Receptivity; connectivity — the Queens in tarot

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 explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

This week, we leave the tournament fields of the Knights behind — where the qualities of the suits were, as yet, concepts to be tried on for size and tested — and into the sphere of the upper court, home of the Queen and the King.

Rather than seeing the relationship between the two cards as an evolutionary progression from Queen to King, what we have here is a partnership. The Queens are the yin to the Kings’ yang. They are the masculine and feminine principles, which together create the fullest human expression of each suit; and both of them lie within each of us.

The word that comes most readily to mind when I see the Queens is receptivity. To me, it describes a sense of openness, and of allowing. It is not indiscriminate, nor is it passive. Like a chalice, feminine energy contains rather than directs: it holds space — the space between objects, concepts, ideas, the concrete. It is active presence.

Active presence is what connects us to soul — ours and others’. When we are connected, we are more able to align with and follow the promptings of the truth that lies inside us, whatever that truth might look like. The Queens are the embodiment of this alignment in the four realms that they both inhabit and incarnate: creativity (Wands), emotions (Cups), mental processes (Swords), and the manifested world (Pentacles).

Queen of Wands

For someone who lives, works and breathes the creative fires, I have always thought that the Queen of Wands is of remarkably calm demeanour. Next to the fiery passion of the Knight, tilting at pyramids in the desert, the Queen seems positively demure.

This, I think, is the key here. What I believe the picture is telling us is that potent creative energy need not consume everything in its path, desiccating clothing, evaporating life-sustaining juices, threatening to devolve from heat into hot-headedness. Make no mistake: the Queen has access to every bit as much energy as the Knight — and more. But she has mastered something that the Knight has not: the ability to harness it. It is a means to an end. It is a spark that ignites a steady flame rather than a spent match. The sunflowers bear testament to this. Yes, the pyramids are hinted at in the three yellow peaks behind and to her right, yet there is also room for greenery. Sunflowers juxtapose the ideas of fire and water. Life cannot be sustained without both.

As with the other Queens, the Queen of Wands’ dress is comparatively plain. There is no need for ostentation; it is not outward appearance that is the seat of her authority. As one who rules through receptivity, her focus is inward, her mode of attraction her attention to what matters.

In addition to the sunflowers, six felines appear in the illustration. A lion’s head clasps her cloak at her neck, denoting strength and courage sitting as it does over her heart. Two lions seem to dance with one of the sunflowers on the banner behind her — again, the idea of fire and water co-existing. Two more lions form the bases to the armrests on her throne. The lion is the symbol for Leo, one of the fire signs in astrology. Here, they support the Queen: the principle of fire as sustainer rather than destroyer.

The sixth feline comes in the form of a black cat at the Queen’s feet. And here is the quirk. For while the five lions are inanimate and in supporting roles to the Queen, this cat is very much alive. Not only that, I get the distinct impression it has a mind of its own. It is not entirely controlled — not entirely controllable either, I feel. It looks at us with a certain cocky knowingness. This is the element of unpredictability that is allowed into the creative process. Because it is only with a sense of mystery that we make room for something greater than we imagined to come through. Sometimes it backfires — and so we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and perhaps come back to it better prepared. Sometimes, however, it works in ways that were both unimaginable and beyond our expectations. That, to me, is the path of true creativity, where control is relinquished to a higher principle.

[Note: the following are all taken and adapted from previous articles]

Queen of Cups

The Queen of Cups features a feminine protagonist, used to having subjects who work for her, and who is receptive. In fact, the Queen is dedicated almost entirely to the feeling nature. Dry land gives way to the water rippling onto sand, and the Queen’s cloak — held together at the neck by a sea-shell — is an extension of the sea itself, cascading down her body and meeting it at the shoreline. The cup that the Queen holds with both hands takes up her entire focus. The action implied in the card is in the space between the Queen and the cup. It is the energy that I feel streams across it.

There is magic at work here… and it seems to be presided over by the Queen of Cups — a woman who is completely at ease with her feeling nature, and who has endured her own emotional trials and tribulations on her journey to the throne. She is the emotional care-taker, her watery robe and cloak flowing down to meet and join with the sea that laps the shore at her feet. She is emotion embodied, but she is also centred: her solid throne, carved with three fishtailed ‘mer-cherubs’ bear testament to that. The earth, the sea and the heavens meet at this juncture.

