By Sarah Taylor
Disappointment. Strength. Re/Birth.
This is the pattern of the tale that is being woven in this week’s tarot reading. It feels like a timeline to me — a story of the emptying out of something, an emotional reckoning (Cups), and then the revivifying fire of Wands energy that gives you the opportunity to revisit something in a different way. If you do this, you move into the landscape of The Empress, Venus, fecundity, sensuality, the consort. She is the gateway to cleared, fertile ground ready for sowing. At its most literal, this is a card of pregnancy and motherhood, although ‘pregnancy’ can mean the birthing of ideas, projects, love, and sexual union.
But let’s go back a step. There’s a change in the feel of the cards as they progress from left to right which is worth exploring a little.
On the left, the Five of Cups feels dry, hard, metallic. The lotus flowers have nothing to feed them. The five cups, joined by a filigree pentacle, are separated from the water beneath them, and both plants and water are poorer for that separation: vitality wilts in a hardened atmosphere; emotional depths shrink, feeding nothing. The picture has the capacity to be beautiful, but it has become a nightmare of barrenness. There is no presence of the initiating force of divine love: the single cup at the bottom of the picture represents the Ace, but in the physical world it has stopped flowing.
In the Five of Cups, you face the disappointment that comes with having forgotten who you really are, and by extension what you are capable of bringing down from the gods and making manifest.
And so on to the Nine of Wands — Strength. This is what Gerd Ziegler has to say of the Nine:
The strong wand in the center connects the sun and moon. Hidden unconscious powers (Moon) become visible through the radiant light of the conscious (Sun).
When the unconscious becomes visible, we are faced with many things we have covered up in order to avoid looking at them. This can produce fear of some sort, the fear of feeling painful wounds we’ve covered up and hoped to forget. …
This budding self-realization allows no return to the familiar situation of weakness or ignorance. [Tarot: Mirror of the Soul]
In the Rider-Waite Smith version of the Nine of Wands, a bandaged figure holding a wand looks suspiciously at the eight wands lined up behind him. He’s been here before, he knows what happened last time, and he’s wondering what’s going to happen next. What he could do — what might not be occurring to him — is to stop fighting and put his wand in formation with the other eight, thereby enacting a moment of integration.
You change patterns by being conscious of what was once hidden and then acting on that new information in a different way. Possibilities open up to you. Conflict can be avoided by seeing your situation in another light: not a battleground but a place where there can be alignment with something that releases new reserves of energy, feeds, restores, re-establishes the flow of life and feelings.
The Empress understands that every rebirth follows on the heels of an ending. What you are being invited to consider is the ending of a form of Disappointment that came into being when you chose to cut yourself off from the flow of your emotions, and in the process to separate yourself from love in its highest incarnation. You are being transformed in the fires of the Nine of Wands. It is time to face the fear that led you to empty yourself out — where you ran dry — and see what lies past the cycle of withholding and withdrawing, of hardened shine without the depth and which feeds nothing.
Take a closer look at The Empress. The colours lie in stark contrast to the Five. The textures are soft and rounded. Hers is a different world entirely. Like The Empress herself who faces away from the Five of Cups, you, too, can turn towards a different story. If you are feeling fear, remind yourself that fear is one of the signposts at a turning point — if you choose to take it. Gather whatever help you need, ask for directions if necessary, equip yourself with an open and unguarded heart and mind, and prepare yourself to step into a new land.
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.
Isn’t it just, eco11?
Sarah, this deck is really beautiful.
I can’t thank you enough for your wise and healing words, dearest Sarah. I’ve been fighting with my feelings of grief and angst over my mother’s suffering, versus my own suffering and resentment. Your words help me to get out of the state of victimhood, to be an adult again, to recognise that I’m no longer a helpless child, and to have deeper insight into what my mother is feeling, as well as my own feelings. Thank you so much!
Rob and Huffy – you are so welcome, as always!
Holiday – that’s the Five of Cups for sure; a really ‘hot’ card. In that way, it is also one of the cards that can usher in the process of calcination in psychological alchemy; the burning, where everything that is no longer of use is taken by the fire — which is apropos given the Nine of Wands after it. Pure fire.
Huffy – I’m not sure that this helps at all, but in a way your feelings describe what your mother might be feeling with her alzheimers: regression, loss of boundaries, a slipping into something over which you have little or no control. I’m not saying that the shared experience is a ‘gift’ in any shape or form; that feels glib. But there is a connectedness to us that transcends our everyday way of seeing things, and even moreso with those to whom we are related. Now that you’re back, I hope the distance gives you some healing space.
Dear dear Sarah, this week’s reading is like an answer to a prayer. Am in a very dark place at the moment, having just come back from spending 12 days with my parents, helping to look after my mother who has alzheimers and severe depression. My mother has always been depressed – I learned over the years to create boundaries, to stand up to her, otherwise she just swallowed me whole. But now that she has alzheimers, it’s as if I’ve gone into a time warp, I’m 11 years old again and all my energy is consumed by a needy, constantly distressed mother – once again I have no boundaries or space, and this is compounded by my sister and father who are also fighting this emotional quicksand. And now I’m back, I have to address work and money problems but just have no energy or bounce left. Sorry for this rant. I will read your words again and again, meditate and retrieve my strength and calm. Thank you. xxx
This is very interesting on a purely earthbound level. I live in Phoenix. The summer is brutal for the plants and humans have to be vigilant in keeping them watered. Most plants I can keep going through August but then there is a breaking point where the plants don’t care anymore and I (shamefully) don’t either. Everybody waits for the days to return to a mere 90 degrees before taking the gardening seriously again.
Then we cleanup what didn’t have the pluck to last for just a few weeks more and get fresh, new friends for the plants that did. Hopefully by the end of September the gardens are in glorious, healthy bloom.
It’s always been so incredible to me that I can really feel some of these plants saying “I got nothin’ left…” and no amount of water or food can change their leafy minds.
Thank you once again. Your insight has served me deeply at crucial moments in my journey. This is one of those moments, which you have articulated so eloquently. Blessings…