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
Out of a period of disillusionment, there is the possibility of union. The key here is to remain open to a higher emotional guiding principle.
This is starting to sound familiar: yet again, we have a connection between readings. This week, it feels like we’re looking at last week’s reading from another angle — this time from an emotional, rather than a spiritual, perspective.
In fact, this reading is all about emotions. All three cards are Cups; all three are minor arcana, although the appearance of the Queen — a court card — gives the reading something of a more enduring, less fleeting, feel to it. This is not about rational analysis (Swords), nor is it about how you interact with the material world (Pentacles), nor how you work with your creative energies (Wands). This is about a wholehearted (read: “whole-hearted”) immersion in feelings.
How to do this? By taking time in solitude in order to be present to what is being offered. This is reflected in the Four of Cups. Maybe all it takes is a shift in focus to draw the youth out of his self-absorbed ennui, and into a state of meditative receptivity to the single cup that is being held out to him. Maybe this is his invitation to emotion, to love. “Love your life once again by loving yourself once again.”
It is when, in the Two of Cups, he takes the cup and looks up that he finds himself reflected in the eyes of another, and experiences himself as that love. This ‘other’ may be real, or it may be symbolic, but those are the details in a larger story. More important is the understanding that what he encountered as outside and separate from himself in the Four was really inside all along. He was simply looking away, closed off to its presence.
The Two of Cups presents a moment of healing, when two separate parts come together. The caduceus symbolises the healing quality of the encounter in the card, the winged lion a mix of grounded instinct and of transcending the physical.
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.
To write more about this reading would be to try and put the Sword of scrutiny to the waves that lie in front of the Queen: it cannot be done satisfactorily. To get a fuller idea of what this reading is trying to convey, I’d suggest that you look at the larger version of the cards — better still if you have the three cards tangibly in front of you — and sit with them for a while. With the Queen’s guidance, open yourself to the possibility of the message that they bring to you.
This could have been titled: Water Loves Gaia…
Our thesis: Life has retained planetary water
(Stephen Harding and Lynn Margulis)
We champion the poorly developed Gaian view that life has vigorously helped maintain abundant water on the Earth’s surface over the last three and a half thousand million years. We defend the idea that life’s populations persist and continue to expand on Earth not because of any “lucky accident” that has situated our moist planet at an optimal distance from the sun, but rather that water has been actively retained by communities of living organisms acting to maintain wet local surroundings. The result has been the retention of moist habitability over geological time. We suggest that without life’s involvement in complex geological, atmospheric and metabolic processes, Earth would long ago have lost its water, becoming a dry and barren world much like Mars and Venus. ” [Emphasis mine.]
Despite the *lamentable* typeface, this is an essay well worth the read.
From http://www.wildethics.org/essays/water-gaia.html
Eco11, I would say that your reading is somewhat oracular – I’m just not sure at what scale. Personal? Regional? Planetary?
Sarah, I read back over my comments. They don’t hang together as coherently as I would have liked, but the gist was that water combined with love has the potential to retwine (see Cadeusus) whatever is sundered by nuclear criticality.
***
Interestingly, just minutes ago a friend sent me a meditation by John Kenyon involving water and intention to set up a protective field of sorts. I had already been using a similar ritual, but I hold the water (or wine, depending) against my heart as I focus. Now I will add the image of two streams of light/sound flowing through my hands into the water. http://tomkenyon.com/medicines-of-light
(timba, ungawah!)
M
I want to make an intuitive observational comment regarding the four of cups. When this piece was first published, I looked at the card and had a flash of Buddha. It took me a day to flesh out the concepts (and they’re still a bit sketchy!).
He sits under a tree upon a hill, communing with the worldly and the divine.
Here, I want to share with you a practice of mine that I’ve developed over the years. I spent a good solid three years staring at the wall of a 24 hour dive. Technically I wasn’t staring at the wall at all, I had retracted my focus into the ‘in between’ space. I began to form pseudo-pictures through the periphery that I could ‘sense’: as if my head were absorbing the environment, all 360 spherical degrees. I heard, saw, smelled, felt everything, yet only focused on that which I found to be pertinent in my reality (..most was inane b.s. chatter of the mundane).
When I really wanted to focus on what someone was saying I’d either scramble my vision, or close my eyes (this kinda screws with some folk.. you know, the eye-contact people).
Anyway, I saw that the cat in the four of cups has his forehead pointed toward the ‘divine’ cup, therefore his gaze (according to this theory at least 😉 ’cause when I really want to Understand something, I have to use my forehead, not my eyes.).
Very fruitfull meditations, and a great run on the spreads, Sarah, et al.
