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
For this week’s Wednesday article, and given there was no Weekend Tarot Reading last Sunday, I thought I’d draw some cards to mark the ending of one year and our move into 2012 in a few days’ time. My intention for the reading: That the cards help us to identify an event, encounter or theme that was meaningful to us this year, which then brings us to a point where we can use what we have discovered to move forward with more insight and more awareness.
Like previous readings, I drew three cards — in this case, the Five of Pentacles, The Empress and the Eight of Cups. Unlike previous readings, I felt moved to draw a fourth, a qualifying card to cast more light on the nature of the third card. What came up was the King of Swords, another recent visitor to these pages.
For many of us, 2011 has been a pretty challenging year. I write ‘challenging’ not as a euphemism for ‘hard’, but rather because, no matter whether the curve has seemed positive or negative, it has frequently seemed steep. More is being asked of us; more than usual, we are being called to “put away childish things” [Corinthians] and to grow up.
Sometimes, when we leave the shelter of the known, we can feel cast out into the cold. It isn’t easy giving up the hope that our parents will change, or — the same idea on a larger scale — that governments will come in and save the day. For many, the idea of leaving shelter is no longer a metaphor: Here in the UK, people are losing their jobs every day, and with them the ability to put an adequate roof over their heads. Many households are facing what is known as “fuel poverty” — where over 10% of household income is used to keep warm.
The Five of Pentacles speaks of a time when we have been cast out — whether literally or figuratively. We might have had a hand in it. We might have actively sought it. We might have little idea what the hell happened to put us out on the sidewalk. However we got here, this is where we have found ourselves. It can feel like a lonely place. And yet, and yet… What we tend to ignore when we are fixated on the struggling couple in the card — what they, too, are ignoring — is the warmth that emanates from the stained-glass window behind them.
I think that many people get caught up in the overtly religious imagery of the Rider-Waite Smith deck at the expense of a more expansive meaning. Don’t think of just ‘the church’; think of what creates a church in the first place: a community, united by a purpose, supported by a collective energy that can inspire and drive them. Pentacles are about imbuing matter with spirit. They are the last of the tarot suits, the physical manifestation of the first three, namely Wands (spirit/creativity), Cups (emotions), and Swords (thought/analysis).
When we are working with Pentacles, we are participating in an act of creation. In the Five of Pentacles, we are not only the couple walking outside the church: We are the congregation inside; we are the church itself. When we feel abandoned to the elements, the Five of Pentacles is asking us to look in another direction and to the support that we can find there. Looking at the other side of the coin (or, to torture a metaphor, from the other side of the stained glass window), the Five of Pentacles might be asking us to look outside at those who might need our help. Because it is by giving that we are able to receive.
It is this cycle of giving and receiving that takes us to the next card. The Empress feels to me to be working alongside the idea of the Five of Pentacles. The Empress governs the cycles of nature, its endings and beginnings. She understands that it is necessary for things to die in order to be renewed and reinvigorated. When we work with the archetype of The Empress, we, too, understand the need for death and renewal, knowing that another kind of energy is at work when the corn withers and the leaves have fallen from the trees. During this time, we are in a preparation phase, gently nurturing the kernel that lies under the ground. Part of the preparation also involves harvesting what we can in times of plenty to see us through the winter.
In other words, we rely on the support that we have received from the past season while we rest and anticipate the arrival of something new. Again, this goes back to community. The harvest was a particularly important time of year in our early agrarian economies, and today this tradition is continued in the celebrations of many communities, both religious and non-religious.
When seen side-by-side, the Five of Pentacles and The Empress look like the change of the seasons — the dead of winter, followed by the abundance of late summer/early autumn. Full circle. What is not, perhaps, required is the sense of isolation that the couple endures. The building behind them offers bounty. Will they take it?
And where does that bring us in the reading?
In the Eight of Cups, what strikes me immediately is the Moon overlapping the Sun. On Nov. 25, we had a partial solar eclipse. This, to me, feels like there is a reference to timing here. In other words, the Eight of Cups is associated with an experience on or around Nov. 25, and it would have been emotional in nature. The endings and beginnings reflected in the first two cards find their expression in something that is deeply feeling-related in the Eight, and it is usually to do with the act of walking away from something in which we have an emotional investment.
