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 articleexplains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
As with so much that is going on in the sky right now, this week’s reading is potent. There are two major arcana — Strength and The Tower — both encasing a court card, the Knight of Cups. I’m taking the theme of the reading from the only suited card that we have; it seems to give direction to the two powerful archetypes that envelope it and give it further expression. This week, therefore, the theme is about emotions, relating, love.
Let’s take a step back first, and focus on the card on the left, Strength. The eighth card in the major arcana (which focuses on the archetypes that we both embody and experience personally and collectively at a soul level — at the level of beingness rather than doingness), Strength develops the idea of the union of opposites that we encountered in card six, The Lovers. Here, however, instead of that union being associated with looking into the mirror of another — very often in the form of relationship — Strength is about how we relate inwardly to the polarised aspects of ourselves.
Each one of us carries in us the characteristics of the two figures in the Strength card. We are the simultaneous incarnation of maiden and lion, human and animal, virtue and lust, civility and instinct. That is simply so. The challenge for us arises when we choose — consciously or unconsciously — to subjugate one in favour of the other, casting it so far away from us that it becomes part of what C G Jung referred to as the shadow, which he defined as, “the thing a person has no wish to be.” When an aspect of who we are is relegated to the shadow, it doesn’t go away: It simply expresses itself indirectly, usually in our interactions with others. We tend to project on to others what it is that we cannot accept about ourselves — and so it might seem to us that we meet the same kind of people again and again in certain situations, that we have similar experiences again and again. If we can bring these into awareness and shine the light of insight on them, they become opportunities: To rediscover and integrate an aspect of ourselves that, until now, we couldn’t admit to being — and these aspects can be negative or positive.