By Sarah Taylor

What make you of a Queen, and two Twos?

There is something to be said, here, of an aspect of the personality that has been made present sometime in the near past, which is bringing about change on a material level. This includes the materiality (mater-iality) of who you are — and how this transitions into change, and a regaining of equilibrium on the mental plane.

Queen of Wands, Two of Disks, Two of Swords from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig. Click on the image for a larger version.

Where are you in this? Maybe you are still in the throes of the Two of Disks.

That would be more likely: that, right now, you are not sure of where you are, of what is happening, and of where things stand. What you can know is that things will not be the same again. You, and your life, are changing in some tangible way.

The catalyst lies at the left: the emotional, watery nature of fire. She is Leo in her most queenly form. A witch in her most potent form — and when you look at her, you are looking into the mirror. In a key way, you are her, and she is you. I wonder what would happen if you were to look at the card and strike the same pose? Finger resting on your chin, coolly regarding yourself with inner fire, lips closed. But if they were to open, what would you say to yourself?

“Do you know yourself?”

Perhaps you do. Perhaps you don’t. Perhaps you think you know. What feels true when the Queen of Wands appears next to the Two of Disks is that there is a part of you that is becoming known to you, and it has the potential to rock your world. The word “change” doesn’t appear on both the Queen of Wands and the Two of Disks for nothing. No. There is a reason for this change; the fire has come through to shake things up a little — or a lot. Your creativity, your passion, your ecstasy, are calling you out.

This call is not heartless, however, because the Queen of Wands is not without heart. Her gaze may be implacable, but her exposed left breast indicates that her feelings are right there for the world to see. She is utterly unafraid to live her vulnerability along with her fire, her motherliness along with the lioness. Her Mama Lion roars are an activating force — maybe out of direct ear-shot, but they are reverberating nonetheless.

Do you know yourself? What would change if your existence were a lived-out declaration of what beats at the heart of you? Because those flames are licking right through you, baby. Can you feel them? You are them, and they are you. Can you ride the heat without losing your cool? Can you be your inner fire-keeper?

I think you can. And the reason for this is held in the relationship between all three cards, and particularly both Twos.

While red predominates with the Queen, my eye is also drawn to the spatters of green on the lower half of the card — spatters that continue onto her headdress and morph into two green ribbons that hold between them a key. This key is pointing to the Two of Disks, as if it unlocks something that sets the two Disks into motion.

In the Two of Disks, the red of the Queen is still apparent in the mauve sky behind the lower Disk. Her quality is acting behind the scenes, shifting and drawing three near-metallic arrows out of the clouds on the horizon, which then become the agents of change. They direct and hold the Disks — two magnetic, hematite spheres — in a new paradigm of relatedness.

The arrows, like the key, point to the next card as if leading my eye to a third metallic element: two swords lying horizontally, hilt-to-point. The invocation of the fiery feminine was what was needed in order to redress an imbalance and open the skies up to new possibilities.

The Two of Swords — Peace — is another card that speaks of transition: the creation of a through-point that clears the skies enough that you can journey to new land. And it looks like the journey itself could be one beautiful adventure, if you are open to moving in a way that you may not be used to, open to living with a lot more (head) space than you may be used to.

First: change. It’s the change that gets you to the space. With that space, you can choose to leave an element of your life behind that in some way has felt stuck or barren. You don’t need to be there anymore. The through-point beckons. Adventure — your passion, your heart — is calling.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Queen of Wands (the watery aspect of fire / Leo), Two of Disks (Jupiter in Capricorn), Two of Swords (Moon in Libra)

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.

By Sarah Taylor

Look at the angel in The Judgment. Do you hear what she is saying to you?

“You have a choice. One way or the other. Choose to be hemmed in and enclosed, or take a risk, and leap.”

After I drew the cards today and before turning them over, I placed the first at centre, the second to its left, the third to its right, and, looking at the central card, said out loud to myself: “This the ‘pivot point’.”