The cups are participating in the scene as much as the figure. To me, they are standing aside, giving space, flanking the man even as they are separated by distance. They do not ‘crowd out’ by covering his exit. There is an awareness of him even as he walks away.
Water often symbolises emotions in the tarot, and here, broken as it is by the rocks, it feels complex in nature. There are too many interruptions for it to flow smoothly or to achieve any depth. And finally, the Sun and the Moon in the sky indicate the mood. The Sun — symbol of enlightenment and of clarity and joy — is blocked by the Moon — where everything is cast into shadow, unclear, and where all manner of things real and unreal lurk in nooks and crannies. The Moon is meditative rather than sad. This is what she does. She renders things indistinct and ambiguous.
That being said, an eclipse (of the heart, of the soul, of direction) might be intense but it is not permanent, nor has the Sun gone: it is simply out of sight for a while. The figure is moving, perhaps unaware of the pivotal role that the cups are still playing in the experience of the card, and perhaps with some despondency (his hunched shoulders and the reliance on a staff bear testament to this) — but he is moving nonetheless. As is the Moon over the Sun. This is a moment of transition, and it will pass. [Finding your way forward: the Eights in tarot]
There has been a painful but necessary walking away; a changing of the seasons; something ending in order that something new might come to life. It hasn’t yet emerged, but when the Sun returns once again, its light will not only encourage the green shoots from the ground, the butterfly to break out of its chrysalis: It will also offer the light of awareness so that we can witness this birthing process.
How to work with what it is that we are holding right now? How to make the most of our time in the semi-darkness of the Eight of Cups? By embodying the archetype of the King of Swords. He sits and waits, but it isn’t an idle passing of the time. He is ready, sword drawn, his intellect and powers of observation and discernment at the ready so that he can know his cue when it arrives. When he identifies it, he will act decisively, authoritatively and with integrity. In the meantime, we have all the support we need, and we have more than enough to give.
Thank you, Rob, Elizabeth, jinspace and Len. Though really the only credit I can ever take is that I was clear enough to bring something useful through.
Sarah,
Thank you. This piece is proof that you are a living oracle. Your prehension of the flow beneath the surface of event indicators is downright uncanny. You are a valuable and deeply appreciated part of the Planet Waves community.
Yes, Sarah, I’d have to say you’ve been hiding out in my house, too. What an extraordinary reading. You have summed up my situation precisely, even right down to the timing.
Sarah has obviously been (unbeknownst to me) hiding out in my house, writing this piece specifically to me, to address my year, right down to the November 25th reference. How do you guys & gals do this day after day, mirroring my life as no one else ever has? Amazing!! Thank you!
-Elizabeth Good
You have affirmed and illuminated exactly what this past phase means for me. Death and rebirth, letting go, the sense of isolation in transit. All necessary turning points, some involving painful losses. But losses that were created in order to allow new life to emerge. It’s been a difficult and humbling journey at the hinge of the year. Thank you for doing what you do–it helps so very much…
Thank you, indranibe! And (((((((Burning River))))))) and (((((((susyc))))))). Thank you for sharing what seems to me to be very intimate parts of your lives here.
As always, the reading resonates for me too. This has been such an intense year, both in terms of changes and emotions, both positive and negative (and *always* with that steep learning curve!). My husband and I decided to separate at Easter, but we continue to live together, which, in spite of having its very fraught moments, is an arrangement that is working for us for now. So support has come from the unlikeliest of places — often from my husband himself.
I met someone in late summer, with every intention in the world that I wasn’t going to risk my heart and that I could control my emotions — and him (though this wasn’t a conscious intention, it was there nonetheless). God laughs at our plans, eh? We had what I felt was a profound encounter. And then he left, and I was devastated for a while — I thrust myself into the cold with feelings of not being good enough, of being unworthy, of being a complete fuck-up. And then I slowly managed to get over myself. I miss him; the feelings are still there. I am confused in many ways, too — but I also understand that The Empress means that anything that has had its time needs to change or end, and the Eight of Cups feels apropos. What it did bring me was the realisation that it is possible to have a connection with someone that is both intense and passionate, and which opened my horizons in ways that I wasn’t able to express — to him or to myself — but which are becoming clearer to me now.
