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
Welcome to The World … Or The Planet Earth or The Universe, depending on which deck you choose. I’ve been holding off on writing about The World until the time felt right. And this is it. It is also one of the cards that I feel merits two articles — one where I invite you to participate in its unfolding on these pages, and one where I work with it in more detail.
All of the 22 major arcana cards, from The Fool to today’s card, hold the key to a significant archetype — or blueprint — that we encounter within us over our lifetimes. However, The World represents an apex, where one thing ends and another enters. What started out with the Fool’s journey finds full expression here. It holds the sum total of all the other archetypes; it embodies the collective; it embodies you — or, rather, you embody it.
So, once again, my invitation to you: to sit with The World — whichever version/s of it calls to you — and discover what it reveals to you in terms of its archetype, and, if you feel so moved, how you have experienced it in your own life.
As inspiration, I am including excerpts from the accompanying texts of three of the four cards: the Xultun Tarot, the Voyager Tarot, and the Tarot of The Spirit. (If you are a regular reader, you will probably be most familiar with the Rider-Waite Smith version of the card, which I will be writing about next week.)
You can either comment below, or email me directly if you don’t want your words published (sarah (at) integratedtarot (dot) com). I’ll be waiting with anticipation.
The Xultun Tarot
Note: the Xultun Tarot is unique in that its major arcana can be joined together in five rows (one row of two cards, and the next four rows of five cards) to form a picture of the journey of the soul through its lifetime in the body. The images interact with each other, which for me emphasizes the idea of oneness and interconnectivity.
” …[L]ike the albedo needing the blood of the rubedo in the Temperate Man, the creation of the caelum [which “represents the corpus glorificationis, the glorified, incorruptible, resurrected body, the immortal soul, the residue left by the process of conscious individuation”] was not the end of the procedure. It was then mixed with honey (they joy of life that overcomes inhibition and darkness), chelidonia (a golden, four-petalled flower symbolizing the fullness of life), rosemary (the binding power of love), mercurialis (a herb associated with sexuality), the red lily (symbolizing passion), and finally the alchemist’s own blood. All this symbolized the surrendering of the whole personality, light and dark, to the new center of the personality. All that has been discovered and realized in the journey is now given over to wholeness. Along this row [the fifth, and bottom, row of cards] are a total of eight Flowering Trees growing out of the transpersonal base of the deck. In this last card the eight trees now encircle the earth indicating they have incarnated, transforming an archetypal potential in spirit into form, pattern and wholeness in matter. The Fool has now arrived at an inner certainty which makes him both completely self-reliant but also completely inter-dependent with the world around him, a state that the alchemists call the unio mentalis. So the caelum is not placed on high by itself but is mixed with plants, healing products of the earth.”
From The Tarot Codex [now The Maya Book of Life] by Jungian psychotherapist Michael Owen.