{"id":62007,"date":"2012-10-07T14:02:19","date_gmt":"2012-10-07T18:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=62007"},"modified":"2012-10-08T07:38:19","modified_gmt":"2012-10-08T11:38:19","slug":"the-weekend-tarot-reading-sunday-october-7-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/reading-tarot\/the-weekend-tarot-reading-sunday-october-7-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, October 7, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

No man is an island, they say.\u00a0Yet you sit there
\nAlone.
\nVoluntary exile,
\nBlind to those there by your side — quiet, unquestioning,
\nWaiting
\nUntil you see otherwise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two things happened when I was laying out the cards for today’s reading. First, there was a clear directive to position the first card that I drew — the Seven of Jades (Pentacles) — as the middle card.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Released Man, Seven of Jades, The Priest from the Xultun Tarot deck, a Mayan tarot deck created by artist Peter Balin. Click on the image for a larger version.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This puts the protagonist in the Seven firmly in the centre of the reading, with the other two cards as events surrounding him. Had I placed the Seven at left — which is what I would typically do — then The Released Man (The Tower in the Rider-Waite Smith deck) would be the focal point. Here, it is not.<\/p>\n

The Released Man will have an impact on the Seven of Jades, yes, but the message is a clear one: keep going, in spite of what may feel like the odds being stacked against you in an environment that is quicker to quash than to nurture. You have been conferred the responsibility for tending to what is bearing fruit in a part of your life.<\/p>\n

The second thing that happened was that the two cards that accompany the 78-card Xultun Tarot (making it an 80-card deck) decided to do their own enactment of The Released Man, and fell off the table onto a chair and the floor. I wouldn’t have given it much thought if I didn’t know that the cards were created to represent the polarities of masculine and feminine energy — yang and yin — and are therefore symbolic of the fall of the man and woman from the Mayan Pyramid in The Released Man.<\/p>\n

So we have two points of emphasis — first, the Seven of Jades, then The Released Man — followed by the comparatively low-key entrance of the third and final card, The Priest. The next thing is to listen to the narrative that all three are weaving for us.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What I find interesting is that the tree which the figure in the Seven of Jades is nurturing into bloom is divided into halves which, for the most part, mirror each other: the left-hand side is blue and holds three of the jades; the right-hand side is brown and holds another three; the seventh jade is held by both sides.<\/p>\n

The tree’s roots are wrapped around a skull, which faces The Released Man: out of endings new beginnings are made; from one state of polarity another one must spring. That is what life is: an incarnation of two complementary wholes that are forever in a state of seeking balance. When something falls out of balance to the point that it has done in The Released Man, the only thing that can correct it is its destruction. That might sound brutal, as if there is judgement attached to what is happening. But what if there is no judgement? What if it is a simple statement of fact? Instead of looking at what is falling, what if we were to look at the ground it gives us to build something new? Something with greater structural integrity, something that serves both the whole and its interdependent parts.<\/p>\n

And yet it serves us to remember that this is the planet of free will: we can choose to learn a lesson from the past, or we can choose to repeat it. We know what happens when we choose the latter; the former releases us into the unknown.<\/p>\n

The figure is reaching for a jade in the lower branches of the brown side of the tree, which is nearer to him. It seems ripe for the picking. What feels true is that he has been caretaker of this tree alone, unaided. Perhaps he is a little surprised that he’s made it this far. But the roots dig down, as do his own legs; he is waist-deep in the soil, rooted and grounded. This has been an exercise of finding root.<\/p>\n

If he turns around, he will see a figure standing behind him — a figure who shares the same-coloured background as the branch from which he is making his first harvest. This is the figure of The Priest, clothed in the shamanic robes of jaguar — the jaguar’s belly full of him, his head ‘birthing’ through jaguar’s mouth. How much is man, how much is jaguar? I cannot be sure. They merge in a card that is about communion, marriage, the coming together of two different paths — the sacred and the profane. The Priest (also known as The Hierophant) is Spirit’s commandment enacted in the land of the living. Like last week’s reading<\/a>, it speaks to me of Tantra.<\/p>\n

From a coupling of masculine and feminine that can no longer be held in structural integrity (The Released Man), we move to a merging of spirit and matter in service to the divine (The Priest). All the while, the figure in the Seven of Jades keeps his vigilance, carefully watching the jades on his tree as they grow, small buds of leaves appearing on each branch.<\/p>\n

Nothing is accomplished if we do not act, and continue to act, from a point of inner authority. When we lose our connection to that authority — to the Self — we build our lives forgetting the foundations that anchor us into meaning. In doing that, we create a pathway for a lightning bolt to come and correct our course. It isn’t retribution: we created the conditions for it to happen.<\/p>\n

And so this reading finds us on the other side of The Released Man, growing something that reaches down as much as it reaches up, a balance between nature and the material world. At the point of the first harvest, we might look back with some trepidation. We know all too well what it feels like to lose our footing, to be thrown to the ground, feeling separated from others and from our connection to Spirit, to meaning.<\/p>\n

But we are here, now, tending to something living, vital and balanced — albeit in infancy. Sometimes it may seem like a lonely job, yet we are far from alone. Something — perhaps someone — has our back, and it asks us to consider what it would be like to identify with a form of relating to the world and others that recognises the spirit that resides in everything.<\/p>\n

By paying due care and respect to what we have learned about the past — about balance between body and soul and between the extremes of experience that life brings us, understanding that one is neither more superior nor necessary than the other — we can focus our love and attention on yielding a harvest that is new and altogether more sustainable.<\/p>\n

Astrology correspondences:<\/strong>\u00a0The Released Man (Mars), Seven of Jades (Uranus\/Pluto combination, Pisces), The Priest (Taurus)<\/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 No man is an island, they say.\u00a0Yet you sit there Alone. Voluntary exile, Blind to those there by your side — quiet, unquestioning, Waiting Until you see otherwise. Two things happened when I was laying out the cards for today’s reading. First, there was a clear directive to position the first card that … 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\/62007"}],"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=62007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}