In the meantime, I have met someone else, and it is different but no less meaningful, and so a new cycle starts to bear shoots. I’m not yet sure about the King of Swords. Perhaps the moment is yet to come. What I do know is that I have asked for and received support in ways I couldn’t have imagined, and that I am blessed with all of the relationships that I have been fortunate enough to experience.
Really a perfect reading for me for 2011. Service, especially to my disabled sister has been the theme of this year; being patient, setting limits, waiting for her to make her own choices (as unwise as they seemed to me at the time), honoring her choices for what they had to teach her (and me!), helping her through two moves and one hospitalization. Dealing with an array of feelings some clear, some ambiguous, anger, guilt, pity, fear, etc., and so on. It’s been difficult since she moved down here a little more than four years ago now. She was taking care of my mother until her own health became of such concern that we had to help them split up. My mother has a happy dementia overall, and she has even improved living with my daughter and son-in-law and her two great-grandboys. She has stopped smoking, goes to a daytime adult facility where she can see her doctors, do a little therapy, play bingo, see the nurse nutritionist, etc. My mom moved in with my kids a bit over two years ago and my sister moved in with me and my hubby at that time. The real issue this year though has been my sister. When she moved in we agreed that she would move out in a little over a year. Holding her to that has been what made her true needs clear. She is just getting ready to pay her second month’s rent at an assisted living facility. What I am noticing now that my sister is in the proper level of care is that we are becoming free to be friends and get to know each other again. The last 2-3 years have been seriously crisis-ridden. It’s really nice to visit her and even relaxing! Her health is improving so quickly with the proper level of care! My hubby and I ran up about $10,000 of debt getting my sister settled. We do hope that the sale of her mobile home will repay us for most if not all of our investment. My oldest brother has taken on selling the mobile home for us. But honestly, I am at the point where what happens, happens. I am committed to living without resentment if I can help it. I know I may feel angry about this situation from time to time. It’s hard. But that is not resentment. For me resentment is anger that is nurtured, fed, held onto. I expect that we will get some of our money back and hopefully more for my sister’s bank account. But there is no reason for resentment whatever happens.
Dear Sarah, i was so happy to see your post. I missed you.
This spread again seems to be laid out just for me. Uncanny. Delightful.
Covering my past year with the 5 of Pentacles is apropos. From all my sons disowning me last year at this time for my deciding to dissolve the marriage with their father and at the same time being misunderstood and rejected by someone I had given my heart to, I entered the year of 2011 utterly bereft on the one hand but on the other hand I also had awesome support from awesome women in my life, including my daughter (and son-in-law).
As the Empress speaks of cycles, all those relationships with each of those people have gone through their cycles of death and resurrection. Everything has been rearranged, like a rearrangement of a kaleidoscope scene
The final call to presence by the King of Swords, to alertness and to the awareness that one moment is coming in which I will be called (again) to be true to myself is also being spoken in me and to me from many sources. The legal proceedings are not finished. The testing is not over. But having passed through this past year and the November 25 solar eclipse and the 8 of Cups events of that time (the Thanksgiving holiday that i survived this year) have certainly been a good training ground for my facing and finishing what lies ahead, it seems to me.
But it is truly the windows of warmth and community that that have been there from the beginning in the 5 of Pentacles that have been, and still are and will continue to be, I am sure, key for my survivng and thriving.
May you, as well, dear sister in life.
And always, from my heart, deep gratitude and respect.
(((((Sarah)))))
That was fantastic Sarah – a very accurate wrap-up! Cheers! 🙂
Thank you, HS!
I also wanted to add something – from The Oracle on Christmas Day, when the usual Weekend Tarot Reading would have been published, and which came to mind when I drew the King of Swords today:
“The next week or so presents you with a test of your integrity, and raises the question of whether you can bring what some call the ‘higher self’ into the situations you face. This higher self is given many mystical attributes, but really it’s a perspective on life that allows us to exist exclusively in the present and not drag the baggage of the past into every situation. In the current situation, you will have about one single moment to make the choice of how you handle yourself, and it may arise when you least expect it. The story sums up simply as: do what you know is right, not necessarily what ‘feels good’.”
The King of Swords isn’t just going to happen; he needs to be called to duty within us. That’s where awareness steps in.
Wow. Just wow. Simply amazing Sarah. Thank you so much.