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
Someone saved my life tonight, sugar bear.
You almost had your hooks in me, didn’t you dear?
You nearly had me roped and tied.
Altar-bound, hypnotized,
Sweet freedom whispered in my ear,
“You’re a butterfly.
And butterflies are free to fly.
Fly away. High away. Bye bye.”— Elton John and Bernie Taupin
If you’re looking at today’s cards, homing in on the Ten of Swords, and thinking to yourself, “Well, this doesn’t make for a particularly up-beat reading,” — you’ve just had a taste of how Swords can play out in your experience.
Swords, by design, are sharp creatures. They are the tarot suit that holds the most negative associations. It is a reputation not entirely unearned. Unlike the organic, leafy contours of the Wands, the promise of succour and satiety of the Cups, the money-like, feminine associations brought up by the Pentacles — Swords are lean and mean. They are designed to cut; there is an association with death because they are what man has brought into battle from the time of the iron age.
If you reacted that way to the Ten of Swords, then I’d like to ask you to do something: Not to avoid it or mitigate your feelings, but to look at them. Invite them in, feel what it is like for them to cut into your consciousness. Let them go in as far as they want to. And when you have done this, you might feel something else happen; something unexpected. Beneath that swords energy that is taking up so much attention, there is something altogether… calmer, perhaps? Accepting? Really quite okay with it all? Perhaps they don’t feel as threatening as they did. Perhaps, now, they don’t feel that threatening at all.
That is the full experience of the Ten of Swords.