{"id":61669,"date":"2012-09-23T13:54:53","date_gmt":"2012-09-23T17:54:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=61669"},"modified":"2012-09-24T12:51:56","modified_gmt":"2012-09-24T16:51:56","slug":"the-weekend-tarot-reading-sunday-september-23-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/reading-tarot\/the-weekend-tarot-reading-sunday-september-23-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, September 23, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

After a reading that provoked strong emotions last week, I decided to take a different approach to the Weekend Tarot Reading and introduce and work with a new deck every four or five weeks. Hopefully it’s more inclusive, avoids any single deck outstaying its welcome, and makes use of the fact that there is a deck to suit every predilection. (We’ll also be taking a more in-depth look at some of the decks over the coming weeks as the tarot column resumes a twice-weekly publishing schedule.)<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Priestess, Servant of Cups, The Planet Venus from the Xultun Tarot deck, a Mayan tarot deck created by New Zealand artist Peter Balin. Click on the image for a larger version.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the meantime, for the next few Sundays, I will be reading from the Xultun Tarot deck, which has popped its head round the door here at Planet Waves every now and then. The Xultun deck was created nearly 40 years ago by artist Peter Balin. <\/p>\n

As the story goes, one of his guests at a dinner party suggested he create a tarot deck, and at the point where Balin was telling her \u201chow crazy I thought she was,\u201d the major arcana appeared to him in a vision. He sequestered himself thereafter and over the next three months the deck came to painted life.<\/p>\n

The Xultun Tarot is unusual because its major arcana (the 22 cards associated with the broader, archetype-driven themes that affect us at a soul level) can be assembled to form a single picture<\/a>\u00a0—\u00a0which is how Balin painted them. Seen this way, it is easier to feel the interconnectedness of the cards and what they represent; they work together to weave a picture of the soul’s evolution, and it is both horizontal (linear) and vertical (lying outside space-time) in nature.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The three cards this week are The Priestess, the Servant of Cups and The Planet Venus — more typically known as The High Priestess, the Knight of Cups (or the Prince in the Thoth Tarot, who made an appearance last weekend), and Judgement. That’s two major arcana cards, and one court card. This is no small-fry reading we are dealing with.<\/p>\n

The first thing I find interesting is that the two figures of the Priestess and the Servant are facing the same way — towards Venus and the feathered serpent that descends from the skies in front of the planet. When the major arcana is looked at as a whole<\/a>, the feathered serpent has descended from The Bound Man card — The Devil in other decks.<\/p>\n

This is a relationship reading — or, more generally, a reading about relationship. There is a difference in that the former tends to be associated with ‘romantic’ relationships, and my sense here is that it cannot be limited to that.<\/p>\n

Something that was birthed by agreement between two people, or the clash of the conscious and the unconscious — or both — who came together to experience what lay in the shadows is now taking shape by the light of Venus. Nevertheless, this isn’t all lovey-dovey in nature: The Planet Venus card is ruled by Pluto, and so the nature of that Venusian energy is stirred up by an overarching energy that is both destructive and creative — the necessary ending that makes way for new beginnings. <\/p>\n

In the Rider-Waite Smith Judgement card, figures who have been entombed in coffins rise up, rejoicing, their arms stretched out to the heavens, where an angel is blowing a trumpet. There are obvious biblical overtones to the imagery, but Judgement in the tarot is about redemption. What imprisoned the two people in The Bound Man has been transmuted; the chains of the unconscious have been broken; release through change beckons.<\/p>\n

To the left of The Planet Venus, we have the Servant of Cups, kneeling as if making an offering to the harbinger of change. In last week’s reading, the Servant (there the Prince) represented immature love — love for love’s sake, love that skims the surface, not fully cognizant of the depths that love requires you to go to when you are called to maturity. <\/p>\n

Here, it looks like the Prince has been brought to his knees by the earlier experience of The Bound Man. He has lived and understood the depths and, by doing this, has realised what love is through the knowing of what it isn’t. Now, he is in obeisance. He is humbled — as are we all humbled when we are brought face-to-face with a part of our nature that we find hard to accept, and when it enables us to plunge into our emotional depths to redeem it, and ourselves. The Servant represents an acknowledgement of this journey, and an offering up of himself to a love that is archetypal in nature: Venus herself.<\/p>\n

Finally, at far left, The Priestess, knowing witness: our intuitive nature, partnered with Spirit, that guides us to this encounter. She is housed in the darkness, under the stars, but the colours of her card at the far right are the same as those in The Planet Venus. She provides us with safe passage into our meeting with Judgement. The Priestess doesn’t shout, operating in the shadows as she does. Her voice is a whisper, but it is unapologetic and unequivocal. You’ll know her when she speaks to you.<\/p>\n

Listen to what your intuition tells you, especially in matters of the heart: it, above all things, knows what it is doing.<\/p>\n

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free\u00a0tarot spread generator<\/a>\u00a0using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread.\u00a0This article<\/a>\u00a0explains how to use the spread.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Sarah Taylor After a reading that provoked strong emotions last week, I decided to take a different approach to the Weekend Tarot Reading and introduce and work with a new deck every four or five weeks. Hopefully it’s more inclusive, avoids any single deck outstaying its welcome, and makes use of the fact that there … 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\/61669"}],"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=61669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61669\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}