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
“We have more in common than we think.” A pairing of opposing, yet complementary, qualities holds great creative potential. Feel the sense of something coming together while knowing that both aspects have an equal contribution to make.
I find this week’s reading compelling, exuding a sense of mature, self-contained — as opposed to inhibited — power.
We have two court cards — the King of Pentacles and the Queen of Wands — and a major arcana card in The Magician. This is not an everyday ‘doingness’ reading, but rather one that deals with personal evolution.
Although the King and Queen are in separate cards, the links between them are quite striking. Like all the Kings and Queens, they are on thrones; but in these particular cards, both sit square-on, their legs open, feet grounded, while turning their upper bodies slightly to their left. While the King looks down at his pentacle, however, the Queen’s gaze is directed at something beyond the borders of her card — in this case, The Magician.
There is a yin-yang quality to the colours in both courts: in the King, yellow skies overarch blue mountains; in the Queen, blue skies surround yellow peaks. Both monarchs hold masculine and feminine symbols in their hands: the phallus of both sceptre and wand, and the egg in the shape of the pentacle (and globe on the sceptre) and the seed-bearing head of the sunflower.
There is an abundance of yellow in both cards, as there is in The Magician, and this — and the sunflower and sceptre — point towards the illuminating qualities of The Sun. This is not a reading cast in shadow, although the shadow is acknowledged and included: two dark creatures at the base of each card are small but significant details in both, one resting under the left foot of the King and the other seated at the foot of the Queen. The bull’s head in the King seems to be held in submission, an active gesture of authority keeping it low to the ground. In the Queen, the cat sits independently, looking directly at us, its eyes the same colour as the Queen’s robes. It seems very much its own feline, and yet there is room for it, as well as the quality of unpredictability — of impulsivity-in-potential — that it suggests. Do these both denote sexuality? It certainly feels that way to me.
In the Queen of Wands, lions support her arm-rests, dance with sunflowers on the backdrop behind her, clasp her cape at her neck. As well as the one that he rests his foot upon, four bulls flank the King on his throne. Each animal is the astrological representative of its suit: Taurus and Leo — earth and fire respectively.
The King and Queen make a regal couple. They sit together, touching symbolically at key points, and yet are independent. There is a vibrancy — a sexiness — to their juxtaposition, their similarities and their tensions.
The King looks down, earth-bound; the Queen looks up beyond the limits of herself. Theirs is a mature relationship, each holding sway over their separate domains of physical and spiritual. As my eye moves from left to right across the cards, I see a journey that moves through introversion and extroversion, both incarnating in the self-awareness of The Magician.
The Magician incorporates the qualities of both Pentacles and Wands, which, together with Cups and Swords, appear on the table before him, the tools of his trade. We embody the archetype of The Magician when we are able to work consciously with all of the elements required to produce alchemical gold: self-expression that comes from embracing the truth of who we are.
What we meet in the King of Pentacles and the Queen of Wands finds its synthesis in The Magician. The red flowers on the King’s crown appear in The Magician — arched over his head, and growing at his feet. However, while the flowers — beautiful as they are — are rootless in both court cards, in The Magician they are part of a larger organism and have the ability to grow and flourish.
The red head-covering in the King and the white cape in the Queen become the clothing of the wizard. All three figures hold a staff-like object in their right hands, but The Magician also has his left hand pointing downwards: as above, so below. The physical and the spiritual come together, The Magician — the sign of infinity over his head — the connecting principle, holding the energies of both in an eternal dance.
Is this an indication of what The Lovers become when they have separated in order to be reunited? The Magician looks at us, unwavering.
Wordless, I can only thank you for your shuffle, your spread and your reading. Ceres, Earth, into Aries, Fire creating the Shaman. In each of us, if we will.
..What’s done on Earth, Will manifest in transformation.
..That’s my succinct observation.
I’m off to read, to see how the stars line up…
Jere
I’ve been working a lot lately with integrating the things represented by the court cards: practicality vs. creativity, service vs. self-expression, dominating nature vs. letting it run free, looking inward vs. looking outward. But in truth the full expression of each end of these polarities doesn’t happen without its opposite playing an essential role. For example: my act of self-expression does not feel complete unless it is in the service of something larger than myself, which may simply mean a letting-go of the thing I’ve created. I have to look inward in order to create, but not so much that I get bogged down in self-doubt. To get my creation out into the world I have to be practical and business-like about it. And so forth.
Funny, though: astrologically, earth and fire are not opposites. They are at a square to each other. So perhaps it’s not a face-to-face encounter but one of the cross, of meeting an apparent obstacle. That’s why their reconciliation manifests itself as power.
I like that the masculine wands (fire) are represented by a queen, while the feminine pentacles (earth) are represented by a king. That further drives the point home of an inherent need for synthesis. And how telling that the masculine and feminine, be they earth-fire or water-fire or air-water or air-earth, meet at the cross rather than in opposition! Looking at the Magician now I see the figure as among the more androgynous in this deck, perhaps another source of his/her power.
To me, the Magician is Uranus, which has just gone retrograde for the last time before its first square with Pluto.