..I swear the World keeps getting cooler everyday! (global-fucked-up-warming pun intended!),
Breathing,
Jere
Isn’t it wonderful that so many different interpretations can converge here, and yet all are valid, because tarot is as much about the observer as it is about the observed?
Charles, the idea of the “Alchemical Marriage” definitely fits with mine – well, for me personally anyway. Mystes and eco11 – two very thought-provoking takes that were not in the scope of my reading. Burning – I found it interesting that the idea of meditation just wasn’t in the cards last week, and yet here it is, clear as day.
Thank you, one and all!
I think this is a very sorrowful layout. I would name it “the sorrow of the divine feminine.”
In the first card, the boy refuses the cup.
In the second, the boy is now a young man and eager, but the woman is obviously more mature than he is, older. Her face is sober. It is her duty to hold up the cup, but she is not joyful or expectant.
Further, above them is no sweet cloud of heaven now, but instead a fiery lion and twin snakes coil down from a center rod that extends from the lion between the cups.
There is no proof that the young man will become a man in time and no sign of a forthcoming man.
The queen, alone, seems more like she is dissolving into the water than taking form out of it. Her throne and posture lean downwards. The cup is covered, enchurched, entombed. A true queen, she continues to focus on the divine element she carries, but it seems suited up for protection and she seems destined to return to water again for awhile. All is not written. But she has been here before.
When the world is in denial, it cannot rejoice over its gifts, and they become invisible while those who carry them sink back into the unconscious. Potential remains hidden below. We will have to go fishing. Or do a water dance.
Thank you, Sarah. Excellent pull! And Charles: It is always a pleasure to read your insight. (Howsoever much we may disagree about the nuclear issues.)
For me this suite is giving a hint about how to deal with the poisoning of our planet that is occurring principally through water. While the radioactive isotopes from Japan continue to flow in via air currents, it is in rainwater that they are most concentrated. Our groundwater nationwide is showing an impact, but after a few rain cycles, it will really begin to pervade our food/earth — along with air and water. As radioactivity could be considered ‘fire’ there we have the full suite of elements.
Note that the 1st and 3rd cards are male/female and that the Queen is holding not just the Grail, but a cup with features echoing the Arc (with a “c” not a “k”) of the Covenant, which symbolized and sealed the end of the Great Flood. The middle card is expression of that Covenant, and the ardent affection shown therein a key to working creatively (read: esoterically) with this newfound ‘fire’ in our midst.
For continuing ‘real’ data on this situation, I recommend keeping an eye on Alexander Higgins’ blog http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com and Al Jazeera’s coverage: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/04/20114219250664111.html
@ Charles: “Perhaps this is the message of the layout, being receptive and focused instead of disinterested with the the little gifts our universe presents us. The center card suggests the way to do this is is to enter into that “spiritual marriage” that tunes into our passionate feelings and transmutes them to a spiritual relationship.”
That resonates with me.
Cups cups cups. That’s a lot of cups. The outer pair 4-Queen is so similar to the previous 4-King. And the 2 in the center, these are court and minor arcana, so this is a reading about personal matters (with cups, personal feelings and emotions).
But that 2C in the center is a very interesting card. A man and a woman are holding cups underneath a Red Lion, an alchemical symbol roughly analogous to The Philosopher’s Stone. The caduceus is also a symbol of Asclepius, who supposedly discovered the formula for “Tears of the Red Lion.” There’s a long Rosicrucian story behind this, we are seeing an “Alchymical Marriage,” a “transmutation of lead into gold” with The Philosopher’s Stone. The man and woman, through a union of marriage, transmute their passions into a spiritual blending of souls.
But now that 4-Q pair on the outside, the thing that stands out to me is their gaze. In the 4, the boy looks disinterestedly towards the 3 cups, he almost looks through them. But in the Queen, she stares intently at the ornate cup, as if it the only thing in her field of perception.
Perhaps this is the message of the layout, being receptive and focused instead of disinterested with the the little gifts our universe presents us. The center card suggests the way to do this is is to enter into that “spiritual marriage” that tunes into our passionate feelings and transmutes them to a spiritual relationship.
OMG, Sarah. This really connects to last week’s for me and makes sense of both weeks. I was haviang trouble relating to what last week’s was saying on it’s own. That is why I had to connect it to the week before. But now I see the flow, because, I realize, I am in it. And the cards are speaking. And it is not strange I have trouble “reading” when it is “spiritual”. Thanks so much for your insight and wisdom. How strange that the thought of slipping into meditation out of ennui for the young man never was a thought when looking at tha card last week. And completely obvious in the context of the cards this week. Powerful cards and powerful reading. Thank you for sharing your gift with us. Much love to you.