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
What is that within us which does sound a trumpet and all that is lower in our nature rises in response — almost in a moment, almost in the twinkling of an eye? — From facade.com
The card Judgement has such strong religious imagery that it is often hard to look past its more obvious associations with the Day of Judgement, and see our way to another interpretation. Is it only about the resurrection of the dead, the separation of those who are redeemable from those who are not, and their subsequent salvation or damnation? Or is there another way of looking at its meaning? I believe that an alternative lies at the heart of the quotation, above, and it is one that I’ll be focusing on in this reading.
In fact, I think that this particular combination of cards (chosen at random, as usual) is already asking us to reach past a more conventional view of Judgement to find something that better fits the paradigm that it suggests.
The reason for this lies in the two accompanying cards. If we take Judgement in the traditional sense — one of separating the righteous from the non-righteous — then I would expect to see two clear and opposing choices: the path to salvation, or the path to damnation.
However, here there seems to be no obvious judgement, no opposition, no clear-cut choice. Instead, we have two Queens: the Queen of Cups, and the Queen of Pentacles. What is going on? It is at this point that the idea expressed in the quotation starts to make itself known; and further exploration of the cards brings it out.