The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, August 14, 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 explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

Choices, choices, choices: the empowerment to make them, the options they offer you, and where they will take you. This is a potent reading where the decisions that you make, and what you explore, have the potential to bring you into conscious contact with your shadow. At the heart of the reading: the invitation to greater self-awareness through integration.

The Devil — fifteenth card of the major arcana, which hold within them our inner archetypal development — is a visual depiction of our shadow nature. It is when we encounter The Devil that we come face to face with what connects us to the darkness — something that has the potential to hold us prisoner, but which also offers us a pathway to freedom.

The Devil is born of us, rather than the other way around. He is created when what we find unacceptable in ourselves, both positive and negative, is locked away in the unconscious because we aren’t able to own it as a part of us.

I believe that The Devil is a visual depiction of what psychiatrist Carl Jung referred to as the shadow — something that Eric refers to often in his astrology articles and reports. In Jung – A Very Short Introduction, Anthony Stevens refers to the shadow as such:

… [T]he whole shadow complex is tinged with feelings of guilt and unworthiness, and with fears of refection should its true nature be discovered or exposed. However painful the process [of confronting the shadow] may be, it is necessary to persevere because much Self potential and instinctive energy is locked away in the shadow and therefore unavailable to the total personality.

We cannot approach the shadow directly. Rather, we experience it in our dreams, or it is projected out into the world, and then returns to us through relationships — especially our relationship with a partner or partners — and our experiences. Its presence is inferred.

When I look at the Two of Wands and The Devil side-by-side, I see both the capacity and the capability to take matters in hand — to take the world in hand — in order to acknowledge our shadow nature and to begin to own it. It is appropriate that the figure in the Two of Wands is turned away from The Devil: as I mentioned, the shadow is not something that stands in front of us, clear as day, so that we can analyse and interpret it. However, the two wands are indicative of the man’s dual nature: the wand in his left hand, held together with the world, represents the part of him that looks outside. The wand behind him seems to be the gateway to The Devil, marking space between the figure and what lies out of his immediate field of vision. The figure is well-dressed and in a position of authority, looking as he does out at the sea from the rampart of a large building. He is master of his domain; he has the means to hold the energy of both outer and inner.

And there The Devil sits, at the centre of it all, looking out at us, his expression ambiguous to my eyes. This merely emphasises the mystery of the underworld that he inhabits. He is a dream-like figure — an amalgamation of creatures both worldly and fantastical. He is an amalgamation of all of the things that we have put there.

The figure of the man and the woman are chained to the pedestal on which he is perched, and yet those chains are able to be lifted in order to release them. Right now, however, they are in his thrall. Like the man in the Two of Wands, they are turned away from him, but here they seem inert and dejected. There is no light around them — no light of consciousness to shed on their predicament. They are the core of our experience when we are in service to something that we are not aware of, but which affects who we are, how we behave, what we think and believe about ourselves and others. In the Two of Wands, however, the man is standing in the light; he holds the world; he has the power and inspiration of Wands energy. There is work to be done. What is it that he will do, and how will he do it?

Which leads us on to the final card — the Seven of Cups. This card returns us to the idea of choice that I referred to in the opening paragraph. Here, on a cloud, there are seven cups, each holding something different. The figure in the foreground is cast in shadow, spilling as it has done from The Devil on his left. As in the Two of Wands, he faces away, but the presence of the darkness is more obvious, the shadow more readily at play, more knowable — and it is knowable through the choices that he makes and his motivations for making them.

What will he do? Will he choose instant gratification — and in what form will it come? Will he use his powers of discernment? Will he choose something that he hasn’t noticed before? Will he choose the cup at the centre of the picture, which opens its arms to him, but which is shrouded, mysterious, perhaps more risky than the others in some respects?

Although each choice will lead to a different experience of the world and of ourselves — some perhaps more challenging than others — the indication here is that all choices are relevant, and there is no judgement attached to any of them: each cup is on the same cloud, and clouds in the Rider-Waite Smith tarot are most often associated with the presence of the divine. In other words, all cups come from the same source, and no cup is off limits.

So, finally, we have two aspects of the same figure in the Two of Wands and the Seven of Cups; both looking outwards at something; both empowered in their own ways; one of the waking world, the other of the dreamworld; both connected by The Devil, whose influence plays out in their lives. But instead of being wholly at the mercy of the impulses from the underworld — as we are when we become the figure of the man or the woman — this reading suggests that we can work actively with them by looking at what it is that is in front of us, and why it is that we are compelled towards some things more than others, why it is that we are repulsed by some things more than others. At the heart of this lies our feelings about what it is that we encounter — Cups ruling our emotional natures. These can go a long way to helping us discover what it is that often guides who we are, but remains one step away from us.

Analytic success in making the shadow conscious and coming to terms with its contents results, after the initial struggle, in a sense of greater vitality, of feeling more vigorous, more creative, and more whole. To own one’s shadow is to become responsible for it, so that one’s morality is less blind and less compulsive, and ethical choices become possible. Shadow consciousness is important not only for personal development, therefore, but as a basis for greater social harmony and international understanding. [Anthony Stevens, Jung – A Very Short Introduction]