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 explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
You are embarking on an act of creation. You are in the process of shaping your world, and your experience of it. You have the tools to be able to achieve this — both personal and transpersonal. How will you choose to work? What is it that you are going to bring into existence? Both of these questions lie at the heart of the matter at hand.
This feels to me like a very balanced reading. An Eight, a minor arcana Two, card number Two in the major arcana. Two male figures out in the world, one female figure in the inner world. The juxtaposition of a card of doingness on the left, a card of beingness on the right, and one that seems to be mid-way between ‘doing’ and ‘being’ in the centre. Do the outer cards feed into the central card, which is then our focus, I wonder? That is the way the reading is leading me to interpret it.
The Eight of Pentacles is a card of work. After the giving to others witnessed in the figure offering alms to the poor in the Six of Pentacles, there is then the getting down to business of bringing something through for oneself, by oneself, in the Seven: We give first in order to open the way to receiving. When we get to the Eight, there is a sense of having overcome the hurdles of uncertainty in the Seven, where a certain amount of taking stock was necessary in the face of less-than-favourable circumstances.
Here, now, there is an ease to the picture that was not seen in the previous card. The worker has turned craftsman, building up a reserve of things — assets, skills, tools — that are ready for use if he needs them. This is about what we build up within ourselves that we can then apply as required out in the world. They might not all be tangible, but they are all practical, and can have practical effects. We have a wealth of means at our disposal if only we were a) to acknowledge just what we have developed through the sheer will of being here, and b) to look, not at others (who, distant as they are in the town behind the figure, cannot supply what we need) but right in our own backyards — right in front of our eyes, in fact.