The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, February 5, 2012

Today’s reading feels like a meeting point between us mortals and the immortals — the archetypes that we embody that elevate us above our limited viewpoint and situate us on a plane that we can perhaps sense but not fully understand. In fact, this reading is going to be a challenging one to convey, simply because we are dealing with that point of impingement between the physical and the liminal, where words can only go so far, but where we are being asked to feel into ourselves and our deeper senses and intuition to reach for a place where we can hold the tension of our experience.

Let me see if I can explain more clearly.

On the outside of the reading, we have two major arcana cards: The High Priestess and The Hermit. Major arcana cards are associated with inner development and growth — our souls first, rather than our physical bodies, which then live out the soul’s experience in the everyday world. These major arcana archetypes point to areas that are asking for our attention, calling to us through these two figures and what they might represent for us.

Both The High Priestess and The Hermit are what I would call ‘introverts’ of the tarot: They are figures that find their centre and live out their purpose first by going within, and they need that time in order to fulfill what is being asked of them. They don’t necessarily indicate ‘aloneness’ — embodying these archetypes does not preclude us from living and relating in the world — but the work that they ask of us requires that we spend some time separate from others while we align with them.

Here, they are nothing less than two guardian angels to the stricken heart at centre. They are holding space, holding up the light: The High Priestess, looking directly at us from her position of knowledge between the monochrome pillars that flank her; The Hermit, head bowed in reverence and homage to an unseen but embraced god, his lantern held up to the Three of Swords, shedding a small but significant light on the drama playing out in front of him. His light is The Star in miniature. It is a sign of what is to come, but no-one in the centre of the reading can imagine this right now. Here there are pain and confusion. Little does anyone realise what it is that looks after and tends to the emotions that are being dominated by thoughts that tear asunder and rend and demand their piece of real-estate. There is so much wisdom here, so much hope. If only we could see it. Can we but step back, take in the two figures that come into view, and see the bigger picture?

Just what it is that the Three of Swords represents feels fragile to me — as if it needs to be protected, because each one of us who comes to this reading will look at it and know in our own hearts what it means to us. We don’t need anyone else to spell out what we know only too well.

What I will say, though, is this: That this set-up — this triumvirate — is no accident, nor is it ‘making the best of a bad situation’. When I now look at the reading, I see that everyone has their role to play. No-one has come here against their will, having to take up a part with which they don’t identify or which feels one-sided and in conflict with what it is that they have chosen to be. Perhaps no-one can be singled out for responsibility.

More than this: That perhaps we can stretch our imaginations to encompass the possibility that both The High Priestess and The Hermit have been participants in the events that are now playing out. That unbeknownst to us, like the gods at Olympus, they have had a hand in the proceedings, watching as they have directed the flow of our experience, working with and through us — not by manipulating but empathetically and by bearing witness. They come alive through us.

And so to the Three of Swords — which I always want to refer to as the ‘Three of Hearts’ by sheer virtue of the visually compelling, blood-red heart at the centre of the picture. It dominates and demands our attention. In contrast with the subtleties of The High Priestess and The Hermit, it is symmetrical, bold, stylised. We cannot ignore what it is asking us to see: the predicament that we put ourselves in — the damage that we absorb — when we choose to identify with our feelings above all else. This is the point where emotions are not a means to an end, but an end in themselves — the reason why we do what we do, say what we say, believe what we believe. They are the justification for a thousand questionable actions and thoughts.

To pick up on an idea that Eric has introduced in the past, the Three of Swords exemplifies what we become when we ’emote’ rather than feel. It is an ‘acting out’ where emotions are experienced intellectually, but are mistaken for the genuine article. This is typified in the idea of a ‘love triangle’ with which the Three of Swords is so often associated. In a love triangle, the feelings experienced by everyone involved might be real inasmuch as they feel real, but the falseness — the stylisation at the heart of it all — is predicated on the realisation that we cannot put limits on love. It is our view of love that is limited, not the love itself. Love is not limited, it cannot be doled out according to merit or deservedness. It doesn’t recognise worthiness or ownership.

In the Three of Swords, there is a fight over ownership, each sword staking claim over a piece of flesh. What we learn when we do this, however, is that any claim-staking kills the very thing that we want to own — and in this case the heart doesn’t stand a chance: Everyone wants a piece of it, everyone demands their pound.

So what happens when that contention is laid bare and we see it for what it is? Is that what is happening here? Is that why it feels like The High Priestess and The Hermit are not merely detached observers — that there is a sense of things needing to be played out in a more conscious fashion so that we can see more clearly what it is that we are contending with and the choices that we have in front of us?

In this way, then, look again at the Priestess and the Hermit. Look now at the crescent moon in the first card, and the staff in the latter — both lit by the yellow glow of a subtle but undeniable luminescence. Masculine and feminine working together to illuminate the darkness, in a world where bright light does not and cannot penetrate.

We need eyes that are more discerning, that are used to navigating the world of shadows. For now, the light that they hold is enough to pick out the aspects of ourselves that are also used to being shrouded — those parts that are complicit in any experience where we pass ourselves off as ‘not good enough’, as competitors for seemingly limited resources of love, affection, regard, esteem. Look at the light being shed, nuanced as it is: We are good enough; there is no competition, save for that in our minds. The Three of Swords keeps reminding us of our tendency to look at our lives in terms of limitation. The Priestess and The Hermit, enveloping the Three, emphasise that limitations can be transcended by shifting our perception so that it lies outside the matter at hand. In that moment of deciding who we are and what we choose to be, can the archetypes offer us another possibility? That is exactly what I think they are doing.