{"id":53790,"date":"2012-02-26T14:03:16","date_gmt":"2012-02-26T19:03:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=53790"},"modified":"2012-02-26T16:07:58","modified_gmt":"2012-02-26T21:07:58","slug":"the-weekend-tarot-reading-sunday-february-26-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/reading-tarot\/the-weekend-tarot-reading-sunday-february-26-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, February 26, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Sarah Taylor<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The last time we met The Tower in the Weekend Tarot Reading<\/a>, it was the middle of November 2011.\u00a0 Admittedly, when I drew the cards today, two things occurred to me. The first was an exclamation with some exasperation: “Again?!” The Tower is a challenging card for many to receive with open arms. I am no exception in this, and I most certainly had had my own Tower moment during and after that reading. (Its influence can reverberate far into the future.)
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Moon, Queen of Cups, The Tower qualified by Ten of Pentacles from the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck. Click on the image for a larger version.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The second was that the reading seemed to ask for a card to contextualise The Tower. In this case the context is one of interpersonal relationships<\/em> — more specifically the conventions that often surround them. I’m aware I am being more specific than usual, and there are several reasons why, which I’ll address through the cards themselves, doing my best to relate to you the narrative I feel they are weaving.<\/p>\n

In November last year, there was another Cups card in the centre of the reading: The Knight of Cups. I also alluded to the Queen of Cups in that reading in order to contrast the qualities of the two court cards. This is what I wrote:<\/p>\n

… [T]he Knight embodies the principle of ‘courtly love’. Well-intentioned but showy (shadowy?), courtly love is public display of affection without the deeply felt understanding that true love cannot be idealised and pushed \u2018out there\u2019 to admire from afar. Like Strength, love is visceral \u2014 watery, flowing, hidden, sometimes unfathomable.<\/p>\n

Unlike the King and Queen of Cups, who are associated with the ocean, the water associated with the Knight is still a shallow river. Nonetheless, even though idealistic, the Knight\u2019s potential is indicated in the fish and waves embroidered on his tunic (fish representing sustenance for the soul). Moreover, he is on a mission, his cup held out before him: He has courage and an adventurous spirit, and he is open \u2014 like the cup \u2014 to what he will find.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Today, it seems that the Knight’s energy has, indeed, become that of the Queen: Having been through a certain initiatory experience, he is now wiser, deeper, and prepared to encounter feelings directly, working with the ebb and flow of inner tides rather than a trickling rivulet. This is mature emotion, but also feminine, watery, intuitive, receptive.<\/p>\n

Here, the Queen of Cups is turned towards the first card in the spread: The Moon, another card that embodies the feminine. In The Moon, however, there is the accompanying feeling of not being able to see clearly, and when we cannot discern our world — and here this refers to our inner world, which can be reflected in our outer experience — then we need to use something other than our five senses in order to navigate the shadowlands. We use our intuition; we move carefully, feeling for what is around us, inwardly prepared for the possibility that we will not be able to trust in the feedback that we receive from those aspects of ourselves that are used to working in broad daylight.<\/p>\n

The Moon is a time when things surface that are primordial; strange creatures that emerge from the depths, causing the wolves to howl and the dogs to bay. This is the connection to something that we can so often ignore when our everyday lives take over. And because we ignore it so much, when the Moon rises and the day time makes way for night, it can feel unfamiliar to the point where fear can take over. How can we negotiate when we can’t even<\/em> see<\/em>?<\/p>\n

The answer to this question lies in the path — there is a way through — and with the Moon herself, who is raining her golden light down on the scene below. She is calm, meditative, motionless. We, too, are being asked to find that calm, meditative, motionless part of ourselves. This is the best tool that we have to find that path through our moonlit landscapes. And we are being watched over and guided by the Queen of Cups. Two very feminine figures working together. The seas lapping at the Queen’s feet extend into The Moon, and from them crawls that symbol of the primordial — a strange creature that feels perhaps alien, and which has the propensity to make us shift a little uncomfortably in our seats.<\/p>\n

The Queen does not recoil from this creature emerging in front of her, however. Instead, she extends her cup towards it — a cup that symbolises the source of her emotions, a vessel that contains and transforms, from which we are able to birth something new and, yes, altogether less rational than we might be used to. When we are aligned with our emotions to the extent expressed in the Queen of Cups — a state that is amplified by The Moon — then we can take in all that emerges with empathy and openness, the shores of our own psychic seas ready to birth and offer to our embrace what it is that is surfacing to meet us.<\/p>\n

I am writing in metaphor a lot here; I feel that is the point. This is not the kingdom of mind. This is very much the realm of Neptune in Pisces. A waterworld where we have to approach things obliquely, trying to discern them out of the corners of our eyes, and dreaming up a new language to name them and to meet with them.<\/p>\n

What lies behind the Queen is where yang energy takes over from yin: The masculine is very much in this reading too and embodied in The Tower. If we move with the astrology theme a little further, The Tower is Chiron: focused and with the intent of bringing healing. That healing is not always experienced gently, but that is often the case when we have invested our efforts in something that has been created, not to endure, but for the purpose of being torn down.<\/p>\n

The Tower is the realm of being where even the glow of the Moon cannot penetrate. The darkness that surrounds it is there because we have chosen to build a structure in a place that cannot sustain light; in this place, we have become un-enlightened. It is a dark recess of the unconscious that needs to have something strike into it so uncompromisingly that we have no way of turning away from the obviousness of our situation. We have tried to build something away from consciousness, and it has been holding us prisoner in some sense of that word. No more. And in this instance the receptiveness of The Moon and the gentle presence of the Queen of Cups are not enough to achieve this destruction. Instead, they are ‘holding space’ for something else to enter: A divine lightning bolt issued from the sky, which blows apart what has been built in a way that might seem entirely unfair and unexpected at the time \u2013 but the reason for this will become clear because the bolt also illuminates what, up until now, was cast into the shadow.<\/p>\n

What falls is a way of coupling, crystallised in the Ten of Pentacles. The Ten is a card of convention and structure — and, in fact, towers abound in the imagery of this card: Look at the carvings in the stone archway, the mural to its left, and the tower in the far background. It is as if, by embracing the watery nature of our feminine sides — our feelings — the imagery in the Ten (which here seems busy, decorative, chock-full of tradition and bound in structure) is transformed.<\/p>\n

The whippets, well-behaved, seated expectantly and obediently at the feet of a richly dressed figure — old, dignified — become wild animals in The Moon. They are no longer at the beck and call of convention; they are no longer tame. Likewise, the couple, seen standing under the archway facing each other, become the couple who fall from The Tower. Here, there is no more space for the niceties of civilised and mundane conversation in the marketplace. Something else has to come through — a bolt of consciousness and transformation. The golden yod-shaped leaves of light rain down on them as they do on the creatures in The Moon. In that moment, they are surrendered to a force that frees them from convention that no longer serves them, from traditions that hold them back, from an obedience to parental figures that have kept them in place. What sees them through this process is a deeply felt feminine presence that helps them find their own paths through this strange new landscape.<\/p>\n

Freedom through the emotions. Freedom to feel. Feeling through to freedom.<\/p>\n

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator<\/a> using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article<\/a> explains how to use the spread.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Sarah Taylor The last time we met The Tower in the Weekend Tarot Reading, it was the middle of November 2011.\u00a0 Admittedly, when I drew the cards today, two things occurred to me. The first was an exclamation with some exasperation: “Again?!” The Tower is a challenging card for many to receive with open arms. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":470,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[183],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53790"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/470"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53790\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}