The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, November 6, 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 articleexplains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

Stand firm by your principles — this is the time for cool, calm, collectedness. It doesn’t mean that you are out of touch with your emotions. It is simply that clarity is the defining quality first; emotional union follows.

The King of Swords. Authoritative without being tyrannical. Composed while retaining his humanity.

Because swords are often viewed as an uncompromising suit — there is little to match the directness of the imagery in the Three of Swords or the Ten of Swords, for example — it is perhaps easy to look at the King and see him as a figure who is as hard as the metal he wields in his right hand. Not so. His face might bear the planes of a sharp instrument, but his clothing is soft: His gown is a light and airy sky-blue, falling in folds over his knees; his cowl by comparison feels more weighty — the blood-red of a beating heart that informs and works with his head. Butterflies, sickle moons and naked figures are etched into the back-rest of his throne. Transformation, beauty, transition, integrity. The King of Swords embodies the archetype of Solomon: fair, he is fearless in the enactment of what he believes to be ‘right action’. He understands that with insight and truth comes liberation.

Look at the parallels between the King of Swords and the next card, Judgement. When I see these cards side-by-side, I notice that the King’s sword mirrors the shape and angle of the angel’s trumpet; his gold crown is seen again in the angel’s yellow-orange hair; his purple cloak becomes feathered angel-wings; the naked figure above his left shoulder is echoed in the naked woman standing facing us in the background.

This is a call to judgement. The King heralds in a time of reckoning, the foundations of which have been laid by clarity, unstinting analysis that avoids no shadows, and the capacity for transformation that these create. In other words, the opportunity for transformation is ours for the taking once we align ourselves with our kingly natures and direct our focus on truth: personal, interpersonal, collective. It takes courage, but the King is courage incarnate. He sits alone, his own authority, but this authority has influence over the course of events in his and his subjects’ lives. We, too, do not exist in a vacuum, but are part of an interconnecting web of consciousness in which we participate. We can do this by default, unthinkingly and eschewing awareness; or we can do this actively, knowing as we do that when we choose right action we impact the collective.

And so, at the angel’s trumpet call — the call to awareness — the figures rise up from the coffins that held them prisoner, and are reborn. They are still in the half-light, their flesh has yet to find the pink tones of bodies that are fully animated, but the hair of the three figures in the foreground echoes that of the angel. They are in the process of being birthed. The butterfly is emerging, wings still crumpled, the blood yet to reach each vein and fill its wings so that it can fly. Just like the butterfly, in these moments we can feel vulnerable and exposed. The world around us might feel strange — we might feel strange in the world. But above us, the angel is there, guiding us. The angel is our connection to the divine that we all have inside us. The King knows this: It is what he aligns with when he bears the responsibility of his crown (Crown with a capital ‘C’) and what it demands of him.

Finally, we come to the third card, the Ten of Cups. In it, the hues that were so muted in the Judgement card now expand to the spectrum of the rainbow: The butterfly has emerged fully, ready to show its true colours. Both pairs of figures are dressed in blue, orange, purple, yellow — just like the King and the angel before them. They are integrated, finally. They represent the marriage of masculine and feminine, the adult and the inner child. The marriage of the Self. It is a union in celebration of joy and fertility. The background provides what is needed to sustain life: shelter and sustenance. The rest they carry inside them. The ten cups arching over them is the expression of their feeling natures, on display with nothing to hide. Love. Do not turn away. Be all that you are, and it will shine and cover the world.

And I quote, not for the first time here, the words of Marianne Williamson in A Return to Love:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.