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
Now that you have been forged in the flames of some considerable pressure in your life, it is time to be vigilant, and to keep a nurturing watch over the new seeds you’re cultivating within you. It is worth it.
The Nine of Swords is a descriptive card, isn’t it? I’ve analysed it in previous articles — one of them only a few weeks ago — but I find its imagery readily taps into a part of the psyche that bypasses thought and logic. I’m sure it isn’t just me when I say that I can identify with the type of pain the figure seems to be enduring in the card. That’s probably because I have had my Nine of Swords moments — and no doubt you have, too. As I wrote in that earlier article on the Nine of Swords, the experience is primarily an inner one:
[T]here is conflict, but this is no outward battle. Rather, it is the inner expressed outwardly. Our inner experience manifests in the world around us, our outer world mirrors our experience. As above, so below: the rose of our own heart sits side-by-side with symbols that describe the heavens.
This last sentence refers to the blanket that lies over the figure’s legs. It provides a contrast to the swords above his head, which at the same time share the same colour blue in the squares that hold the astrological glyphs. What the figure is going through is witnessed and participated in by the cosmos. Not only that but the roses next to each glyph make their own contrast to both the glyphs and the swords. They bring colour into the picture — red and yellow — while the idea of a rose conveys something that is living, vital, beautiful and unique, yet fragile. The rose is the personal next to the collective of the glyphs. Just as our lives are transitory, so are our experiences — and therefore so are the experiences of pressure, pain and suffering.