The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, January 6, 2013

By Sarah Taylor

The unknown is uncontrolled; no strategies exist that will enclose the endless territory of the new. Only by trusting in yourself and in this world can you get past the watchdogs of your fears and out of the iron gates of the already-known.
— Arthur Deikman

The cards are tying up with the month’s astrology this week, and I have a feeling it might give an indication of timing for some of us. Moreover, the cards are — what’s the word? Undilute — in terms of their quality; all three are well-nigh impossible to overlook in a card line-up. They are conspicuous, weighty, vibrant — even when the colours and energies are cacophonous, at odds, unsettling. However they play out, there is a beauty to their symphony. Perhaps a profound beauty.

Let’s look at the astrology. From left to right, we have The Star, the Ten of Cups, and The Tower, representing Aquarius, Mars in Pisces, and Mars respectively.

The two outer cards are both from the major arcana, representing the large-theme, archetypal cards in the tarot. When we work with the major arcana, we are working with transpersonal themes that each of us embodies and experiences in a particular way in our lives. Currently, Mars (The Tower) is in Aquarius (The Star) and about to square Saturn, on Monday Jan. 7. As Eric described this aspect:

[I]f emotional and erotic energy is involved, there is only so far stuffing things down can go; eventually the container fills up. Group opinion, described by Mars in Aquarius, is saying that it’s time to break free against the constraints of Saturn in Scorpio.

So we have The Tower and The Star both being activated — and from the perspective of the tarot the meaning of that activation is clear. The Tower is card 16, following on from card 15, The Devil. In The Devil, we confront the shadow — something about ourselves that we have kept so well hidden that we weren’t even fully aware of it. The Devil is often the repository for a specific kind of shadowy energy: that of sex and sexuality, and the way that it ties in with relating to others.

So much of what we desire, what we crave and fear showing to the world resides in how we feel about our bodies and the drive to merge. Many of us had an incomplete or perverted experience of relating as infants and children. Couple that with the fact that we have a hormone-driven, animalistic side of us (that is entirely natural), and we can find the two aspects in opposition to each other rather than harmony — that somehow we are ‘wrong’ to feel the things we do, or that we have no way of containing or expressing what we feel.

The Devil brings us face-to-face with what we have sought, and failed, to contain, and it can be unsettling. So unsettling, in fact, that we realise that containment is impossible. Something inside us erupts and barriers and walls are obliterated in a strike of energy that is so powerful that it can feel like our world is being torn apart. This is The Tower, and we can experience it either as an inner phenomenon, or as one that is outside of us — a projection of our inner dismantling.

The Tower is unavoidable. To the ego — to our controlled, conscious selves — it can feel relentless. But to see that as the aim of the experience is to misunderstand it. Because the power that is behind the lightning strike on The Tower is coming from the very core of us. It is of us. It is the power of consciousness that has been denied. It is freedom of consciousness. It can also mean orgasm; it can be the bursting forth of the life-force that has been held back to the detriment of self and other (Aquarius).

M. M. Meleen — creator of the Rosetta Tarot — writes that The Tower is the “destruction that precedes, and is necessary for, renewal. … From the open window (the only way out of the Tower) flies the dove of peace. The dove fleeing the tower is a sign of release and of emancipation from prison.”

The Tower has its moment, but its counterpart is the card that sits opposite it on the left side of the spread: The Star. “The Star’s Hebrew letter Hè means window, and here we look out upon a vista of night sky.” The way out of The Tower is via the window of The Star. The Star, as card 17 in the major arcana, is revelation after The Tower has fallen. It symbolises the flow that comes after the destruction of the old and unworkable. It is growth and expansion.

The focus of this growth and expansion comes in the form of the card in the centre: the Ten of Cups, which is Mars in Pisces, reflected in the astrology as Mars changes signs from Aquarius to Pisces on February 1. The Ten of Cups heralds the culmination of a cycle in preparation for a new one — in this story, one that is founded in feelings, relatedness, and the emerging of the unconscious into consciousness.

It is often said that the Ten of Cups can mitigate even the most hard-assed of cards. If this is the case, if you are faced with revelation and you feel the walls falling, take a moment to ask yourself if your fears are ones that you want to hold to, or to release with what it is that is now leaving.

As the quote at the beginning of the article states, it is the fear of the unknown, and therefore the fear of what we cannot control, that has the propensity to cause us to run to the hills screaming. But what if your revelation were breathtakingly beautiful, rather than simply breath-taking? What if you weren’t facing a tidal-wave, but a tidal-wave of love?

Astrology correspondences: The Star (Aquarius), Ten of Cups (Mars in Pisces), The Tower (Mars)

M. M. Meleen’s website: www.rosettatarot.com

To purchase the Rosetta Tarot or The Book of Seshet: http://shop.rosettatarot.com/

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.