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
You have hit a period of boredom or disillusionment. You are invited to pick yourself up, embody a sense of discipline, and assume the mantle of responsibility.
The three cards this week seem to me to be calling for a change, a shift in attitude and/or action. In the first card, the Four of Cups, a man sits under a tree, his body language closed, his face sombre … this in spite of the fact that he is well-dressed; the sky is uninterrupted blue; the world around him is thriving, leafy; he is supported and sheltered by a tree that seems to look at him with one eye, its branches dropping towards him. Three cups sit in the foreground, a distance from his crossed feet. A fourth cup is presented to him by a hand emanating from a cloud — but he is having none of it.
Every aspect of each illustration by Rider-Waite Smith artist Pamela Colman Smith is deliberate. The fact that there is no apparent (i.e. visual) reason for the man’s obvious disillusionment to me indicates that the cause lies within. In other words, it is in his mind.
Not even the presence of the divine — the hand and cloud — is enough to immediately rouse him from his ennui. This is a moment of boredom, suspended in time. The hand doesn’t seem forceful, however: to me, it is not the kind of hand that is going to put the cup down and shake him to his senses. Rather, it embodies a gentle, but persistent, patience: I feel like it will hover there, waiting, until the man is otherwise prompted, or prompts himself, to look up and see it. And once he does, the potential is there for all change, heralded by The Hierophant.
The Hierophant can sometimes be a bit of an archetypal stick-in-the-mud, standing for formal doctrine as he does, even dogma. The flip-side to this, though, is the sense of discipline that he asks of us — the dedication to a path, and the commitment to oneself in the pursuit of a discipline.