By Sarah Taylor

Following on from last week’s reading, we have the Three of Swords at centre once more. This time, though, the context is different and so the energy is different. It is as if a layer has been peeled away, and this layer lies underneath — the next story to be told, the next transmutational focus.

There is still a second Swords card, but here, instead of the Eight of Swords, we have the King of Swords. He is the mature human, masculine embodiment of Ace energy. The historical figure I return to time and again with the King of Swords is that of Solomon: discernment, truth, wise compassion.

The King’s posture is upright, but at ease in spite of the heft of the blade. It can be used for battle, yes. The King, as Solomon, knows when that time is called for. That he is holding the sword in the hand that is further from the Three, and that the blade is slanted away from it, suggests that this is not the time to focus on a battle over emotional real estate — which is really a battle over something which can be wounded, but not owned: love.

Behind the King, the back of his throne depicts butterflies as symbols of transformation, crescent moons which bring a sense of the feminine as well as the cycles of nature, and figures that might be angelic or human. All of these stand in contrast to the hardness of the stone from which they are carved and the set of the King’s jaw — while his eyes remain soft. This feels like an exhortation to find the balance inherent in the beliefs we hold, and the actions we take based on them.

King of Swords, Three of Swords, Four of Cups from the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck, created by A E Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. Click on the image for a larger version.

Truth is an action as well as a concept. The King knows when to act with the blade’s edge, and when to use it as a means to see and to understand. What the King of Swords knows is that this understanding can only start with the self. He is the human manifestation of the journey of the swords through its suit; he has experienced everything and come out wiser than he went in.

Unlike in the Three of Swords, which are embedded blade-down in the heart of a heart, all three blades vying for a piece of the flesh, the King holds his sword up in front of him, in the air to which it belongs. His action seems to work to oppose the energy of the Three, his look to us saying:

“This is how to wield a sword — with authority, with a light touch, working together with what it has to offer. It is the blade of insight.”

In the Three of Swords, the insight is lost to conflict.

As with the reading from last week, we have an association with the three swords at centre and three other objects in the final card — this time, three cups. Cups precede swords in the tarot, and from this is implied the un-layering that I referred to earlier. We are no longer in the realm of wounding thoughts and the self-imposed psychological barriers that we build around us. We are in heart territory, land of emotions and the unconscious. In this, it seems, we are getting closer to our depths, a place where we are more open to receive something different.

In the Four of Cups, we have the three cups on the ground in front of the youthful figure, who sits under a tree. He, like the woman in the Eight of Swords, is closed off. This closing off nevertheless is softer. He is not blindfolded, but rather his eyes are cast down. He is not encircled by swords, but rather by his own arms and legs. The puddled barrenness of an empty landscape is now green, the sky blue.

But he is still not seeing the whole picture.

What he’s not seeing is the the fourth cup, which closely resembles the Ace of Cups, carried in as it is by a hand emanating from a cloud. There it is in front of him, offering itself to him. The Ace embodies the energy of its suit as pure potential; it is love as an expression of the divine, without bounds or condition.

As beings limited to form and living in a world of contrast and contradiction, we are not able to contain the Ace fully. But we can choose to express it in the highest form available to us. And in the Four of Cups it is there for us to draw from if we can hold it in awareness. It can free us from the fetters that we find in the Three of Swords; the King as guardian of our thoughts is demonstrating this, by finding a different way of working with them.

To paraphrase a quote from A Course in Miracles, when we can remove the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence — in spite of every sensation of fear or disillusionment that wants to tell us a different story — we can move towards something closer to the truth in our hearts.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: King of Swords (the fiery aspect of air), Three of Swords (Saturn in Libra), Four of Cups (Moon in Cancer)

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

What do you feel when you see these cards? Tell me. What do you feel? Once you’ve identified your feelings, how about this: what was the thought on which your feelings were predicated? And how were you feeling before you had the thought? Was there a significant shift in how you were feeling before you saw the reading, and how you felt afterwards?

If so, then perhaps you have come away with a greater sense of the power that your thoughts about what you see have in affecting your perception of reality.

The Tower, Three of Swords, Eight of Swords from the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck, created by A E Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. Click on the image for a larger version.

