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
Well, well, well — again! Here we have the Queen of Pentacles — at the centre of the reading last week — with the King of Swords, by now a familiar visitor to this column. Today, however, the Royal Couple are together. What does this mean, and what are they creating through their union?
First, a digression about the phenomenon of repeating cards. And it is a ‘phenomenon’; there is nothing accidental or coincidental about it. Rather, I believe it is an example of synchronicity — a concept created by Carl Jung to describe “an acausal connecting principle”. In other words, a synchronicity is the meeting of two separate objects or events that do not appear to have any logical, provable link. The idea of how tarot works is based on this principle: We get the cards we are meant to get, and yet we cannot prove it or explain it through logic. Repeating cards is a variation on this theme. There is something about the repetition itself that is trying to convey a message to us.
This morning, I happened to read a blog post by Jordan Hoggard, author and creator of the Land of Mystereum Tarot deck, about what this message might be, and this is what he had to write about about it:
When a card or cards come up multiple times when reading for myself, reading after reading, to me it feels like successive laps on the track continuously voicing their time-message, their presence, each time differently, to inform me from different perspectives, as a chorus of a card voicing its multiply informing messages. Meaning, it is my job to resonate more with its/their iterations, as if the card is pulse-cycling to gift me a fuller meaning before I slingshot out of a curve back onto the straightaway powered by it and the other card(s). Meaning, ‘I am trying to message you!,’ the cards seem to say.
Of all three cards, the King of Swords seems to want to make his presence felt the most. Then again, this is the Queen of Pentacles’ second outing in a row, which seems equally compelling in its own way. Together, they form a couple — masculine and feminine, yang and yin. And if we add the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, then at its essence the union of the King and Queen gives birth to The Fool.