Seven of Wands, Judgement, Ten of Wands from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig. Click on the image for a larger version.

I am going to start with The Judgement, for she is the first and last word — or, rather, clarion call — in this reading.

Associated with Pluto in astrology, The Judgement in tarot is about the reclamation of Self through the resurrection of Spirit. The card directly before The World, The Judgement speaks of a rebirth into the light, a sweeping aside of the veils that have held you separate from your sense of who you are, from the world and from others.

The 20th card in the major arcana is also transpersonal. In other words, this is not simply about you; it concerns itself with how you and what happens to you are an indelible part of the whole. What happens to you also happens through you, and the effects both ripple out into the collective, and also return to you from the collective. The card asks you to see who you are, and what you are experiencing, from a higher perspective. You are no longer solitary and hidden. You are Neo in The Matrix. Except we are all Neo — no one more special than the other, no one more worthy of salvation than someone else.

It is only when you see that you cannot be separated, and that your coming to life has repercussions of which you are possibly unaware — and, what’s more — you see yourself as a unique part of what is inseparable — that you can heed the call to something greater. You are worthy; and so is everything else.

Looking at the cards as a whole, I am drawn by the colours that unite them: deep blue-black, purple, mauve and white. The darker side of the face of the angel in The Judgement is echoed in the darker shades of the Ten of Wands, or Oppression. It is the shadow. In this particular shadow, there seems to be the assumption of a burden for which there is an energetic price to pay.

By “energy” here, I mean life force. There is something that you have elected to do that is taking up a lot of space in your reserves — so much so, there is a feeling that you haven’t much space for anything else. Ten glass wands weigh heavily down on a naked figure enclosed in a box of stone.

What is that box? And why have you chosen to stand in it?

The Ten of Wands is the last numbered card in the Wands suit. It is like an existential migraine: a squeezing of the self through a high focus of this life-force in a concentrated area. You are in a metaphorical oven, the heat up, your back turned to the exit point.

Again: What is that box? And why have you chosen to stand in it?

Because this is very much about a choice that now feels like it has become an obligation. That obligation, however, is probably more out of direct cognition than something that is staring you in the face. This is not a tangible obligation — though it may also take that form — but a psychic one. It is a contract you have signed with yourself, perhaps without knowing you were even holding the pen. It might have happened a while ago — perhaps a long while ago. While your back was turned. And yet you are the one who is in the hot seat, still holding the reins, still taking the heat.

Maybe it’s time to step out of your cell of solitary confinement.

And so to the first and final card, the one to the left of The Judgement. Look at the colours and how they correspond differently. Here, there is a sense of lightness, echoed by the light that is received from the card on the face of the angel. There is a message in this; a white feather pointing the way.

The Seven of Wands speaks of valiantly vaulting over the abyss of the unknown and into — well, into The Judgement. Here, in the Seven, life force is liberated — as you are — to make that leap. The Wands rise up to meet and to usher you across. The light is the light of what was once dark coming into consciousness. You now know what you are able to do. The world on the other side beckons, and you ride on the emergence of a part of you that had been held down in the darkness.

And, thus, you find yourself looking into the eyes of an angel. One who knows you because you now know yourself that much better. And you know what you are not. You do not have to stand, hemmed in by a contract that is no longer being called in by anyone but you. Tear it up, throw it away, take a run-up if you need it.

She is waiting for you. The world is waiting for you. You are waiting for you.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Seven of Wands (Mars in Leo), Judgement (Pluto), Ten of Wands (Saturn in Sagittarius)

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.

By Sarah Taylor

In this week’s reading, the seed of the third card — the card on the right, the Six of Cups — is found in the first — the card on the left, The Magus (The Magician in the Rider-Waite Smith tarot). This feels important to note: what is to come has its roots firmly in what has just passed.

The Magus, Death, Six of Cups from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig. Click on the image for a larger version.

Because it might not be easy to hold to this idea when you start to move through the deep inner transformation of the card at centre, the Death card.