I look at the cup that she is gently but firmly holding with both hands, and in the angels praying on either side I see echoed the figures of the woman and the man in the Two of Cups. It is here that her role as care-taker is emphasised. She is watching over them intently, guiding them with her wisdom and with her own connection to the heart. In this way, she is fulfilling what I see as a mentoring role that the couple can draw from when and if they are aware of it. They are being guided by something that has their interests at heart, and by one who knows and understands the experience to which they have opened themselves.

Queen of Swords

The little white book that accompanies the Rider-Waite Smith deck has, I feel, a rather narrow definition of the Queen of Swords, associating her with such things as “sterility, widowhood, embarrassment.” That’s not to say that these do not apply, but I believe that the cards speak to our light as well as our shadow aspects, and the Queen of Swords is no exception. There is a strength and richness to the imagery that is far from sterile or austere and, in fact, evokes a sense of the Queen as one who is devoted to nurturing her subjects using the strengths that she has as a ruler.

The Queen’s long red hair is partly covered by a red headdress and gold crown of butterflies. Butterflies — often symbols of transformation — adorn her throne, as do two sickles, which are associated with those who work the land: perhaps the workers over whom she holds dominion. The landscape behind her is far from austere: trees and water appear to her left, dominated by the sky, a mix of blue expanse and roiling clouds.

Swords are representative of the mind and mental processes. Here, the Queen wields the sword of reason, which is thrust above the clouds and into the blue. Her mind rises above confusion and her hand points forward, her resolve apparent in her face, as she sees the way through the turbulence. She is in control of her thoughts — also seen in the fact that she wears a cloak that mirrors the sky: it is in service to her, not she to it.

There is also something distinctly masculine about her sword: she owns the phallus as it stands erect. Here, again, she is both masculine and feminine incarnate. She has mastery over her sexuality and is able to channel it to her will — as did Queen Elizabeth I as The Virgin Queen, who chose to direct that energy into her role as monarch, rather than as a wife or mother. In this way, she is the least receptive of all of the Queens, and perhaps that is because mental activity, by its very nature, is not received, but created.

Nevertheless, the Queen symbolises to me the idea of directed, controlled action of the mind in service to something. There is balance in the picture that is really not alluded to in many descriptions. There is nature (trees, water) vs. civilization (the throne); hardness (sword and stone) vs. softness (hair, clothing); colour vs. monochrome. All work together to create imagery that evokes upward and forward motion.

The Queen of Swords is alone, yes — as are we all. To dwell on that as something to be feared or avoided, however, ignores the gifts that solitude can help us to find: clear-headedness, single-pointedness, unimpeded action, wholehearted devotion and the integration of both male and female rather than seeking for a sense of power ‘out there’.

Queen of Pentacles

As we’ve discussed in previous articles, the progression from Ace to King in any suit symbolises our own progression through a particular area of our lives at a particular time. Whereas to me the Queen of Swords speaks of the ‘emancipated ruler’, someone who has mastery over their thoughts, the Queen of Pentacles lives out the idea that the body is a temple, and that richness here on Earth is not necessarily material. While many of the preceding cards in the suit have hinted at material richness, with the protagonists in a town surrounded by commerce, either dressed poorly or ornately, the Queen is simply dressed, and the prosperity in the card springs from the fertile landscape around her. She is firmly situated in the landscape of the Ace of Pentacles – a human working with the energy of the Ace to achieve, in one of our reader’s words, “The culmination of all things into their ultimate form in the physical plane.”

The only thing that the Queen wears that speaks of monetary wealth is her gold crown, but even here there is a message. The crown’s colour is reflected in the yellow sky behind her – a colour typically associated with the ground when it is as bold as this – whereas the mountains in the background are blue. The colours have been inverted, so what is above is below, and below is above. Finally, both crown and sky are reflections of the Pentacle itself, while the landscape surrounding the Queen is tangible, verdant. This is the point where matter and spirit converge.

We hit our midlife crises. We become confused. We often try to address the chaos through acquiring new things, new ideas, a new body, a new lover. What we forget about is acquiring new meaning. I think this, in many ways, is what this card is about. The Queen’s existence is meaningful because she understands why she is here, and what she is doing. She works deliberately and in balance with nature, and her environment is abundant and supportive, if not opulent or glitzy. It is as if she were made from the earth itself — Eve, reinstated in Eden.