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
What is it about The World that is so hard to describe with words? I think it is that The World is not an object, but a felt sense — a state of being.
One of the ways in which we can work with tarot is by approaching it as a visual representation of an archetypal journey. An archetype is a blueprint that we all, either consciously or unconsciously, come into contact with at some point in our lives; the archetypal journey is the sum total of our archetypal experiences. It is also evolutionary. Just as our own voyages take us through alternating periods of growth, stasis, seeming reversal — sometimes crawling or streaking forward, sometimes spiraling back to a place that is similar, yet different — so the cards move with us, through suit, number, arcana.
The 22 cards of the major arcana seem to me to depict the evolution of the soul, as opposed to the minor arcana, which make up the daily details of that evolution. The journey through the major arcana is far from linear, and we visit and revisit each card as we work through the particular issues that come up for us; but there is a progression that seems to make sense on a broad scale, from The Fool’s entry at zero, to a culmination in the 21st card, The World.
And so we enter our lives as Fools — untapped potential, unaware of what we are stepping into.
We forge our identities as individuals from The Magician to the Hierophant.
With The Lovers, we see ourselves for the first time in the mirror of another.
We move out into the world with this new knowledge and we attempt to balance what we now hold (The Chariot and Strength).
We take what we have gathered and we move within to integrate it (The Hermit), while preparing ourselves for change that comes on integration’s heels (The Wheel of Fortune).
We meet with reckoning (Justice); we sacrifice, or are sacrificed, for the decisions we make (The Hanged Man); we die to ourselves in order to be born again (Death).
We are given the opportunity to understand what it is to walk between spiritual and physical, sacred and profane (Temperance), before descending into the shadows to bring our darkness into the light (The Devil).