The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, October 28, 2012

By Sarah Taylor

Today marks the first Weekend Tarot Reading with the Röhrig-Tarot deck that I featured in the mid-week article, A View from the deck: the Röhrig-Tarot. (If you’re unfamiliar with the Röhrig-Tarot — and given it sits in stark contrast to the Xultun Maya Tarot that I’ve been using for the Sunday readings since September 23 — it might be useful to read that article first so that you become acquainted with its imagery, how you relate to it, and how you feel it is relating to you.)

This week’s reading is comprised of cards from the minor arcana: this will be something that becomes apparent in your day-to-day life and your interactions with others. From left to right, the cards are the Nine of Swords, the Nine of Wands, and the Two of Disks (Pentacles) — Cruelty, Strength, and Change respectively.

The suits are balanced, their corresponding elements being Air, Fire, and Earth, which are also seen in terms of thoughts/beliefs, libido/creativity, and the physical world. The missing suit is Cups — element of water, which governs emotions and our unconscious depths (emotions being a doorway to the unconscious).

Which says something to me immediately: there is a thrust into consciousness of that which was once hidden. It has been hidden under a layer of self-recrimination, shame, guilt — a layer of swords that has been preventing us from seeing past them. As soon as we came close to the source of the pain, it triggered our defence mechanisms. We turned the swords on ourselves — a fight so up-close-and-personal that it prevented insight.

Look at the picture: it is the eye that is the target of the attack — our ability to see. There are grief, encroaching barbs, razor-sharp blades. But what might be hardest to see of all is that it is self-inflicted. Those swords are sketched into the skin; they are not pointed at the eye from some external antagonist. Our perceptions, what we believe we are seeing, are what wound us.

In that moment, we become blind to our inherent beauty.

The Nine of Swords was the central card in the Weekend Tarot Reading of September 16, 2012. Here, it has moved to the left; its energy is receding. Have we learned our lesson? Do we now understand that punishing ourselves because we feel inadequate in some way is simply cutting off access to our light? When we do that, we not only deny it to ourselves, but we also deny it to others. Our shame is what we bring into the world, and it is our shame that gets reflected in our relationships with others.

When we are able to look into ourselves with searing honesty and compassionate acceptance of who we are — apparent warts and all — we bring light to the darkness. Here, it is as if it bursts out of us in a flash of revelation and release. In the Nine of Wands, the eye has become star, exploding the stone walls holding us in, holding us back.

This stone cube is not a one-off image in the Röhrig-Tarot. It is one of the visual themes that runs through the deck, and it is seen most clearly in the stone cube that forms the centrepiece to the Five of Cups (Disappointment). The Five of Cups was the focal point of last week’s Weekend Tarot Reading, where I wrote about the grief and disillusionment we can experience from a sense of loss, not realising that our perception is mistaken. We have been looking at the wrong thing. The loss we felt there becomes clear here: it is the loss of a part of ourselves with which we have identified so closely, and for so long, that we forgot to ask ourselves whether it had been doing us any good.

Amazing how we can cleave to the very things that hurt us simply because it is more comforting being wounded by what we know than being released into the unknown. Uncertainty, freedom, pulling up anchor: all of these can seem terrifying. Maybe in the face of the unknown the swords are a sacrifice (a self-sacrifice) that we tell ourselves we can handle. At least the pain feels familiar. For a time we believed that we had petrified so much that our hardened centres could contain anything — keep it safe from consciousness.

Not anymore. The opportunity is there for an insight that blows the whole damn charade apart. We put up a really good fight; we put up a good front. We learned to be brave; we learned that strength and fortification would stand us in good stead. Instead we became imprisoned.

What we are being guided towards now is alignment. We can burn so much brighter than we have. We can burn so brightly we burn through an idea about ourselves that no longer works in our best interests. In that moment, we become vulnerable, and our beauty becomes apparent.

And so we open ourselves to change. That change is evocative of the eternal dance of opposites, living in co-operative, dynamic partnership that opens the flow of the universe to us. Disks are manifestation, and here we have the ability to create something tangible with our connection to the divine. If we choose this, we liberate ourselves from the mirror of pain we have been so used to seeing in front of us. Our cell is opened, the landscape is illuminated.

We are called to relate to our world in a new way, however, committing and re-committing ourselves to a paradigm that thrives on change. This calls for flexibility and skill in an environment that will keep us on our toes. Now that we know what it feels like to be held captive by our fears, we are equipped with the means of steering a different course.

Astrology correspondences: Nine of Swords (Mars in Gemini), Nine of Wands (Moon in Sagittarius), Two of Disks (Jupiter in Capricorn)

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.