The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, September 4, 2011

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

In moments when you feel resistant, defensive, shut down, ask yourself whether the cause is really coming from ‘out there’, or whether this feeling is one that seems to rise up from inside — and which seems to have a certain familiarity to it. There is something else on offer to you right now. If you take it, there is a flow of creativity that you can align with. Making the most of it means using your powers of awareness and focused action.

What’s going on here? The first thing that I see, given that our natural eye movement is from left to right, is that there seems to be standoff – one fraught with tension.

A man, head bandaged, eyes up eight wands that line up behind him with some suspicion. He seems defensive, hurt, and possessive of the ninth wand that he holds as if keeping it away from the wands at his back — keeping it close to his chest, across his heart. There is little trust here. The wands dwarf him; he seems somewhat corralled. It is the first time that I have looked at this card and seen a parallel with the Eight of Swords, where a woman — also bandaged — is surrounded by a screen of swords, seemingly unable to extricate herself.

However, she can extricate herself: all she needs to do is to remove her mask — which is clouding her judgement — and she would see clearly that there is a way out. Here, in the Nine of Wands, is there a similar admonition? Just what is this figure fighting? As with the Seven of Wands, there is no visible opponent. The opponents are the Wands themselves; the mode of battle is resistance. It is the resisting of the energy that was let loose with the Eight of Wands. It is a fight for identity, a fight for ownership, a fight that feels personal and internal, given the lack of external action. The suspicion seems predicated upon the fact that there is something that the figure knows and which he brings to the confrontation. This is a man who has had to become savvy. “Stay back,” he seems to say. “I know what you are capable of.”

But what is real, and what is not? And what are the wands in relation to him? The reason I ask these questions is because of the colouring of this card. First, in spite of what we might feel is happening in the foreground, in the background the sky is blue and clear, the hills are green. There is an element of chocolate box about it — a Lynchian framework of surreal perfection that serves to accentuate what rises from beneath. And here we have the wands, rising as they do from the ground … and they are the same colour as the figure’s tunic, arms and face — each of them a series of red hatchings over a yellow surface. This man is the wands; the wands are him. They emanate from the same source. Is this an echo from the past? And are his perceptions able to influence what is going to happen next? And, if so, how is the energy flow working here, given that wands are focused on energy? I am left wondering what would happen if he were to put that wand back in line with the others, in the gap that sits right behind him. What would happen with full alignment of those symbols of creativity?

The next card says it all for me. The Ace of Wands. Ah, yes. He is resisting the potential of the highest expression of the wands suit. And he hasn’t got a chance. He can either go kicking and screaming, full of the defences that he has learned so well — that he has had to learn so well — or he can rescind power to a force whose own power is both greater than his, and profoundly transformative. It asks for nothing less than surrender. His own posturing next to the unabashed vitality of the staff and the hand — the hand of creation itself — seems childlike. Why associate yourself with the vestiges of wounding when you can cloak yourself in, and be supported by, the currents of heaven? There are more leaves than the stems of the wand can carry, and yet they are supported on their own invisible tendrils of energy. In the same way, if you feel beaten down, conflicted, cynical … you, too, have access to that support. And there is more than seems possible to imagine.

So how to use what is being offered to you? The key lies in the final card, The Hierophant. The Hierophant is the intermediary between divine law and secular law — the principles of engagement that we have with ourselves, with others, and with our world. As Eric wrote in the comments section to a previous article on The Hierophant:

The Heirophant is the destination or maybe the journey. I think one key to the card is that the two monks who make it there are adorned in red and in white flowers: red on the left, white on the right (roses and lilies). This represents what you might call Red Tantra, the path of passion; and White Tantra, the path of purity. They both lead to the same place. Balance is implied.

The Hierophant is also associated with the “marriage of the Self” — a cornerstone of Jungian analysis — where wholeness is achieved by journeying within rather than through the search for something outside us. Furthermore, it speaks to me of discipline on that journey. Not intractable discipline, or dogma, but the commitment to the full and conscious participation in our own unfolding nature — that is, the gradual discovery that at the heart of all creative processes — no matter how challenging, how hidden to us, how painful sometimes — is love. We express it fully when we surrender to its moving through us without resistance, or fear, or the need to hold on to it. Our journey towards love of self leads us to love for others and, by extension, love for all creation.