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
After a period of challenge, a moment of grace opens the way to a greater sense of ease, support and nourishment.
Where some three-card readings develop an idea or theme in a progression from left to right, this week’s reading starts with the two outside cards, and unites them in the card at the centre — The Star.
Both outer cards deal with challenge. The Ten of Wands — also known as “oppression” — depicts a man labouring under the weight of his load of ten wands. Not only do they seem heavy, but unwieldy: it’s all he can do to keep them in his grip, while they fan out before him, blocking his view of what lies ahead of him. A demanding bunch of wands indeed. However, although he has his work cut out for him, there is the implicit presence of choice. He is choosing to carry them; no one is behind him, forcing or cajoling him. There must be something that he gains from this, a purpose to his actions.
In the Five of Pentacles, a man and a woman pass underneath the stained glass window of a church. It is snowing, and the woman seems cold, pulling her threadbare shawl around her neck and shoulders. The man is on crutches, his lower right leg in bandages. Both seem absorbed in their respective plights, the man looking at us as if silently asking us to acknowledge his predicament or to offer assistance. In contrast to the Ten of Wands, there seems to be less choice afforded the figures in the Five of Pentacles, their situation more immediately precarious. They seem to have missed the option of seeking refuge and sustenance in the church behind them, focussed as they are on us and on the way ahead of them.