The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, October 9, 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

Something is coming together in a dance. It might not be obvious — it may even be contradictory at times — but these often seemingly opposing elements are available to work in unison, and in a way that is productive, sustaining, and revivifying.

I can’t help but notice the parallels between this and the previous Weekend Tarot Reading. Last week, we had the Three of Wands, the King of Pentacles, and Justice; this week, we meet the Three of Cups, the Queen of Cups, and the Two of Wands. There is enough of a correspondence for it to be significant — although the mood is distinctly different.

Whereas last week the Three of Wands was about entrusting something to forces that lay outside our control — a necessary relinquishment in the name of growth and evolution, with the acknowledgement that we had done the groundwork — this week, we give ourselves to something closer to home. We become harmony, dancing in unison. Three is trinity; here is a trinity of joy, pleasure, fertility. Wands are associated with the fiery urge of creativity and self-definition. Cups, this week, are symbolic of our emotional natures. The Three of Cups specifically speaks about a situation that is balanced, in spite of the potential ‘oddness’ that three brings with it. Everyone is included in a single purpose: that of the elevation of love — and in turn of being elevated by love. It is a coming together of complementary aspects that support and enhance each other, and which produce something that is nurturing and nourishing.

When I look at the Three of Cups, I am reminded of Eric’s article entitled Organic Love: An Ecology of Sustainable Relationship. The Three of Cups feels like organic love in action — however that chooses to express itself, but which includes concepts such as selflove, trust, curiosity, allowing, surrender, change, communication, space, responsibility, healing. The Three is nothing if not inclusive (a word I am aware that I am using a fair bit of late, but perhaps there is a larger reason for that — a shift in our own awareness of who we are and where and how we connect with others).

And then we have the Queen of Cups, whose energy takes over from the King of Pentacles last week. The King ruled a physical world where the spiritual and the material were in fine balance. The Queen inhabits the shoreline where emotions meet solid ground — our own grounding in our feelings. She is receptive, focused, steady, and yet very much a part of the ocean that ripples up to her feet and which seems to stream into the patterning on her cloak. The Queen is unafraid of being enveloped by the watery world of which she is a custodian. There is no egoic fight for supremacy. She understands who she is while she gives herself to it fully.

And the Three of Cups and the Queen of Cups work in unison. It is as if the three figures in the left card are dancing for her, as she gazes intently at the far more ornate cup in her hands. This is the Grail — a vessel that demanded that questing heroes be spiritually worthy of being in its presence. It also later became a symbol of the womb — the feminine as vessel for birthing life. Is this a dance for life? In celebration of life? To create life? The two cards feel like a meeting of the grounded with the mystical, the earthly experience of the mystery of our emotions that can be used in service to something that brings forth life.

Finally, the Two of Wands moves into the place where Justice stood last week. This time, instead of the figure of Justice holding a sword and a pair of scales, a man holds a wand in his left hand, a globe in his right. I wrote this of the Two of Wands in an article from October 2010 (From potential into action: the Twos in tarot):

Wands are concerned with creativity, their roots going back to the first moment when God said, “Let there be light.” They are the force that brings things into being. They are desire.

In this picture, the world — the culmination of the creative process — is still taking shape. It is being held by the figure, yet to be fully developed and released to spin in the cosmos. It represents beginnings; a seed. It also represents a choice: he holds one wand while deliberately placing the other behind him. With this particular wand he creates; the other he holds in reserve. And he looks outwards, waiting for something to appear on the horizon and move towards him.

Again, like Justice, a decision — but this one on a more personal level. Unlike Justice, which is disinterested (not uninterested), the figure in the Two of Wands is looking in a specific direction. He is turned towards the Queen of Cups. They are united by the sea — up close and personal in the Queen, at a distance in the Two of Wands. The globe seems to mirror the cup the Queen is holding. The wand is a symbol of the phallus as the cup is of the womb. Together, yet separate, they seem to be ‘holding space’: feminine and masculine principles.

And all the while the three figures dance in the first card:

If the Two of Cups is about love in the conventional form of coupledom, then the Three of Cups is what issues forth from that: family. Here, though, I see ‘family’ suggested in its broadest sense. The cups form a triangle — a stable geometric shape, denoting strength in numbers and in kinship, and evocative of the Holy Trinity. Love as a human experience. Love as a nurturing principle. Love that is unselfish and inclusive. When we face adversity, it is then that we are drawn back to our emotional support structures in whose presence our lacklustre and depleted cups are revivified. [Stepping away from the mirror — the Threes in tarot.]

The two lone figures make an enigmatic pairing, mirrored, yet discrete. And yet they are both turned towards the small but affirming gathering going on to their left. What we make of that is up for discussion, but I feel that out of the enigma comes a sense of interrelatedness that is worth celebrating.