Remember: you might temporarily lose sight of perspective, shifting as you are into the underworld or cocoon in order to emerge, skin-shed; the old wintriness of your outer husk removed to reveal something altogether more colourful.

And someone altogether less alone, it seems.

The Magus is Mercury. He is the principle of action that comes after the stepping into the infinite potential of The Fool. He takes the energy of that quantum field of possibility and starts to shape it into manifest reality. In the Rider-Waite Smith version of the card, the Magician stands before a table that has on it the four suits: Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles. He has one hand pointing up towards the heavens, the other pointing down towards the earth: as above, so below.

Above The Magician’s head in the RWS card — and in this version just below his hand — is the lemniscate, or infinity sign. You, as The Magus, represent an endless mode of creation. You use the flow to form your world — this flow coming from a masculine connection with Spirit, depicted in the light that radiates from The Magus’s crown. You are creating yourself into a metamorphosis. Your mind is about to undergo a shift, moving away from something light, airy, Mercurial and in constant motion, and towards a downward movement into emotional embodiment.

But first, before embodiment, the Death card, which you are currently moving through. It might seem that the activity of The Magus is a distant memory as you immerse yourself in the sloughing off of a particular way of being. There might be a felt sense of having ‘gone to ground’. Maybe there is grief — maybe a sense of ‘not-knowing’ — at the falling away of what once felt so much a part of you. It was a part of you, indeed — and it still is, even as it dissolves, changes and reveals what you are becoming.

Again, bear in mind the phrasing: “as you immerse yourself.” Yes. You are immersing yourself. This isn’t happening to you. You are happening to yourself. Through any confusion, there is a part of you that is complicit in your own transformation. The most obvious wording on the Death card is not “death,” but “rebirth.”

And so, finally, you are reborn — into communion with the beloved, or the Beloved, or both; this may be something you experience alone, or with another. What is clear, though, no matter the nature of that communion, is that this love affair is one that you have experienced before in different ways. It might feel new but at the same time deeply familiar. You fall into the arms and embrace of a presence that feels like a home-coming. And it is passionate, surrendered, love-infused. You are filled with love. The Six of Cups is the heart-based knowing of what you only knew intellectually in The Magus. It was a whisper that has now become blood flowing through your veins, beating through your heart.

You have come around again, and you are held. Feel the warmth as you re-emerge from the chrysalis and into the light once more.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: The Magus (Mercury), Death (Scorpio), Six of Cups (Sun in Scorpio)

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.

By Sarah Taylor

So, here you are, standing on top of a derelict, bombed-out building: the Five of Swords; Defeat. You — looking at a distant star on the horizon. Or maybe you are that distant star on the horizon, a soft glow of light surrounding you. You have survived. You are very much alive. You are following a light. Your own inner light.

Nine of Cups, Five of Swords, Knight of Disks from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig. Click on the image for a larger version.

Can you hold that light to you when it looks like everything around you has been torn down, the girders exposed, bent, the walls of your experience bearing the cracks and holes of an attack that has passed, leaving you seemingly alone? But there is that light. There, are you.

Where have you come from? Ah, that’s such a different scene. Somewhere, in your past, or in the recesses of your heart, is a vision that lies so much in contrast with where you are that it may be hard to reconcile them.

The Nine of Cups is also known as “the wish card.” Take a look at it; it might be easier to grasp it, not through your mind, but through how your body and heart respond to it. There are beauty, softness, sensuality and flow. There is inspiration; there is delicacy. In it, there is a kind of heart-sung grace. The words on the card reflect this:

“Happiness,” “Deep Joy,” “Overflowing Love,” “Blessing,” “Rapture.”

The Nine of Cups is a prayer answered and reflected back. It is the light in the Five of Swords — that kernel of truth that you carry with you over the wasteland. It offers a gentle vortex into which you have the choice to let go in order to move you through your immediate circumstances and out into ones that are different.

