The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, October 13, 2013

By Sarah Taylor

An all-female cast heads up this week’s tarot reading — although the figure in The Star at centre, corresponding as it does to the sign of Aquarius, lies outside of the more solid gender delineations of the next two cards in the major arcana: The Moon (female) and The Sun (masculine).

As part of the tarot’s major arcana, The Moon and The Star represent transpersonal experience. In other words, when we contact with a major arcana card, we are contacting the collective. We feel ourselves part of a larger pattern that forms an interconnected cosmic web; we understand that we are not just a product of our personal history but also of our collective history — our ancestry, what has been woven into our genetic structure, the identities and characteristics that are simultaneously ours and not-just-ours.

Here, the two transpersonal cards, representing heavenly bodies, both feminine (one edging on androgyny), seem to be in communion with each other — a meeting of, if not minds, then of consciousness.

According to the writing on The Moon, it is associated with the “Threshold of the new field of awareness,” “End of Karma,” “Illusions,” and the “Examination of the subconscious”. The card is dominated by a moon that doesn’t immediately correspond with my idea of what our Moon looks like, and the upper body of a woman in contemplation. As in the Rider-Waite Smith version of The Moon, it is tempting to see her as looking sad. She may be sad; she may not. Any emotion comes secondary to the process of seeing inward that defines her.

A foreign-looking moon. Very often the language of our intuition — the language of the unconscious — can feel just as foreign to us. It speaks in an other-worldly voice, and it is easily masked by our feelings and by other voices that tend to speak louder or with more urgency. A judgement on the woman’s expression is an example of where I could look at what lies on the surface, failing to see something deeper and which speaks to the truth of The Moon. And the truth cannot be spoken or written about fully; it has to be felt. As the Moon pulls and pushes the tides, she also moves us inwardly, and we feel it in the rhythms of her voice and our bodies and how they meet.

And The Star? What does The Star bring to the gathering of two? She brings flow, illumination, inspiration. Whereas The Moon is the gateway to the inner unconscious, The Star is the channel for higher consciousness. She is a little harder to contain in our own understanding, because, as a star, she resides further than the Moon from our embodied state on Earth. Again, however, she can be felt, and the feeling has a different quality. The Moon is a felt sense; The Star is one step beyond, an encounter with … the only word that I can come up with is “the angelic”, and while I’m not entirely happy with it, it describes the energy. It’s so light as to pass through our fingers; it is present and yet communicates in tongues of light rather than visceral waves.

So we have a communion between two transpersonal entities. One is more accessible, the other further away — both in an act of co-creation that has its birth in the final card.

The Princess of Wands. She is what is brought into human form when the light of consciousness created by our intuition (inner cosmos) meets with our connection to impersonal consciousness (outer cosmos). The result, in this case, is a form of physical expression that is unashamedly erotic.

The Princess is at once butterfly and panther — fragile and powerful, transformation that is gossamer-winged and sleekly feline. Stockinged legs, bare breasts, lithe body in an arch of ecstasy reminiscent of a young Babalon from the Lust card in the Thoth Tarot.

Except here, instead of holding a cup upward and outward in an offering, she directs a shaft of light downward and inward, as if in an act of prayer, the wand penetrating her third eye. The writing on the card says it all:

“Optimism,” “enlarged perception,” “Setting free of fear,” “New Beginning”.

Both The Moon and The Star are hard to grasp, but when we work with diligence and openness, we are able to cut through the doubts and illusions to come to a certain truth that is rooted in our bodies. The truth, coming as it does in the form of the Princess of Wands, is the truth of our erotic nature.

Butterflies and leopards don’t apologise for who they are — their beauty and vitality worthy of pause, their vivacity expressed through the shedding of old skin and the untrammelled flow of the wild.

Looking at the Princess unselfconsciously immersed in her own form of devotion, I am left wondering why it is that we would need to apologise for ourselves either.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: The Moon (Pisces), The Star (Aquarius), Princess of Wands (the earthy aspect of fire)

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.