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 tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
Something is drawing to a conclusion; something new and unexpected is coming. This change is mediated by the energy of The Emperor: with wisdom, gravitas, and an unmistakable air of authority.
“Phew! What a reading.” That was my first thought when drawing these three cards for today’s Weekend Tarot exploration. Whenever I draw a large number of major arcana cards, I always need a moment to take it all in and ‘percolate’ what’s coming through. They carry a fair whack of power, and demand some time and some sifting to get to their essence.
What we have here is a ‘tarot sandwich’ (and please excuse the rather coarse metaphor, which really doesn’t do the reading justice) with two highly complementary cards on the outside, and a practical, beneficial centre that links them. Let’s look at the outer two cards first…
Both The World and the Wheel of Fortune share some striking visual similarities. Both are set in the sky, the images seeming to float in space, clouds at each corner. Both deal with a circular centre. Both have the figures of a man, an eagle, a bull, and a lion, representing the fixed signs of Aquarius, Scorpio, Taurus and Leo.
However, the cards are also contrasted. Where The World is about completion, the end of a ‘cycle of individuation’, where the protagonist has played a complex and central role in their experience, the Wheel of Fortune is about change through chance, and on a more narrowly focused scale, where there is little control over what happens (although there is control, as we will see later, over how we are in the face of change). The website Aeclectic puts it well when it says that The World “is not, like Death, the end of something, but rather a change in frequency.” But this frequency has been hard-earned.