The Nine of Cups, being of the heart as it is, has a quality to it that is not always easy to grasp and to hold to yourself. It is there; but if you try too hard to ‘make it behave’ or bend to your will, it is apt to slip through your fingers like a rainbow. How do you hold on to a rainbow?

The answer lies in the destruction under your feet. It feels paradoxical. A construct — no, a fortification devoid of that Cups energy — needed to be brought down so that you could be reunited with that grace in the Nine of Cups. A dose of reality brings it in closer. There is another way to hold that rainbow. You can’t trap it in steel and concrete — which has been your mind’s way of negotiating with the heart. You hold it by becoming it.

You are the Nine of Cups. You are Happiness.

“Everything you were looking for was right with you all along.”

Maybe you, too, had to travel to some distant, inner land to find your heart and your courage — to find the right use of mind — in order to face down what told you that you were anything but, and to come back to yourself.

What emerges from your travels is the card that you are now able to move towards: the Knight of Disks (the King of Pentacles). As the individuated adult in the suit of Earth, the Knight has made the journey through the Five of Swords in order to reunite himself with what once felt ethereal and dreamlike, which slipped through his fingers.

The Knight has grounded the Nine of Cups, and now lives it out in physical reality. Look at the Nine and the Knight as if they were side-by-side. Do you notice the correspondences? The upward-and-outward movement of the heart-and-cups infused panel at the top of the Nine and the key, coins, notes and stamps that sit over the gold circlet on the Knight’s forehead. The feathered striations that radiate down on the Nine, and the Knight’s own beard. And finally, the spiral just above centre on the Nine where the Knight’s face now appears — and that same spiral — now tangible — that seems to emanate from him.

The Knight is holding the paradox by embodying what was unable to be embodied — the supposed fantasy of the Nine. From fantasy to reality. From Oz to Kansas. He has returned from the fray a different person. He is more than he was before, because he now knows.

“I know,” he seems to say to you. “I know what it is to search for what reveals itself in the rainbow — the promise of what I knew I felt, but which eluded me and nearly abandoned me at the time where everything seemed to crumble beneath me. It, and I, are one.”

Time to tap your heels together and come home. That thing you were searching for? You are it.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Nine of Cups (Jupiter in Pisces), Five of Swords (Venus in Aquarius), Knight of Disks (the Fiery aspect of Earth)

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.

By Sarah Taylor

Last week, the Ace of Swords appeared as the card on the left of the three-card layout; this week, it is the Ace of Disks. There seems to be a ‘reaching towards’ in order to bring something into fruition — whether that has been something at the forefront of your mind, or a strange itch that you’ve somehow felt you’ve needed to scratch.

Ace of Disks, Strength, Princess of Cups from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig. Click on the image for a larger version.

This sense of an itch needing to be scratched is indicative of one of the ways an Ace can manifest. Because they are non-incarnate, they don’t take place in front of your eyes as one of the many situations or interactions depicted in the 2s to 10s. Nor are they aspects of the personality, as depicted in the Court cards. (More on that later with the Princess of Cups.)

Aces are the Alpha and Omega of their suit. Aces are the blueprint of the quality that each is designed to convey. Aces are eternal, unadulterated, never fully knowable, and exist in a parallel existence to your own. You can feel them. You can sense them. Sometimes the veil that separates you from an Ace can be so thin that it is almost ‘here’ — almost tangible. Sometimes it might reach you through an echo — or sidle up alongside you, defying your direct observation of it.

But it is there. Oh yes.

The way the Ace of Disks is making itself known is hinted at in the card illustration. A lone figure stands on a rocky promontory, looking out into open space. The night seems cool — chilly, even, given the snowy peaks in the middle-ground. Maybe that’s why the star in the distance seems so close: that crisp air bringing a definition to its rays, which stretch out in fine light-strokes from its centre.

And so the figure stands, looking at this celestial body in front of him. There is a reciprocity between person and star — both emitting a corona of light. I wonder if his own inner light is resonating with the pulse of light he both receives from, and transmits to, it. That star is so far away, and yet there is a connection.

