and examine how you are getting your needs met.
What are some of your fundamental stories? Do they need updating? Pay attention to what you say to yourself, especially if it’s harsher than how you might talk to anyone else. Pay attention to how your body is talking to you, and how you are responding.
If Red Blue comes up in a reading, it may also be a good time to pay attention to your imagination. Dreaming is one way that our body tells stories, conjuring pretend scenarios to run through real feelings. Kids of a certain age are able to sustain hours of pretend. Though we call it play, it is serious work that becomes harder to do the older you get. Whether it’s from your subconscious or a flow state, you may be surprised by the images that emerge from being fully present.
This is a divinatory meaning for Series Six: 05. Red Blue. Read its full story here.
Red is the first color in the visible spectrum, while Purple is the last. Taken together they signify a kind of totality, an Alpha and Omega, an Everythingness. A microcosm of a whole system.
At first glance Rainbow Squared seems to be a system of binaries. In actuality, methodically pairing these seven elements so that each dances with the other is quite maximalist. Taken together, the 49 pairs constitute a whole, a multiplicity, a way to describe a profound oneness. The technology of the 7x7 grid breaks down a larger complex whole into every permutation of relationship, a cosmic queerness. A process like Rainbow Squared or even counting the Omer is about integration, helping you to feel like every part of you belongs, every part of existence belongs. Even the parts you don’t like, the parts you don’t want to deal with, the parts you’d rather forget or have made yourself forget.
At its simplest but certainly not its easiest, Red Purple is the connection and integration between the body and the mind: the self.
Red is a primary color. Purple is a secondary color, made of Red and Blue. This means that mixing the Red of the body and Blue of communication gets you the Purple of mind, of self. Learning how to communicate as your body and with your body is essential to your selfhood.
On a personal level, if you are feeling scared or stuck or like something just isn’t working, is there any sort of practice or ritual that could help you recalibrate and even get free? It can be as rigorous as committing to a 49-day sprint or as simple as remembering to breathe.
On a collective level, well, we need spiritual liberation now more than ever. Red Purple is also about our bodies and our identities, stories passed down through generations. Traumatized people traumatize people, and cycles of violence are just that: cycles.
It is a gift to be part of such a beautiful and long tradition of maintaining annual cycles. May the wisdom of our and your ancestors guide us in upholding the cycles that make us who we are, to break the cycles that no longer serve us or that never did. True liberation never comes at the expense of anyone else’s.
This is a divinatory meaning for Series Six: 06. Red Purple. Read its full story here.