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
“We have more in common than we think.” A pairing of opposing, yet complementary, qualities holds great creative potential. Feel the sense of something coming together while knowing that both aspects have an equal contribution to make.
I find this week’s reading compelling, exuding a sense of mature, self-contained — as opposed to inhibited — power.
We have two court cards — the King of Pentacles and the Queen of Wands — and a major arcana card in The Magician. This is not an everyday ‘doingness’ reading, but rather one that deals with personal evolution.
Although the King and Queen are in separate cards, the links between them are quite striking. Like all the Kings and Queens, they are on thrones; but in these particular cards, both sit square-on, their legs open, feet grounded, while turning their upper bodies slightly to their left. While the King looks down at his pentacle, however, the Queen’s gaze is directed at something beyond the borders of her card — in this case, The Magician.
There is a yin-yang quality to the colours in both courts: in the King, yellow skies overarch blue mountains; in the Queen, blue skies surround yellow peaks. Both monarchs hold masculine and feminine symbols in their hands: the phallus of both sceptre and wand, and the egg in the shape of the pentacle (and globe on the sceptre) and the seed-bearing head of the sunflower.
There is an abundance of yellow in both cards, as there is in The Magician, and this — and the sunflower and sceptre — point towards the illuminating qualities of The Sun. This is not a reading cast in shadow, although the shadow is acknowledged and included: two dark creatures at the base of each card are small but significant details in both, one resting under the left foot of the King and the other seated at the foot of the Queen. The bull’s head in the King seems to be held in submission, an active gesture of authority keeping it low to the ground. In the Queen, the cat sits independently, looking directly at us, its eyes the same colour as the Queen’s robes. It seems very much its own feline, and yet there is room for it, as well as the quality of unpredictability — of impulsivity-in-potential — that it suggests. Do these both denote sexuality? It certainly feels that way to me.