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
There is a middle ground open to you, where you are free from the overbearing weight of responsibility and the shallowness of emotion-for-show. Walk this middle path, where thought works in concert with creativity and feeling, and you walk the path of transformation.
Butterflies. They seem anomalous next to the overt sense of ‘hardness’ of the King — his chiselled jaw, set smilelessly. But if we look closer, his demeanour is not as rigid as we might think. He sits at a slight angle, his legs seem to be relaxed. He holds up his sword, but unlike the Queen’s, which rests bolt upright on the arm of her throne, in the King it is held fully in his hand, slightly at an angle. Two birds fly above the clouds to his left. The trees behind him might be wind-blasted, but the ground on which he rests his feet is made up of red earth, sand, grass.
I feel a real sense of paradox here — the square jaw next to the soft, red folds of his cowl; the steely blue-white planes of his sword next to the undulating expanse of his tunic — both reminiscent of the sky that frames him. The gravitas of his expression — the lion denoting healing and strength on his crown — and the receptive presence of the moons. The beauty and symmetry of butterfly wings carved from stone — not trapping them but rather capturing their symbolism in something enduring, which gives them a further symmetry to their form.
There is a guardedness to the King of Swords. But just what is he guarding? What do we meet if we enter his domain? The liberation of thought. The mastery of thought. Thought in synergy. Can this be expressed in day to day life? Can it, for example, be reconciled with the sensuality that is suggested in the last card? Can the King be both logician and liberated? Can this be used with a flexibility that enables it to be creative, courageous, transformative? I think so. I think that is what is embodied in this card. Look past the set jaw, the directed look, and it is there.
And then there is the Ten of Wands. Is this what happens when thought prevails above all else? When the butterfly energy of the King is, for the moment, unable to fly, liberated, on the clouds that lead off the side of the throne? When concentration is focused on the task at hand to the detriment of one’s own personal freedom of thought and of expression?