There are many different schools of thought in tarot work, just as there are many branches of psychology, counselling and other talking therapies. Some tarot readers trust their own psychic abilities or their intuition to connect with the cards. Others feel that they have contact with Spirit. While some, like me, take a Jungian approach, seeing the tarot cards both as a key to unlock thoughts and memories hidden deep in the subconscious, and a channel through which we share our ancestral knowledge.
A Three Card Reading for the Day Ahead
Creating A Tarot Space - holding space for the unconscious to speak
Tarot Speaks Your Language
Using Essence and Guidance Cards in a Tarot Reading
The Moon in Tarot
The Death Card in Tarot
The Four of Wands
This card speaks of freedom and the joy to be found when we break away from old ideas or what is expected of us and embrace all possibilities. It tells us that finding ourselves and celebrating who we are and what we have achieved with family and friends is a way to fulfilment.
When people feel that society makes collective decisions that disregard the unique needs of the individual, their feelings of alienation are compounded by illness, poverty, isolation.
Tarot, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Pansychism
Are you wondering what quantum mechanics could possibly have to do with tarot? You are probably not alone. And frankly most people (including tarot readers) would not even be interested. Feel free to skip this blog post. However, if like me you are always curious about the ways of the universe and look for explanations, not least for the astounding results of a tarot reading, I think Heisenberg had it down.
The Pentacles in Tarot
Pentacles are of the element Earth. They are the manifestation into the material world of our hopes, fears, dreams, and desires. They are the world of our senses; our bodies and the spaces we inhabit.
Walking in an ancient forest we can hear and smell millennia of seasons beneath our feet. Sitting beside the ocean we can watch and listen to the eternal backwards and forwards, breathing, sucking, and flowing motion of the waves. Feeling the soft sand or the hard, accepting warmth of pebbles beneath us, we can allow our heartbreak, our anger, our disappointment and our love to be released into the eternal life-giving waters.
The Chariot
The Chariot can be a difficult card to interpret. At number 7 in the Major Arcana, it follows The Lovers which is a time when we learned to make our own decisions and chose to leave our childhood behind to step out into the world as individuals. How do we leave the love and security of our family, the community that has nurtured us, to begin this journey of self-discovery?
The Traditional Trumps of the Major Arcana
The 22 cards of the traditional Major Arcana are the symbolic story of The Hero or Heroine as they take the journey of self-discovery from birth to full realization of who they are and their place in the world. It is a story as old as humankind, repeated in tales from ancient Sufi texts, the Hindu Vedas, Buddhist stories, ancient Greek, Roman and Norse legends and countless oral traditions from The Old Testament to Native American songs handed down through generations to explain the world and how to live our best lives.
The Seven of Cups
The dreamy, imaginary, watery world of the 7 of Cups reflects the power of our fantasies to take us away from the real world. Imagination is a wonderful gift but sometimes it can carry us away. Here we see a lost soul – the figure is a black silhouette – caught up in their daydreams and confused about what they think will make them genuinely happy. This card reminds me of a young contestant being interviewed on a music talent show who, when asked what she wanted from the competition replied, “I just want to be famous.”
The Hanged Man and the Pandemic
The Hanged Man is one of the 3 cards at the centre of the 22 cards of the Major Arcana. The Wheel of Fortune 10, Justice 11, and The Hanged Man 12 – they all represent the mid-point in our journey from ‘birth’ (in the physical sense, of our spiritual growth, and of our personal development) towards what Jung called ‘self-actualisation’ or becoming whole or fulfilled.
The Three of Wands Reversed.
The Threes in Tarot, overseen by The Empress, the archetype of our deepest human experience of love and creativity, are expressions of the feminine principle of the perceptive and transformational power of love. The Empress is Yin, the receptive, the womb through which all Souls must pass. Here in the Three of Wands we see The Empress expressed through feelings, our drive, our passions about ourselves and our world.
