By Sarah Taylor
This is the third week running that the Queen of Disks (Pentacles) has been present in the reading, and I feel that the change in position — from third card last week to first here — heralds a change in circumstances that her energy is helping to usher through.
The first card that I picked for the reading is the one at centre: the Ten of Wands. It feels like the mood of the current situation — the inner or outer circumstances in which you might find yourself.
There is a sense of similarity with the Eight of Swords, which has also come up recently, but the feeling and emphasis here are different, and so is the way out. Whereas the Eight of Swords describes imprisoning thoughts or beliefs, where, as captor and captive, you are also liberator, the Ten of Wands suggests a more energetic ‘pushing in from all sides’. Wands precede thought; this is a confinement of Eros, creativity. It may be by choice or circumstance — either way, the experience is one that involves a certain amount of solitariness, or isolation.
In the Ten of Wands, a naked figure stands, head lowered, his back to us, in a stone chamber. He is almost transparent. I understand this to be what happens when Eros is wholly directed inwards, without any means of channelling or expressing it beyond the physical body. It is also suggestive of the feeling of something ‘coming at you’ — in other words, the circumstances of oppression may feel as if they are beyond your control.
Or perhaps, perhaps … that energetic building of pressure is also what it is that offers the release. And the key is in your hands — again in the form of the Queen of Disks.