What breaks my heart open when I look at this picture today is the spherical, hematite-like disk embedded the rock beneath the figure’s feet — as if we are privy to a secret that lies, as yet, unrevealed. That secret speaks something like this to me today:

You might think it is impossible. You might believe you have to reach far beyond the stretch of your most capable thoughts, your widest embrace, to find what it is that you’re after. But, listen here now: what you are looking for? You are it, and it is you. It isn’t ‘out there’. It is most assuredly right ‘in here’. Right under your feet. You have spent so much time and expended so much energy wishing on a star, you have forgotten that you are also that star.

This realisation unlocks something. This ability to own something that feels distant brings you into a new and infinitely more embodied and instinctual experience. You move from the ethereal to the visceral. Or you can … because you start to own it!

The words on Strength — the 8th card of the Major Arcana — start to define how it is that you are able to draw the Ace of Disks down into material, physical, visceral reality:

“manifold creative talents,” “power,” “integration of animal forces,” “passion (emotion).”

Disks are the densest of the suits, and so they speak to what you experience with your sense of touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Strength, embodied by the maiden and the lion, encompasses all of these. When you are dancing with the Strength archetype, you are both innocent and animalistic; you revel in your sensate experience. To quote Steve Vai on his album Passion and Warfare:

“We may be human, but we are still animals.”

You are safe, and protected. Not by some outer force, but by your natural discernment of what serves you, and what doesn’t. When you are animal-like, you are tapped into your bodily wisdom. You, and the Earth, are one.

The outcome of this is one that is, funnily enough, not strictly bound to the ground at all. Cups as the tarot representatives of emotions are less dense than Disks. They are your watery nature — the heart that beats inside of the human-animal, which, when liberated, feels deeply, expresses naturally, and allows you to open your arms into the mystery of life and love.

From the Ace of Disks — beautiful but, at first glance, out of touch — you have the ability to look closer — and to reach nearer — to home, to find something that is not only very much in your grasp, but which also offers you a means of resting into self-generated ecstasy and taking a risk.

You do this by diving like the Princess (Page) of Cups, open-armed, and into a sky that embraces you as much as you are willing to embrace it.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Ace of Disks (the pure, limitless potential of Disks/Earth), Strength (Leo), Princess of Cups (the Earthy aspect of Water)

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.

By Sarah Taylor

This week, after an all-Majors reading last week, you’re back into the day-to-day experiences of life. Well — for the most part: the Ace of Swords signals something that is available to you, if not if not immediately apparent. As with all Aces, it isn’t going to fall into your lap as much as you will need to reach out and help yourself to what it offers. Yes: you will need to help your self.

Ace of Swords, Two of Swords, Five of Cups from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig. Click on the image for a larger version.

And because the reading returns you to the quotidian, you’re also in the realm of what is tangible (though, again, keep an eye on that Ace, which will be more subtle) — so here you’ll really be able to feel what’s going on, and to apply some mental equilibrium to those feelings.

When you look at the three cards in front of you, imagine you’re looking at a seesaw. You have the two cards on the outside, at each end of the seesaw, and then the card at centre as the fulcrum. I’m going to start first with the card on the right, then the card on the left, and finally that point of balance in the middle.

Imagine what it is going to take in your life to get this seesaw to work when you have what you have seated on the right — namely, a bloody big rock. How the hell do you manage to get anything moving — how do you manage to move forward in your life — with the Killjoy-Cube-of-Disappointment that has just whumped! itself down into your life, obliterating the path you were quite keen on taking? That cube even seems to have a voice in this reading. It’s sitting there, practically crossing its arms, uttering that one phrase guaranteed to stop you in your tracks:

“I am so disappointed in you.”

The heart becomes heavy, the inertia of your situation weighs your world down around you. You see little else but this cube. In fact — is this your heart? Is that what you’re looking at when you see it? Is this the shape and inner texture of your feelings? Or maybe something is beating at the centre, if only you could get to it. But how do you move it? How do you get that seesawing momentum back into your life — a life where change is inevitable, yes, but where things move through and move on out because of that inevitability?

