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 article explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
This week’s article follows on from the two previous articles on the Celtic Cross (Part I — An introduction and Part II — Reading the Cross). This morning, I drew the remaining four cards, which form the ‘staff’ section of the reading, and I’ll explore these here as a separate unit (with a few exceptions), before revisiting the reading as a whole in a couple of weeks’ time.
Overview of the staff
What a spread! Four figures of authority, one court card, three major arcana cards. All of them are rulers over a particular domain: Creativity (King of Wands), the meeting of the spiritual and the physical (The Hierophant), balance and accountability (Justice), and intuition (The High Priestess).
All three male figures are clothed in red; the Priestess is in blue. This seems fitting because the male figures are of the world, while the High Priestess inhabits what I have referred to as the ‘liminal world’ — the world that lies between worlds. The red of the men’s gowns is flesh-like, more physical. The Priestess’s gown is watery, like the lunar world she inhabits. She also sits on top, balancing out, like the Moon in the sky, all the fleshy male energy beneath her.
Also, all four figures are seated on thrones, and, apart from the King, all of them are flanked by pillars. This seems significant to me: the major arcana — the archetypal figures we embody and express through the process of individuation — seem to be enclosed in a strong, ‘funnel-like’ structure created by the pillars, which form an extended column down most of the staff. Taking it from that structural point of view, it feels like each one feeds into the other, and finally down into the King. Does this fly in the face of the traditional interpretation of the staff, which flows in chronological order from bottom up?
I don’t think so. From my point of view, time is a construct, and if we sit with the possibility that it isn’t simply linear, then it may well be that the energy of the Outcome card is already starting to influence the King as he sits on his throne at the bottom of the staff.
Finally, the King sits side-on, a recipient of this energy who demonstrates, by his body language, that he is ready and able to draw on it and act on it by moving out into the world. As the only minor arcana card, he is not constrained by the limits of the archetype that the other three inhabit, but can embody all three actively.
7. You (or Your Client) — King of Wands
“This card describes the qualities that the client brings with them to the reading: what they are, and what they are capable of achieving. This card is the archetype they are embodying at this moment in time, and one which, like the tools above, remains available to them.”
Two Kings (the other is in the cross part of the spread, linked to above) and a whole lotta Wands. The King of Wands as you ties in with and further strengthens the themes of the emergence of creative drive and of evolution of the Self — an increased assuming of authority over who you are and the powers that you have at your disposal.