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
Having experienced a time of unquestioned, and unquestioning, authority in an area of life, a shift takes place where all that was familiar and supportive seems to stand back. It is the old making way for something new.
The idea that almost immediately came to awareness when I first looked at the three cards I’d drawn for this week’s tarot reading was something that I’ve encountered on Planet Waves and in other astrology sources more than once in the past week: that of emptying something out in order to fill it with something new.
The Five of Pentacles is making its second appearance in a row, and I think that, in light of this idea, its presence here again is significant. Last week, I wrote this of the Five of Pentacles as it pertained to its pairing with The Star and the Ten of Wands:
“After a period of being so caught up in toils and trials that you have been able to see little else, this is the indication of the potential for something new. … What seemed meaningless at the time might have brought you to this very point of transition.”
This week, the story of the Five of Pentacles as a time of toil and trial seems to have developed and deepened along the same lines as the astrology. The feeling of being put through the wringer physically, psychologically, emotionally or spiritually is really a process of clearing away and sweeping clean to make way for the arrival of an experience that otherwise might have been unable to find expression. The Five of Pentacles and the Ten of Wands pairing last week didn’t just bring us to this point; they weren’t just something ‘on the way’. I would argue that without them, this point — this potential — simply wouldn’t exist.
What also comes to the fore this week is the ‘why’ of it all. Why is it that we have been going through a period where we feel like we’ve been carrying more than we usually do? Why has there been a sense of profound responsibility, or a need to step up to something? Why have we felt abandoned — by others, by our faith, by ourselves?