The Weekend Tarot Reading – January 2, 2011

Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

What is that within us which does sound a trumpet and all that is lower in our nature rises in response — almost in a moment, almost in the twinkling of an eye? — From facade.com

The card Judgement has such strong religious imagery that it is often hard to look past its more obvious associations with the Day of Judgement, and see our way to another interpretation. Is it only about the resurrection of the dead, the separation of those who are redeemable from those who are not, and their subsequent salvation or damnation? Or is there another way of looking at its meaning? I believe that an alternative lies at the heart of the quotation, above, and it is one that I’ll be focusing on in this reading.

In fact, I think that this particular combination of cards (chosen at random, as usual) is already asking us to reach past a more conventional view of Judgement to find something that better fits the paradigm that it suggests.

The reason for this lies in the two accompanying cards. If we take Judgement in the traditional sense — one of separating the righteous from the non-righteous — then I would expect to see two clear and opposing choices: the path to salvation, or the path to damnation.

However, here there seems to be no obvious judgement, no opposition, no clear-cut choice. Instead, we have two Queens: the Queen of Cups, and the Queen of Pentacles. What is going on? It is at this point that the idea expressed in the quotation starts to make itself known; and further exploration of the cards brings it out.

Let’s look at Judgement again. The yellow of the angel’s hair is shared by the man, woman and child beneath — a uniting factor. The angel’s expression is neither frightening nor angry; and rather than cowering in fear, the people seem to be in a state of awe and celebration: their arms are held up to the sky, while the angel’s trumpet reaches down towards them from above.

The angel and the figures below it are two aspects of the same thing, striving to meet.

Therefore, what if Judgement is not about separating the guilty from the innocent? What if Judgement is a call to our shadows, our dispossessed facets, those sides of us that we consider damn–able and which we have tried to bury, to rise up and be accounted for — to be counted as part of us? And accounted for not by an angel ‘out there’, but by the divinity that lies inside us and recognises our wholeness?

And what of the Queens? If they are not opposing ideas, choices pitted against each other, what role do they play? Look at their positions within the layout. Both are sitting in similar positions, both are facing Judgement, and each one is holding out an offering. We are in the presence of the divine feminine. Both Queens are receptive, introspective. Both hold in their hands symbols that made their genesis in the Aces. A cup is typically associated with femininity — a vessel. A pentacle, associated with physical matter, could be reduced in its most biological sense down to a single cell: an egg. Together, they provide half of the means to confer life.

The other half is seen in the Judgement card: while angels are typically depicted as genderless, I feel that this angel denotes the masculine principle: the strong neck, the bold lines of the nose, the instrument that seems to meld with its flesh at the point of contact with its body. The yellow of the angel’s crown of curls is further echoed in the golden crowns on the Queens’ heads. The meeting of masculine and feminine. The meeting of spirit and matter.

But I also think that there is another layer to the reading — one that offers assistance. With integration comes upheaval. In Judgement, this is implied by the bodies rising out of their coffins. When the trumpet blast of consciousness calls us to wake up and step up, things can surface that are unfamiliar. We can feel naked in the light of being fully seen, and consequently vulnerable.

The gifts that the Queens offer us are ones that can help us on our journey: emotional and physical nourishment. They are a gentle but unwavering admonishment to look after ourselves. First, by accepting our feelings, whatever comes to consciousness; and second, by remembering that we are also physical beings, and to find our balance in the world around us.