The Weekend Tarot Reading – Sunday, Feb. 13, 2011

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

The reading this week feels like an alchemical quantum leap — a reaction within that causes a transformation from novice to master, from fluidity to fire, from an untested idealism to an oomph of focused and authoritative energy.

It is as if a person, an entity or a part of us steps forward and assumes a position of power through an unexpected shift in events.

Look at the card on the left: the Page of Cups. Cups are associated with emotions, and here I tend to see these emotions as being pure and well-intentioned, young-at-heart.

The Page is well dressed. Dandy, even: he isn’t wearing the attire of someone who is used to going through the wars (that comes with the Knight), but rather of someone who has time for recreation and imagination. This is not to denigrate the Page of Cups. Not at all. Love has to have its beginning somewhere, and what better beginning than one that is imbued with an open and dream-like quality? Yes, it’s going to be put through the wringer, in a manner of speaking, and it has yet to acquire the patina of experience, but the foundation for something that is expansive and accepting is there.

The fish interests me here. It is the same colour blue as the man’s ornate headdress and his tunic, as well as the undulating waters behind him. It is as much a part of him as it is a part of the seas — a visitor from the uncharted depths of his own psyche. But he isn’t afraid of it, instead greeting it with a smile, his body bent towards it. It is as if he is inviting it into his consciousness, after which he might throw it into the sea so that it is free to swim and multiply.

And we have the same blue again, in the Wheel of Fortune. Now, however, there is something else that vies for my attention: the orange of the wheel in the centre of the picture, and the darker red-orange of Anubis — an Egyptian god associated with the afterlife — supporting the wheel on its back.

The love and fearlessness of the Page are being shaped and honed, conferred with a weathered patina by events that are both unexpected and which lie outside of our full control.

The Wheel of Fortune speaks of an event that changes either our inner or our outer circumstances, or both. In the centre of the wheel are four symbols, three of which (salt, sulphur and mercury) are integral to performing the Great Work: the transmutation of base matter into gold, or, in psychological alchemy, the act of individuation. The fourth symbol is the sign of Aquarius, or water. Here, the water associated with the Page of Cups is an essential part of the chemical reaction required to create alchemical gold. The Great Work isn’t simple, nor is it performed in a sterile and contained environment. Alchemy is inextricably bound up with the vagaries of life — but I’d suggest that that is a part of the process itself. Who knows where an unexpected turn might lead us?

Here, there seems to be a hint. Look back at the figure of Anubis. It is as if it is pointing towards the final card: the King of Wands. In fact, both figures share the same colour, the same cross-hatched detail of yellow and red. Out of the Wheel of Fortune emerges the King, full of fiery power, born of the idealism of the Page. The gentle and enquiring emotiveness of the first card has developed depth, complexity, mettle. The King looks back at the Wheel of Fortune and the Page — who seems entirely devoted to his cup — as if surveying the landscape from which he emerged. Now, instead of a fish, he is both lion — strength — and salamander — fire. But without the water he would be nothing; he would not exist in the form that he is. It is water that ensures a tree comes into leaf, and this is reflected in the sprigs growing from the wand, and the green mantle around his neck.

The youth has grown into a man — one who is aware of and comfortable with the power within him, and one who asserts his authority. What is the event that brings him here? Who knows? And maybe that is the point: it is not what happens to us, but how we choose to act when wheel starts to turn. Remembering and invoking the openness of the Page might not be a bad place to start.