The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, June 12, 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

Now that you have been forged in the flames of some considerable pressure in your life, it is time to be vigilant, and to keep a nurturing watch over the new seeds you’re cultivating within you. It is worth it.

The Nine of Swords is a descriptive card, isn’t it? I’ve analysed it in previous articles — one of them only a few weeks ago — but I find its imagery readily taps into a part of the psyche that bypasses thought and logic. I’m sure it isn’t just me when I say that I can identify with the type of pain the figure seems to be enduring in the card. That’s probably because I have had my Nine of Swords moments — and no doubt you have, too. As I wrote in that earlier article on the Nine of Swords, the experience is primarily an inner one:

[T]here is conflict, but this is no outward battle. Rather, it is the inner expressed outwardly. Our inner experience manifests in the world around us, our outer world mirrors our experience. As above, so below: the rose of our own heart sits side-by-side with symbols that describe the heavens.

This last sentence refers to the blanket that lies over the figure’s legs. It provides a contrast to the swords above his head, which at the same time share the same colour blue in the squares that hold the astrological glyphs. What the figure is going through is witnessed and participated in by the cosmos. Not only that but the roses next to each glyph make their own contrast to both the glyphs and the swords. They bring colour into the picture — red and yellow — while the idea of a rose conveys something that is living, vital, beautiful and unique, yet fragile. The rose is the personal next to the collective of the glyphs. Just as our lives are transitory, so are our experiences — and therefore so are the experiences of pressure, pain and suffering.

Which makes the Seven of Pentacles appearing next to it all the more meaningful. As if birthed from the blanket, a vine springs out of the left-hand side of the image. We have, if you will, a diamond in our hands, forged from coal-black night — albeit a little rough around the edges and requiring some effort and dedication to shape it so that it shines.

The fragility of the roses in the previous card is echoed here. The vines are on tentative ground. The landscape around them feels hard and dry; even the sky is a stone-like grey. The only green in the picture comes from the vines themselves. This is a moment, as the farmer, to be vigilant, attentive and caring. The vines are cropping, but they run the risk of drying out if they are cut off from their source of nourishment: that which first enabled them to come into being. It is also worth bearing in mind that what lies outside is a reflection of what is within, so that vigilance, attentiveness and caring extend to the farmer too. He is doing this alone, and it is on his own wellbeing that the potential bounty of his vines depends.

And here’s why the attention to what is growing is so important: the Page of Swords. Swords represent mental processes — that which is of the mind — and the Page of Swords often comes in the form of an adversary that meets you on the mental plane. He is there to challenge you to hold to what it is that you value most, to see how focused you can be on your work. He is antagonist. He is swift and his blade is sharp. I looked at the Page and one of my first reactions was, “Watch that sword!” He is perfectly capable of lopping off those burgeoning pentacles in one fell swoop if you let him.

That is not to say the Page is to be dreaded. I don’t think that’s the case at all. Rather, he asks for discernment. What you come up against is the knife-edge of unthinking youth, swift to lash out. He is a person — perhaps more likely an idea — that can sabotage. He lacks the empathy and insight that come with maturity. He is not yet a Knight, and far from being a King. In other words, he is young, and behaves as such.

The one thing about the Page, though, is that you’ll either see him coming, or his presence will be unmistakeable when he arrives. He might be a thought that doubts your ability. He might be a pull to regress to patterns that are not conducive to nurturing what you are tending to. His is an invitation to cut down your progress; all he asks is that you step aside and abandon your devotion. In this way, you have it within your means to disarm him. Pay him no mind and keep your attention focussed on what is important. Like the cumulonimbus clouds swirling around him, what he brings with him is an explosive mix of hot and cold air. Hold your ground. Let the storm blow through. You have better things to do.