Today's question: what's happening?
(Rider-Waite-Smith deck)
Significator (me): Queen of Pentacles
Card 1 (the situation): 3 of Wands
Card 2 (obstacles): 5 of Swords
Card 3 (the ideal resolution): 2 of Swords
Card 4 (the questioner's foundation): Justice (inverted)
Card 5 (the immediate past, that which the questioner leaves behind): 2 of Pentacles
Card 6 (the immediate future, that which is now coming into action): 6 of Cups
Card 7 (the questioner's attitude and relationship to the issue): 6 of Wands
Card 8 (the questioner's home, family, and surrounding environment): 2 of Cups
Card 9 (hopes and fears): King of Swords
Card 10 (what will come): The Fool.
I stand on the shore watching my ships, carrying my merchandise, off to sea or coming in to harbor, but whatever, they're on their way (3 of wands). My main obstacle: someone else has got all the power (5 of swords). Unless that smug blond fellow with all the swords is me, and my main obstacle is actually that I have all the power (unlikely). The highest ideal and goal I have, the thing I want but lack, is, and I quote from the handy manual in the deck, "conformity and the equipoise which it suggests, courage, friendship, concord in a state of arms, affection, intimacy" (2 of swords). But I am either working from impaired judgment (Justice inverted) or my position is simply unfair. Hard to tell. What I am leaving behind, what is immediately past, is represented by a young man playing with two pentacles, the card of gaiety and recreation, but also of "news and messages in writing" (2 of pentacles). The card representing my immediate future confuses me: two children gathering flowers in a nostalgic tableau, "a card of the past and of memories, looking back, as—for example—on childhood, happiness, enjoyment, but coming rather from the past: things that have vanished" (6 of cups). What is my relationship to all this? I ride in triumph, represented by "a laurelled horseman" who is "expectation crowned with its own desire, the crown of hope" (6 of wands). What is the influence of my surroundings, my friends and family? Ah, look at this one. "Love, passion, friendship, affinity, union, concord, sympathy" and curiously enough (as in utterly obscurely) what the manual describes as "that which nature is sanctified" (2 of cups). One assumes they mean "has sanctified." What do I hope and fear for? "Whatsoever arises out of the idea of judgment and all its connexions—power, command, authority, militant intelligence, law, offices of the crown, and so forth." Authority, power? Interesting. Or one could take the dull, literal, overly romantic point of view and see the card as a person (King of Swords). The final card is the strangest, because up until now the only interloper from the Major Arcana has been Justice on its head, indicating that there is something in my foundation awry, and leading me to believe that while everything else occurring now is transitional, not a major crisis, and on its way to somewhere else, the problem with my foundation is something bigger and more lasting and in need of direct address. The final card is a card of radical innocence, in this deck's description standing in for "folly, mania, extravagance, intoxication, delirium, frenzy, bewrayment" (and I like that word, bewrayment) but the manual oversimplifies, for I know from prior reading that this card represents the most drastic new beginning, the babe washed clean, irrational intuitive joy, his face turned to heaven but his foot perilously near the cliff (the Fool). All possibilities, which looks like folly but is the deepest wisdom in the deck.
1 comments:
Hey, you're writing here again! Cool.
I love the tarot. I love The Fool too, what an awesome card. :-)
I don't have a deck now but I did in high school and I studied it a lot. I used to draw and paint those Jungian archetypes a lot too which fixed them in my mind.
One thing I think it did was give me a system of symbols that sometimes come back to me at the oddest times. They start to intertwine with everything once you get to know them.
I totally believe in that idea of the "collective unconscious" and that those symbols are alive, and dynamic. I think that there is an underlying reality to them that both interacts with and is seperate from this "reality" we normally live in, and you can tap into it and it's very fascinating.
(Also, as an aside, I really love even more the I Ching. That sucker is amazing. The things it says are just astonishing in terms of the clarity and specificity of the results. It's a little scary, actually. Someday I'd like to use it with the yarrow sticks, since yarrow the plant is a friend of mine. )
I really find these days that my idea of "divination" has changed. Rather than useing some system, I feel I just communicate with other living things that normally are considered to be not-conscious or intelligent (plants, animals, a sense of "place", etc) and get messages from them about possibilities, probabilities - since the future is not static or fixed.
The communication itself is more interesting to me than whatever messages I get (even though those messages are amazing at times). It's the process of connection that is important to me. I think this is a way of connecting to "God" in a sense. It's once way, anyway.
Sorry for rambling on about my hippie ideas. :-) Have fun with your cards!
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