The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, June 19, 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 choice at hand, and one that has the potential to bring you face-to-face with aspects of your deeper, more hidden nature. Choose what it is that you want, while opening your mind to the creative possibilities in the choosing itself, and with the knowledge that you need not become slave to anything. Playfulness and a sense of open enquiry are your allies.

A rich, intense reading this week — both visually and figuratively. The prevailing idea that comes to me is that of choice, embodied in The Lovers, but it is choice that is qualified and shaped by the other two cards in the reading: The Devil and the Page of Cups.

Let’s look at The Lovers first. It is a more complex card than its name immediately suggests. Yes, there is a man and a woman, and, yes, there is the potential in the picture for them to come together — as they do in the image the card evokes: that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But Adam and Eve are not just lovers. They also represent the [G]enesis of the polarisation of male and female, and the choices that come into play when you stand face-to-face with another. What’s theirs? What’s yours? What is held between?

Therein lies the charge to the card. We are simultaneously looking in the mirror while we bear witness to someone, and something, else’s presence. Although the woman is turned towards the man, she isn’t looking at him. Instead, she looks up at the angel between them, a divine mediator.

The Sun shines down from above the angel’s head. There is access to the light of consciousness, while at the same time the card is very physical in nature: the unclothed figures, the tree bearing fruit, the snake (representing both sexuality and healing, its tail winding up the tree trunk like a caduceus), the flame-like leaves on the blackened tree behind the male figure. Female, male. The power to procreate; the power to immolate. Earth, fire. And yet the red and yellow of the flames on the tree are held in the apples, and the angel’s hair is a synthesis of both the leaves and the fire. The two energies co-exist here. There is a delicious tension between them that feels alive with possibility.

The Devil takes us into the underworld of The Lovers. Now, instead of standing together but independently, the male and female figures are chained to the pedestal on which the Devil perches. Both trees behind them in The Lovers have become a part of them here, shaped as they are into tails. Their attention no longer seems to hold the awareness of something outside them: here, their heads are tilted down and away from the other figures, introspective. The angel has given way to a horned beast — part man, part bird, part goat, part lion, part bat — that looks directly at us rather than them, a pentacle above its head. It seems none too pleased to be there, rather than presiding over the pair with cackling glee.

The more I look at this card, the more a suggestion made in an article last year about The Devil makes sense: that the Devil has been brought into being by the man and woman, rather than being an autonomous entity that holds them captive. The figures could so easily remove the chains from around their necks, but in this picture they do not. They seem to be caught in a loop of unconscious self-absorption; they are surrounded by darkness. They are trapped in the mirror, which excludes the possibility of anything outside of them existing.

When we meet with The Devil, we become slaves to something inside that is seeking attention and expression. It’s a slavery that knows no balance. We are tied exclusively into the body and mind, where the gods are of our own creation, and to which, if we give them enough power, we are held in thrall. We make no allowance for the other — whether it is experienced in someone else, or in our connection to something greater than ourselves.

When we do make room for the other — when we step away from the mirror where we are bound to see only ourselves reflected in those around us — we open to the possibility of an adventure of the spirit. We live with the mystery of something that cannot be fully known, and which, if we let it in, can be energising and nourishing.

How to do this? By embodying the archetype of The Page of Cups: open, enquiring, creative, and one who embraces the unexpected. The Page of Cups is light where The Devil is dark; its colours are more of a match with The Lovers. He is vital and emotionally present and aware: Cups are associated with emotions, as is water — and the sea behind him seems deep, yet calm. Unlike the figures in The Devil, he is open to something separate from him. He looks at the cup that he holds, seemingly unsurprised by the emergence from it of a fish.

Perhaps the fish is a reference to Christianity. Perhaps it is something that seems palpably different from us, yet, like us, is birthed from water and associated with the feeling nature. Whatever it is, the page seems amused by and engaged with it. He is contrasted with the male figure in The Devil, standing in a similar position but this time acknowledging the ‘otherness’ of his situation. That, I sense, is what the cards are saying today: that we have the opportunity to make room for this otherness in the relationship that we have with ourselves, with others, and with spirit.