{"id":76501,"date":"2014-05-11T14:04:20","date_gmt":"2014-05-11T18:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=76501"},"modified":"2014-05-12T13:01:39","modified_gmt":"2014-05-12T17:01:39","slug":"the-weekend-tarot-reading-sunday-may-11-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/reading-tarot\/the-weekend-tarot-reading-sunday-may-11-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, May 11, 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

We have an all-Cups reading this week, which means that there are a lot of feelings around — and a lot of feelings about love in particular, given the messages of the three cards in front of us. However you choose to define that “love” is also how you define your experience of your feelings.<\/p>\n

\"Four<\/a>
Four of Cups, Five of Cups, Prince of Cups from the Rohrig Tarot deck, created by Carl -W. Rohrig. Click on the image for a larger version.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It might be worth it to take a few moments to consider what you feel love is, and how you choose to live it out both as an act of self-definition, and as a means of relating to everyone and everything around you. It is this particular energy — the energy of Cups — that is prevalent. It has the ability to reveal itself in ways both subtle and concrete.<\/p>\n

Talking of concrete, how about that structure in the central card, the Five of Cups? The Five of Cups, or “Disappointment,” is the petrification of something that was once living. It is the loss of vivacity of a feeling — here, love — that, like water itself, is devoted to movement and to the allowing of flow. Love is not something that can be bonded to one’s will. When you attempt to do that, it isn’t love that is held captive; it is your experience of love and life itself. Disappointment in love creates hearts of stone, when in fact love is a force that is anything but cold, hard, unyielding.<\/p>\n

The Five of Cups is what happens when the path of love, and our ideas about what love should be, are at odds with each other. One of the phrases on the Five of Cups is “problematic relationship.” But “problematic” by whose standards? By love’s? Or by what you believe is happening in the moment? Where does love want to flow? Where could you be stopping that flow, or willing it to flow elsewhere?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the Rider-Waite Smith version of the Five of Cups<\/a>, a black-clad figure hunches over three spilled cups. He is focused wholly on that experience, which is one of loss. He embodies disappointment. What he does not notice are the two cups behind him, leading him away from his circumstances and into a new experience of love that is defined — through the Two of Cups — by exchange, mirroring, the experience of what can bloom between self and other. It is healing, whereas he is caught in the grip of a grief that could be described as misplaced. What is implied is a change of perspective. By turning around, he turns in the direction of flow once more.<\/p>\n

This idea of transmuting that which is concretised into something that flows is present and active in the two outer cards that acknowledge and relate to the Five, and which offer something different — something altogether more serene, beautiful and fluid.<\/p>\n

The background in the Four of Cups — “Luxury” — echoes the grassy and mountainous landscape of the Five, but there is a lyrical, surreal, and at moments, whimsical feeling to it. It is ‘surreal’ in that it melts concrete reality, the landscape pulled in towards the blue and purple and gold-flecked spiral at centre. It is as if the spiral is brushing up against its neighbouring card, seeking to dismantle the stone block and sweep it up in its technicolor joy. There is the whimsy; I cannot take it seriously — just as it seems not to take the Five seriously, moving, moving, swirling: a loving, gentle but unequivocal undoing of what has felt so rigid.<\/p>\n

The placement of the cups themselves feel significant: one and three. The Ace — unconditional love that asks to be reached for, there as it is for the taking — and the Three of Cups: togetherness, community, celebration.<\/p>\n

And finally to the Prince of Cups. The Knight in Rider-Waite Smith versions of the tarot, the Prince is the questing spirit that is present in us when we ‘ride out’ into the world in search of something. Here, you can see what is very much on the Prince’s mind. Quite literally. What flows from him is the naked, heart-adorned body of a woman, breasts, hips and thighs, the heads of two phalluses, two vulvas. As written on the card, the Prince is the embodied experience of “desire” and “longing.” Yet both of these are received openly, rather than pursued maniacally. He is meditative. Surrounded by the night sky — suspended in the cosmos — he faces the Five of Cups, eyes closed, mouth resting with an almost imperceptible smile. He is dreaming desire into his world.<\/p>\n

The Prince is dreaming the desire that swirls in the card that holds the Five on the other side — the Four of Cups. I would suggest that it is this card that he is more aligned with. They work together, the Four melting boundaries, the Prince boundless in his imagining of his own version of love.<\/p>\n

There is something that might feel real and absolutely present at centre; and it is compelling in its density. Then there is the call and possibility of what sits outside that, working its own magic, coming from the realm of dreams (Four) and then dreamed into human form (Prince).<\/p>\n

This is a work of transformation that you are invited to, if you wish to transform what has become a source of disappointment into something that might feel far less predictable — yes, a little surreal. You have the ability to let your feelings move in a way that follows an order that is not limited to what is simply human. It is erotic, and places no dictates on the presence of a fixed structure. In there, there is the gold that leads you into the dance to your centre.<\/p>\n

Astrology\/Elemental correspondences:<\/strong>\u00a0Four of Cups (Moon in Cancer), Five of Cups (Mars in Scorpio), Prince of Cups (the airy aspect of water)<\/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 We have an all-Cups reading this week, which means that there are a lot of feelings around — and a lot of feelings about love in particular, given the messages of the three cards in front of us. However you choose to define that “love” is also how you define your experience of … 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\/76501"}],"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=76501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76501\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}