The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, June 23, 2013

By Sarah Taylor

VII — VIII — VII

The numbers that come up in a tarot reading are just as significant as the cards to which they correspond, and this week is telling us a story with numbers alone.

Seven is often connoted as the number of completion, or of a particular completion. It is the mid-point where Spirit and matter meet. It is the confluence of what is unknown and known.

In this way, something is asking to be integrated, and there is a sense of completion around the two aspects of Spirit and matter coming together.

In tarot, I believe that when we meet the Sevens we meet the idea of “consciousness” more fully than we have before. We have an opportunity to see ourselves in a different light, and we are only able to do this when we step back and inquire into the nature of who we are. [Reaching the mid-point: the Sevens in tarot]

This doesn’t happen without a struggle. It is hard work to birth something that is out of awareness. There is a part of us that simply doesn’t want to go there. This part is the gate-keeper to the unconscious, which protected us when we were young from experiences that were too painful or difficult for our childlike selves to deal with. (It also protects us from legitimate danger, negotiating our physical safety in the world.) However, it still stands sentry to the vaults that lie within us, not trusting that we can surrender to the chaos that leads to liberation.

This emerging of the unconscious into consciousness is the landscape of the first card, the Seven of Wands. Wands are energy — erotic, creative energy — and here we have one wand in the hands of the figure, representing energy that is conscious, being used to suppress the other six that are emerging from below.

The threat is perceived rather than real; there are no other human figures wielding weapons against him. He is in a fight with a part of himself that just seems separate. Imagine if he stopped fighting. Look at what becomes available to him — look at all of that potential that he is resisting. It comes on the wings of emotions, thoughts and things, yes, but those are entering to be cleared, leaving behind the wands themselves, which then work in formation in the Eight of Wands as a release of inner power. By finding a way to unite with that potential, the eight wands can then fly with intention and directedness.

If the wands are not released, and the fighting to suppress continues, then the next card that is reached is the Eight of Swords, not Wands. There is a sense of a concretisation of a dynamic (albeit energy-sapping) process that then becomes stuck in the mind.

The Eight of Swords came up in an earlier reading (it might be worth going back to re-read it), and its appearance today draws a connection between that one and this one. We are in an ongoing practice of inquiry, surrender and revelation. And it is absolutely a ‘practice’: it requires vigilance and discipline to undergo the work to ‘put down our weapons’ and see the battle for what it is. It is a battle for Self. It is the resisted call to individuate, wherein we discover ourselves as whole and perfect as we are, rather than imperfect in the eyes of others.

When we find ourselves in the land of the Eight of Swords having come from the Seven of Wands, the work involves undoing our thoughts. We can work with this by learning to identify what the Eight of Swords feels like. It is a fear that stops us in our tracks and waylays our plans and aspirations. It blocks our path. To unblock it, we first become aware that we’re in it. Then we can learn to release ourselves (because no-one else is able to do it for us) by choosing a different way to think, to act and to see.

And here lies the paradox in the final card, The Chariot: we move forward by harnessing the energies of the confluence of unknown and known. We don’t have to know it all to start on our journey. We never know it all. We ride the energy that is created where the two meet — the friction of our reluctance and unreadiness and the desire for and beckoning of the path that lies ahead of us.

There is also a timing implicit in the reading: the Eight of Swords corresponds to Jupiter in Gemini, The Chariot to Cancer.

Jupiter entered Gemini on June 11, 2012, and in two days it moves from Gemini into Cancer. We have an astrological transition from the Eight of Swords to The Chariot. Eric wrote this of Jupiter’s ingress into Cancer in last Friday’s subscriber edition:

This is some of the biggest and best news of 2013. It’s not just that Jupiter is exalted in Cancer — that is, one of the planets most closely associated with that sign and most at home there. Jupiter does two impressive things as it passes through Cancer. One is that it makes a grand water trine, joining Saturn in Scorpio and Chiron and Neptune in Pisces; the other is that it will slip into the Uranus-Pluto square (the 2012-era aspect).

There is going to be a change in energy with this move, just as the movement from the Seven of Wands to the Eight of Swords to The Chariot speaks of the opportunity to work with what is emerging in a new way — one that transitions from constraint to expansion.

You are so close, so close. Use the friction of contradiction to move forward. There is no need to know all of the answers. There is no need to know everything to use the power of what is emerging to get going. Feel what it is like to be in your body, feel both worlds — matter and Spirit, consciousness and unconscious — pulling on the reins equally, feel the movement of friction created by their meeting, and let them take you forward into a new adventure.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Seven of Wands (Mars in Leo), Eight of Swords (Jupiter in Gemini), The Chariot (Cancer)

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.