The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, March 17, 2013

By Sarah Taylor

Reflection. Aspiration. Art.

Today’s reading hinges on the card at the centre, which I picked first: the Four of Wands. The Four of Wands has a watershed quality to it. It stands in contrast to the card on the left, the Two of Worlds — a fiery and earthy complement to its icy, lunar neighbour.

The Two of Worlds marks a time of things seeming to lie dormant. As its title suggests, it represents an environment for inner reflection, where nothing moves quickly but where life is waiting, biding its time.

The two Moons denote the idea of intuition, the starry sky evocative of inner space as well as outer. The comet, interestingly, is also a reflection of the appearance of a comet in our own skies this past week. This seems to anchor the reading in a specific time frame, the Two of Worlds being something that is just passing, making way for the Four of Wands, then Art.

With this movement comes a thawing and a warming — from the snow-covered mountains and the barrenness of the Moon, to the fire and storms of a landscape that bursts with life. As we move from the Two of Earth to the Four of Wands, the imagery also moves from  one that is wholly nature-based, to one that is a mix of the natural and the man-made.

And so we move from a state that might have felt like we had little control over it, but one which was a personal cycle held in the larger cycles of nature — dominated as we were by forces that had a transpersonal feel to them — to one where the transpersonal transforms to reflect something more human, more within our realm, more within our grasp.

We have the ability to have an impact on who we are and on our surroundings. We can use the fires in the Four of Wands as forges. We can begin to craft what it was that was imparted to us in our time-out; we rush with the flames, we are the rains that meet the lake, we become the lightning strike.

However, in that rush back into animation, we may feel inclined to forget our time in the wilderness, seeing it as something to run away from. If this is the case, we squander the release of energy available to us if we avoid and put from our memories this time that may well have felt deeply isolating and uncomfortable, but which brought us the very gifts that have liberated us to the fires within.

The invitation is implicit in the final card, Art: to marry both. To acknowledge where we have come from, so different from where we find ourselves now; and from them both, to create something new — a synthesis. Both are interwoven. Neither is fully useful working independently from the other; it is a delicate, often contradictory, balance. Too much of one, and the other is stultified. The capacity for introspection — the hibernation during the freeze — is compromised by over-activity. Fires can be contained to the point where they become ineffectual, when what fire does best is to birth and nurture life.

What waited beneath the snow — what was biding its time beneath appearances that seemed to indicate everything to the contrary, perhaps revealing itself only at those times that we could hold on to a sense of trust — is now emerging in its fiery power. The true meaning of art lies in honouring their interplay.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Two of Worlds (Jupiter in Capricorn), Four of Wands (Venus in Aries), Art (Sagittarius)

The Voyager Tarot website: www.voyagertarot.com

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.