By Sarah Taylor
Disappointment. Strength. Re/Birth.
This is the pattern of the tale that is being woven in this week’s tarot reading. It feels like a timeline to me — a story of the emptying out of something, an emotional reckoning (Cups), and then the revivifying fire of Wands energy that gives you the opportunity to revisit something in a different way. If you do this, you move into the landscape of The Empress, Venus, fecundity, sensuality, the consort. She is the gateway to cleared, fertile ground ready for sowing. At its most literal, this is a card of pregnancy and motherhood, although ‘pregnancy’ can mean the birthing of ideas, projects, love, and sexual union.
But let’s go back a step. There’s a change in the feel of the cards as they progress from left to right which is worth exploring a little.
On the left, the Five of Cups feels dry, hard, metallic. The lotus flowers have nothing to feed them. The five cups, joined by a filigree pentacle, are separated from the water beneath them, and both plants and water are poorer for that separation: vitality wilts in a hardened atmosphere; emotional depths shrink, feeding nothing. The picture has the capacity to be beautiful, but it has become a nightmare of barrenness. There is no presence of the initiating force of divine love: the single cup at the bottom of the picture represents the Ace, but in the physical world it has stopped flowing.
In the Five of Cups, you face the disappointment that comes with having forgotten who you really are, and by extension what you are capable of bringing down from the gods and making manifest.