By Sarah Taylor
The message of this week’s reading feels simple: a lack of connection to something greater than us can make us feel separated from inner wealth and contentment, no matter the outer appearances of our lives.
All three cards today are Pentacles — Pentacles representing our manifest world, and the things with which we interact with our five senses. As the last suit in the tarot, they are the most concrete in terms of what they represent and how they feel.
Here, that sense of concreteness has fallen out of balance to the point where our life, in some way, has become so focused on the outer that it is holding us to ransom. Take a look at the King of Pentacles and the Nine of Pentacles — such an apparently obvious pairing in terms of masculine/feminine, shared colours (the preponderance of yellow, for a start), and shared imagery (most notably the grapes), that I have had to stop myself from referring to the Nine as the Queen of Pentacles. For the Nine of Pentacles is most decidedly not the Queen of Pentacles, even if she might appear to be the King’s partner at first glance.
So let’s look closer and see what these two cards, side-by-side, might be saying once we have looked past the obvious. The first thing that comes to me is that the King and Nine are the visual equivalent of taking a swim in chocolate cake. At first, the whole thing looks lovely — appealing; then, I am met with a sense of something being too good to be true; finally, I start to see the imbalance in the pairing, the scales tipping so far in favour of the material that the whole thing runs the risk of sliding off and out of the picture.