The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, December 4, 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 explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

From a minor arcana card to two major arcana cards. From the personal steps that we can take to allow (as opposed to compel or drive) something to emerge, we die to ourselves to make way for the birth of something new. This is a call to become a ruler of integrity in your inner domain, which has the ability to ripple out and impact the world around you.

The Seven of Wands is making one of its regular appearances in the Weekend Tarot Reading. It must be one of the most — if not the most — frequent visitors here, and from this I would suggest that there is an underlined message: We are being asked to work through a lot of our own ‘stuff’, to be aware of our own processes as much as we can, and to be prepared to allow things that are rising into consciousness to come to the surface without retreating into attack — either inner or outer — or into denial.

Many interpretations of the Seven of Wands focus on the idea of heroic action against an aggressor, and it is entitled “Valour” in many decks. I see the Seven of Wands from a different, although related, angle, and I quote from a previous article:

The Seven of Wands shows us that which is thrown up from beneath that we must then contend with. There is no other figure in the card: perhaps this is a battle that we fight alone. Perhaps it is a fight that we have with ourselves. Perhaps that ‘beneath’ is what rises from what had not been conscious until now.

There is good reason why we have so many defences with which to fend off the unconscious. Psychoanalytic theory sees defences (for example projection, denial, repression, among others) as a necessary function of the ego to defend itself against ‘attacks’ from the unconscious in order to maintain equilibrium. In this way, stopping what is coming up from beneath is an act of valour:  We are, at a certain level, employing what we have in our arsenal in an attempt to keep functioning in the world we have created.

But what happens when the world we have created is no longer working in our best interests? What if it is starting to impede our progress rather than enhance it? When this happens, the unconscious will begin to come to consciousness, bubbling up from the unknown, seeping into our dreams, into behaviours that we find hard to explain, into experiences that seem to run headlong into us in our waking lives. We cannot force something into consciousness. We can, however, stop resisting that which is already taking shape. We can stop our busy-ness, we can stop numbing out, we can take a look at why we seem to face the same situations again and again. This, I feel, is the message of the Seven of Wands: To put down our weapon and see what happens, as threatened and vulnerable as we may feel.

What happens is that those parts that no longer serve us fall away. We die to ourselves in order that we can live more fully. When I look at the Death card, I feel my own fear at the inexorable march of the figure of Death on his white horse, and it can create a sensation that is palpable and prone to externalisation: Death on an inner level has the ability to put us into fight or flight mode.

But is it death that we are really up against? Look closer. In Death, the figure seems to have appropriated the staff that the man is holding in the Seven of Wands to carry his standard: From it, a flag is in full flight. On it is what A E Waite refers to as the ‘Mystic Rose’ — the rose of rebirth. For this is not an ending but a beginning. Death has its back turned from the Seven of Wands. The fight is behind us. Under the feet of Death’s horse, the old king is dead, and Death marches towards The Emperor — a new incarnation of rulership.

The Emperor is the tarot representation of Aries, the first sign in astrology, a fire sign, the herald of spring in the northern hemisphere, the first human incarnation of authority in the major arcana, when we step up and become rulers of our own existence. The Emperor may seem old, but he is wise: He has seen it all, done it all. He embodies the concept of thought into action and the concomitant awareness of the consequences of that action. He can be summed up by the statement, “I am.”

When we stand up and declare who we are, it is an act of self-definition, and it often takes great courage. Through this phrase, we are willing to be counted, and to be accountable. We are prepared to don the robes of rulership (self-rulership), and we are also aware that it is a position that we are ready to fight for: The Emperor wears his armour subtly, but it is there if he needs it nonetheless. However, this is not conflict for conflict’s sake. The Emperor holds the significant responsibility of acting in the interests of those around him too. If he loses this awareness, he becomes a tyrant, clinging on to power at any cost. Accountability starts with the self — the I Am — and expands from there. And with it, your experience of the world expands.