By Sarah Taylor
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.” [John 15:1]
In November 2011, a Weekend Tarot Reading felt significant enough for me to focus on it for two weeks running. In that case, it was a reading that featured one of the most transformational cards — where the transformation is often precipitated by an event that shakes us to the very core — namely, The Tower.
This week, I want to do the same thing again and have a look at last weekend’s reading, only this time the sense of transformation is one that is centred on feelings — here, love — although its impact may be no less felt and no less far-reaching.
To do this, I have added a fourth card as a way of contextualising last week’s reading further; it came to me as a picture in my mind and I decided to run with it to see where it took me. Strangely, I thought at first that the mental image I received was that of the Hierophant, until I went through the Thoth deck and realised that I had been subject to a Mercury Retrograde ‘glitch’ and that, in fact, the card that I had been visualising was the next card in the major arcana: The Lovers.
The Lovers and the Cups go hand-in-hand in a couple of key respects.
First, there is the idea of The Lovers as the card of coupling. Traditionally it is the one that many, if not most, clients love to see in a relationship reading because they feel it to be the card that most closely describes ‘romantic relationship’. We still buy into that notion in so many ways, don’t we? It is an utterly seductive thought that we might just meet the person (or persons) of our dreams and come together effortlessly, our lives melting into a sense of carefreeness where we can surrender to the other. This notion is sold to us wherever we turn, it seems. If it isn’t being reinforced by the media we consume, then it is often being reinforced by the traditions that weave through our families, friends and communities.