The paradox is that even if that rock is immovable, it is not. That seesaw is designed to balance; and here, on the other side, is what you currently have at your fingertips to negotiate a path through Disappointment.

The Ace of Swords is associated with the element of Air, while Cups are associated with Water. Swords are also the masculine counterpart to the Cups’ feminine. Swords represent the mental plane — your thoughts — and the Ace, being the infinite aspect of its suit, is “insight” in its most clear form. Obviously, as with all Aces, they cannot exist in their entirety here on Earth. However, we can avail ourselves of their gifts and use them to the best of our abilities.

This means that what you have available to you, to use in accordance with your means, your imagination and your abilities, is insight. Discernment. Wisdom.

If you look at both cards on either side of the fulcrum — the Five of Cups and the Ace of Swords — you will see that there are some key similarities to the two of them. Both sword and block sit on paths; both have vertical planes; both have mountain ranges in the background; both have blue skies. However, with the Five of Cups, that sky is ‘creased’ — as if there is an interference in that clear thinking because of the sheer magnitude of what is in front of you.

You know what I want to do when I look at the Ace of Swords? I want to take it in the way that I know how, and start using its diamond blade in the service of revealing what that rock really is underneath all of the rough edges and the seemingly impenetrable coldness. I want to find the beating, red heart of Cups. I want to liberate it from the layers and layers of fossilised feelings that are so effective in their own way, because they protect what’s inside as well as hide it.

That voice keeps talking: “I am so disappointed in you.” You can listen; or you can see it for what it is: a voice that belongs to the past, not the present. The Ace is there to cut away what still has a grip but which is so old that it is calcified and unfeeling.

Insight. Discernment. Head balanced healthily with heart. Head to reveal the heart. The Ace is offering inner vision to get to the truth of what is going on, and the truth of who you are. You can take it. It is yours to wield.

When that happens, things start moving, and the card at centre — the Two of Swords — holds the shape of that movement; a transition into blue skies towards the horizon and a different landscape that rises over it.

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Aces are significant cards to me personally. As a tarot writer, they hold the promise and potential for the right and righteous balance of creativity, heart, intellect and skill that I can then choose to draw from. Aces are also symbols of initiation, and it was an Ace — the Ace of Wands — that initiated me as a writer for Planet Waves by accompanying my first article nearly five years ago.

In Summer 2010, Eric took a chance on me and my tarot abilities and invited me to write a tarot column for this site. In essence, it was through his invitation that an Ace was held out to me, and I chose to take it. I have been ever grateful for this — not simply because of the opportunity to write, but also to participate in a community that has both helped me to discover more of who I am at heart, and supported me through some significant changes. The writers that we have here embody the Aces in all their forms, and I am privileged to be counted among them.

If you have considered taking out a Planet Waves membership, and haven’t yet done so, then this is my invitation to you to consider again. The site relies on its subscribers to keep this great content going, and has refused, time and again, to bow to pressure to derive revenue from third-party advertising.

If you’re interested, you can subscribe here. If you’re interested but you feel it’s a little beyond your means right now, then contact Chelsea at the number at the top of this page and see if there’s a plan to be made — and there frequently is.

With many thanks.

Sarah

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Ace of Swords (the pure, limitless potential of Swords/Air), Two of Swords (Moon in Libra), Five of Cups (Mars in Scorpio)

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.

By Sarah Taylor

On Sunday, March 1, it was pointed out to me by a self-described “math head” commenter that there is a .022% chance of getting three Major Arcana cards in a three-card reading; and I’m taking her word for it.

Today, the reading has defied the odds again in the form of another three Major Arcana cards. Not only that but, whereas last time it featured sequential neighbours The Star (XVII) and The Moon (XVIII), today it features the next card in the sequence, The Sun (XIX). Further, there are also another two sequential neighbours in The Wheel of Fortune (X) and Justice (XI).

