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, we leave the tournament fields of the Knights behind — where the qualities of the suits were, as yet, concepts to be tried on for size and tested — and into the sphere of the upper court, home of the Queen and the King.
Rather than seeing the relationship between the two cards as an evolutionary progression from Queen to King, what we have here is a partnership. The Queens are the yin to the Kings’ yang. They are the masculine and feminine principles, which together create the fullest human expression of each suit; and both of them lie within each of us.
The word that comes most readily to mind when I see the Queens is receptivity. To me, it describes a sense of openness, and of allowing. It is not indiscriminate, nor is it passive. Like a chalice, feminine energy contains rather than directs: it holds space — the space between objects, concepts, ideas, the concrete. It is active presence.
Active presence is what connects us to soul — ours and others’. When we are connected, we are more able to align with and follow the promptings of the truth that lies inside us, whatever that truth might look like. The Queens are the embodiment of this alignment in the four realms that they both inhabit and incarnate: creativity (Wands), emotions (Cups), mental processes (Swords), and the manifested world (Pentacles).
Queen of Wands
For someone who lives, works and breathes the creative fires, I have always thought that the Queen of Wands is of remarkably calm demeanour. Next to the fiery passion of the Knight, tilting at pyramids in the desert, the Queen seems positively demure.