By Sarah Taylor
In this week’s reading, you have assumed the mantle of magician — one who brings forth through magic. As a magician, you have set something in motion that is being distilled as it travels forward, coming to rest in the vessel held by the King of Cups. In fact, if you look at all three cards in sequence from left to right, it very much seems like a game of pass the parcel, the central figure taking something from the figure in the card to her left, turning, and passing it to the king in the card to her right.
Let’s chart the evolution of this journey through the cards.
Look at the figure in the Eight of Staffs (Wands). The hand position adopted in this card and in the King of Cups is a symbolic one and appears throughout the Xultun Tarot deck. It represents birth, the hands opening away from the body creating a canal through which something is given form.
The figure in the Eight of Staffs puts himself in a position to receive what he has also just birthed. What is coming towards him might seem as if it has appeared from ‘somewhere else’, but he is responsible for its manifestation.
Tarot is adept at showing us what lies in the shadow — those things that we cannot see and therefore are not yet able to own. Here, I feel it mirrors to us the attitude, and position, we might adopt if we were to realise that the energy hurtling towards us in one form or another is one that sprung from our own actions. Staffs represent erotic, creative force. They are felt rather than known by the mind; our bodies are our best detectors of Staffs energy when it is activated.