The Wheel of Fortune, Justice, The Sun from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig. Click on the image for a larger version.

Last time, I wrote that “an all-majors reading can have a ‘behind-the-scenes’ quality to it — as if you can feel that there’s definitely something going down but, like a roll of thunder, its origin and direction may not be entirely clear. Although the thunder itself is both heard and felt in your body.”

Baby, that thunder is getting louder. That thunder is rolling outside your door. When it knocks, and you open (and if you don’t, be aware that it comes bearing a compassionate battering ram) be prepared for it to roll through your comfy little home, shaking the dust from the curtains, the spiders from the ceilings, and the shadows from the corners.

That “light of consciousness” that was “temporarily, deliberately, obscured,” which I wrote about in that article five weeks ago? It’s moving into town at high noon and it’s asking you to meet it on Main Street.

But you’re not going to be facing off against some guy in a black Stetson — not literally, anyway. You’re going to be meeting you. All that beauty that you’ve kept hidden in the darkness from yourself and others. You’ll both be standing there, under the Sun, in a divine meeting that has been engineered through the momentum of destiny (The Wheel of Fortune) and the rebalancing of karma (Justice).

There are no baddies. There are no goodies. There are no guns and there is no fight. There is, at its most simple, liberation: in that meeting, under The Sun, an aspect of the Self is revealed. It is a triumph of illumination.

Let’s go back and have a look at the journey you’ve been taking in some area of your life to get here.

The foundation of this shift is shift itself: The Wheel of Fortune. Corresponding to Jupiter, the planet of expansion and protection, The Wheel, too, speaks of expansion. It is the expansion that happens when there is a change in your outer (and, very probably, inner) world, which has the result of thrusting you into something new. And so your horizons widen. The thing to look out for here is — much like Jupiter — the idea of too much. Too much movement can be the result of a lack of centring. And when the wheel turns, it tends to serve us better — or, at the very least, to feel better — if we remain close to the centre.

From the position of The Wheel of Fortune, it’s likely that this shift has already taken place. You might still be a little dizzy from it, but you’re now into the territory of Justice. With those first rolls of thunder as the wheel rolled forward, you have been brought before the blindfolded figure of Justice herself. Her lightsabre is neither drawn nor active, but used to steady her arm so that she can balance the scales accurately.

This is not a moment where you are found wanting and asked to pay the price. A much misunderstood card, Justice does not pronounce you either guilty or innocent. Not at all.

Justice is a recalibration of karma based on the movement you have just experienced. What is discarded is associated with what you have left behind; what is added is what you are moving into; what remains is the bridge between the two. And, as this happens, so there is an unveiling of more light: the distant stars constellated behind the Wheel become light-edged waves behind the head of Justice. The torn-out notepaper — nearly a full back-drop in the Wheel — drops lower, resting under the arms of Justice.

And then, finally, that paper drops further, and further still, as the Sun breaks through in the third card.

The Sun interests me today because of the drawings on the two pieces of notepaper. On the first, we have the Sun from the Rider-Waite Smith version of the card, and on the second we have, very faintly, the child riding the horse from that same version. However, going back to the first piece of paper, we also have two figures, both of whom are reaching out to each other. I feel that this ties in with the previous card, Justice, which is associated with Libra, the sign of relatedness.

Just as the two scales are brought into balance in Justice, so the two child-like figures have a visual correspondence in The Sun. Blood rains down from the Sun’s rays. This is life-blood. The illuminating force of this celestial body revivifies and unites everything in its light. And so there is a reuniting of one person with another, one aspect of the Self with another, one aspect of the inner-child with another.

As adjustments are being made, can you feel that light starting to reverberate? It might get a little hot and sweaty out there at high noon, for sure, but it’s the one show-down you probably won’t want to miss. Those rays are reaching out to you. Maybe you can see what happens when you reach back.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: The Wheel of Fortune (Jupiter), Justice (Libra), The Sun (Sun)

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.