By Sarah Taylor
The Nine of Pentacles and the Nine of Swords. A woman and a man — the only humans in each of their pictures. Both enclosed in a particular circumstance. Both leaning towards the third card: The Lovers. This reading talks of sequestration and then integration.
While both the Nines are from the minor arcana section of the tarot deck, which deals with our day-to-day lives, The Lovers is a major arcana card, and a pure archetype, or blueprint. This means that it is more focussed on what happens at a soul level than a physical one, and it is concerned with what is both transpersonal and collective.
Given that The Lovers is archetypal, then this idea of integration, too, can be seen as archetypal — it describes an aspect of the evolution of the soul first, which may then play out in a personal experience.
Going back to the first two cards, the Nine of Pentacles corresponds to Venus in Virgo, and the Nine of Swords to Mars in Gemini. Couple this with the fact that they share the same number, and this tells me that we are looking at the different qualities of an equal nature: the duality of feminine and masculine — specifically, the feminine and masculine experience that each figure is facing in the cards.