The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, August 7, 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

There is a middle ground open to you, where you are free from the overbearing weight of responsibility and the shallowness of emotion-for-show. Walk this middle path, where thought works in concert with creativity and feeling, and you walk the path of transformation.

Butterflies. They seem anomalous next to the overt sense of ‘hardness’ of the King — his chiselled jaw, set smilelessly. But if we look closer, his demeanour is not as rigid as we might think. He sits at a slight angle, his legs seem to be relaxed. He holds up his sword, but unlike the Queen’s, which rests bolt upright on the arm of her throne, in the King it is held fully in his hand, slightly at an angle. Two birds fly above the clouds to his left. The trees behind him might be wind-blasted, but the ground on which he rests his feet is made up of red earth, sand, grass.

I feel a real sense of paradox here — the square jaw next to the soft, red folds of his cowl; the steely blue-white planes of his sword next to the undulating expanse of his tunic — both reminiscent of the sky that frames him. The gravitas of his expression — the lion denoting healing and strength on his crown — and the receptive presence of the moons. The beauty and symmetry of butterfly wings carved from stone — not trapping them but rather capturing their symbolism in something enduring, which gives them a further symmetry to their form.

There is a guardedness to the King of Swords. But just what is he guarding? What do we meet if we enter his domain? The liberation of thought. The mastery of thought. Thought in synergy. Can this be expressed in day to day life? Can it, for example, be reconciled with the sensuality that is suggested in the last card? Can the King be both logician and liberated? Can this be used with a flexibility that enables it to be creative, courageous, transformative? I think so. I think that is what is embodied in this card. Look past the set jaw, the directed look, and it is there.

And then there is the Ten of Wands. Is this what happens when thought prevails above all else? When the butterfly energy of the King is, for the moment, unable to fly, liberated, on the clouds that lead off the side of the throne? When concentration is focused on the task at hand to the detriment of one’s own personal freedom of thought and of expression?

Is the burden the man carries in the Ten of Wands necessary, or unnecessary? That, I feel, is up to how the card speaks to you personally. The one thing I would say here, though, is that the carrying of the wands is a matter of choice. There is no one else in the card forcing the figure to take up his burden. And it is a large burden — a spiritual burden. It represents something that, in itself, is powerful, but which — for the time being, at least — prevents the figure from doing much with it, or much of anything else. However, there is an end-point in sight: the village towards which he is heading. In fact, his entire body is pointed towards it. This suggests that there is assistance at hand, and perhaps a use for what it is that is currently weighing him down and which is completely in his care. The card, in this reading, suggests a considerable weight of responsibility. One that is being borne on behalf of others — that isn’t solely the business of the carrier, if his business at all. But it is being borne nonetheless.

And what a contrast with the card to its right — not a Ten this time, but a Nine: the Nine of Cups. From a figure loaded like a pack-mule, to a man who seems entirely free of care. In the Nine of Cups, the figure sits surrounded by an arc of gold vessels that seem to be his. He is proud; he is proud of what he has: his cups are arranged carefully, on display to us. Cups are the tarot embodiment of emotion, and this feels to me to be self-conscious sensuality; ‘self’-conscious in the way that it is not ‘natural’.

This doesn’t bear the marks of the earthy sensuality expressed in, for example, the Three of Cups. Nothing here is natural. Blue sky has been replaced by blue cloth. Unlike the King of Swords and the Ten of Wands, here is no detail in the background to suggest any placement in the physical world. The man — a wealthy merchant — seems satisfied to the point of smugness, dominated as he is by his prized possessions. If I were to compare this card to a human state, it would be the state of being in love with the idea of being in love. Cups are emotions; here they are emotional artifice — the trappings of love. All for show; look, but don’t touch. Here, there is ownership over feelings. What would we see if we lifted up the blue tablecloth and looked underneath?

Where the Ten of Wands is all work and no play, the Nine of Cups is style without substance. The potential is there — the figure seems to have worked hard for them, and yet he doesn’t interact with them. In the Three of Cups, the vessels are used, held together in a dance of celebration. What might be accomplished if the figure here were to bring his cups down from pride of place and share them?

Two burdens — unbearable heaviness; unbearable lightness — which lead us back to the King of Swords, who I feel is the alpha and omega of this reading. The self-conscious hat in the Nine of Cups becomes the practical cowl in the King; the arc of cups — beautiful, but separate — have become the crown on his head: beauty and kingliness, without ostentation. In contrast to the hunched figure in the Ten of Wands, the King sits upright, relaxed. He is capable of holding the sword — symbol of his regality — in his hand; it is a part of him, potent, yet doesn’t demand his full attention.

When we experience the Ten of Wands, we hold huge creative potential, but unless we have room to move, we are like the stone-encased butterflies behind the King. When we experience the Nine of Cups, we have access to a depth of emotion that could expand who we are, but unless we are willing to risk it — to take it down off the shelf and use it — we are like the birds in the King: our experience is distant, indistinct, unable to be harnessed and fully felt.

The King represents the middle path that I refer to. He is the way of transformation — the intermediary between pure thought and the grounded nature of what it is to be human — to put thought into action, to experience thought working actively with the principles of creativity and love rather than simply its being a concept. His feet rest on the earth — his clothing is a combination of earth and sky. He is the horizon where they meet. This is where the butterfly emerges from its chrysalis.