The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, October 16, 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

Four, three, two. Self-absorption, conflict, balance. The cards this week are asking me to read them from left to right, while paying due respect to each of the three elements, and how they work together to find equilibrium.

The card on the left is the Four of Cups, which has been a frequent, if not entirely recent, visitor to the Weekend Tarot Readings. In it, a figure sits under a tree, arms folded, legs crossed, eyes lowered, as if preoccupied with something going on inside — rather than around — him. To all intents and purposes, his body language feels like a ‘closing off’ from the outside world. The Three of Cups from last week (celebration, harmonious feelings, shared love, abundance) seems to be revisiting in slightly different form: the cups are lined up in front of him, but he is either unaware of, or choosing not to see, them. It is as if the dancers have put them down and taken their revelries elsewhere.

The fours represent a pause, and this is a card of alone-ness. It feels chosen, not enforced from outside; the circumstances of the figure’s world are not in conflict with him: the sky is clear and the greenery around him suggests life. The tree’s leafy branches hang down towards him. What I find interesting, though, is the uniformity of the greenness. There seem to be no apparent signs of fruit or flower. This feels like mid-summer — after things have sprung from bud and before they are due to be harvested.

There is such a sense of preoccupation that the figure does not look at what stands out as being not simply a part of the scenery: the single cup being offered to him by a hand emanating from a small cloud. This is an unusual visitation in the Cups suit: only the Ace and the Seven have similar imagery, the Ace embodying the purest potential of the Cups, and the Seven speaking of choices as we contemplate the nature of the divine and what ‘divine’ might mean to us. To me, this is a visual reference to the Ace: the gift of love. The cloud enveloping the wrist of the hand is evocative of the Great Mystery. The cup it offers feels like love that is pure (one representing the idea of unity), and patient. The man continues to look down in spite — or, perhaps, because — of its presence. He is closed off to it; there is something else he is focusing on for the time being.

Perhaps the middle card is a clue as to what is calling for his attention. The red of his tunic — shaped much like an inverse heart — seems to be mirrored in the presence of the heart itself in the Three of Swords. In the Three, the heart is seemingly under attack, run through with three blades which meet at its core. Blue skies have given way to storm cloud and streaking rain.

I wrote this about the Three of Swords in an earlier article:

[I]t isn’t the swords that I see as dominant in the Three of Swords, but the heart … in the middle, feeling torn by options that seem to put you in a state of conflict with yourself: the sword on the left … crosses the sword on the right …, and both are met by the sword in the centre — you in the midst of it all.

Swords are thoughts, but it isn’t thought that is going to get you through this. It is the heart. Your heart. This is an invitation to remove the influence of analytical thinking for a moment, if you can, so that you can access something that beats with its own vitality and wisdom.

Sometimes heart and head work well together; at other times, the experience can feel cutting and raw. The Three of Hearts is conventionally seen as a ‘love triangle’, but really it is about an experience of split allegiances within. The heart is not free to beat, skewered in place by thoughts that are themselves intertwined. In fact, this particular heart is one-dimensional — a representation, but not the genuine article. The heart — the true centre of emotions — cannot be damaged or compromised by thought. Like the cup waiting patiently in the Four of Cups, it holds its own power; it makes no demands nor is it slave to anything. Is the crux of this card, then, really about confusion surrounding what is real, and what isn’t? What is truth, and what is illusion? Can true ‘heart’ ever be damaged by our beliefs about it and ourselves?

And so we come to the final card, the Two of Pentacles:

The simplest interpretation of this card is the juggling of assets. It often comes up in a reading where the querent is dealing with limited resources that need to be weighed and apportioned so that there is enough to go around. It is not a card of scarcity — the juggler is well dressed and the large ship in the background looks prosperous with its tricoloured sail — but it does concern itself with the judicious use of the things at one’s disposal.

However, as with all the Twos, there is a greater depth to this card than is suggested by a literal interpretation of juggling. The key to this lies in the infinity symbol and the fact that the juggler’s shoes share the same colour. The pentacles are enveloped by infinity, and the infinity sign in turn is linked with feet, as symbols of groundedness. This is the dance between matter and spirit, between the temporal and the eternal. There is much movement suggested in the picture. Life swings one way and then another in a constant quest for balance. When we work within this principle, connect ourselves to spirit and find ways to ground ourselves, we have created a ship that can withstand the larger waves when they sweep into view. [From potential into action: the Twos in tarot, October 2010]

The Two of Pentacles is as close to the symbol of yin/yang that the Rider-Waite Smith tarot deck comes. Here, it feels like the Cups and Swords in the first two cards — essentially our emotions and thoughts — are brought into an equilibrium that dances in perpetual motion. Adjustment, readjustment. Adjustment, readjustment. Now, the red covering the torso in the figure in the Four of Cups, and providing a striking point of focus in the Three of Swords, clothes the juggler evenly, and in different permutations: the deep red of his hat, the hatched yellow-red of his sleeves, the orange shading of his tunic. He is clothed entirely in shades of red — save for his shoes, which are the same green as the mobius strip surrounding the two pentacles that he balances. The part of him that grounds him in this world is associated with an element that is not of him — and which represents a concept we can only grasp at — yet both are working together in a card that resonates with rolling movement.

From the stasis and constriction of three and four we see the coming together of opposites in a choreographed dance of freedom. Freedom within constraints. We work with what we have. The ships are propelled forward. Motion is established.