Thoughts create beliefs — a belief being a thought that has been repeated to the point where it isn’t as immediately open to enquiry. It can become entrenched like the grooves of a record, which is only capable of playing the same song, over and over again.

If that song is a song of fear, one that drowns out your connection to what lies at the very heart of you and separates you from your Self, then you have a choice. You can stick with the song you know — predictable, familiar, conjuring equally predictable and familiar feelings. Or you can see the song for what it is and the effect it has on you each time you get it out and play it. When you can do that, your options expand and you open yourself to freedom.

Take a look at the cards again. It may be that all is not what it at first seems.

On the left there is The Tower, in the centre the Three of Swords, and on the right the Eight of Swords: one major arcana card, which points to an archetypal experience, followed by two cards that describe the thoughts about that experience.

The Tower lies at the foundation of the reading — it has already happened in one form or another. When The Tower has been activated in our lives, we live through an upheaval over which we have little or no control. It occurs when a structure we have built — whether literal or metaphorical — has moved so far out of integrity with our essential selves that it can no longer exist in its current form.

The soul seeks freedom and creativity, and it cannot live fully in the confines of an inflexible and constricting ivory tower. In a misguided attempt to create a place of safety, where we crown ourselves kings over our lives, we find out sooner or later that the ivory becomes grey and lifeless, the skies surrounding it rendered black and without a source of light.

Thus we are overthrown by a higher authority that sees beyond the walls we’ve constructed around us: the divine breaks into consciousness with full impact. When the lightning strikes, it is the lightning of the transpersonal. What falls releases an element of the psyche that has been trapped or isolated by our actions, however well-intentioned, and the energy to the card will very often be felt collectively as well as personally.

In the second card, the foundation of The Tower is given its context — that of relationship. The Three of Swords is typically a love triangle of one form or another, whether personal, familial, professional, or the divided allegiances of communities, governments and cultures. Remember that Swords are thoughts, though — not emotions and not material reality. In the Three of Swords, we witness the belief that we can lay claim to love in the face of perceived competition. By asserting ownership over something that cannot be controlled, we strike to the heart of the love itself. We are not the victims as much as love is. Our limiting thoughts have wounded the very thing we wanted to have; the skies weep with us.

And so to the Eight of Swords. Looking at the swords around the bound and blindfolded figure, there are three swords at the left of the picture, a reflection of the Three of Swords. The figure is turned towards them, aware of their presence, but she cannot see the reality of her circumstances. This demonstrates an inability to see fully, or to recognise that, although the swords — her thoughts — feel familiar, what she is encountering is in fact different.

The Three of Swords is resonating. It has started to play its song, one that she has known before. Yet the song is in her mind; it is not an emotional or physical reality. If she were to exercise her right to freedom, she could remove her blindfold and see the threat for what it is: static blades, unmanned by others, points embedded in the ground. Weapons of her imagination.

Astrologically, we are entering the energy of the grand water trine now, which stretches over the next season and beyond. Water in tarot is the domain of the Cups suit, and it represents both the emotions and the unconscious.

When we move into the deeper waters of our psyche, our conscious mind can interpret this sense of fluidity as a threat, and it throws up all of the thought patterns that have become entrenched as a way of defending against it. Thus we meet the Cups energy with Swords. We try to think ourselves out of a sensation that asks for no-thought. We do this by running tried and tested thought patterns, because that is what our mind defaults to. We bring out our old records and we play them.

But our feeling natures work differently. They move with the beat of our hearts; they are attuned to a wisdom that transcends thought. The old patterns no longer apply. All the old patterns do is to keep us in the landscape of the Eight of Swords: blind to our power, trapped in the shallows while the sea is waiting a little further beyond to welcome us.

Freedom is right in front of you, if you are able to see your prison for what it is. It is the prison of your thoughts and your beliefs, and what you tell yourself based on them. What has happened in the past only continues to happen in the ideas you have about it. Look at the thoughts that hold you hostage, bring them out into the open and talk about them, and disarm them.

Be prepared to see another way, and another way is open to you.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: The Tower (Mars), Three of Swords (Saturn in Libra), Eight of Swords (Jupiter in Gemini)

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

“Once you free your mind about the concept of … being ‘correct’, you can do whatever you want. So, nobody told me what to do, and there was no preconception of what to do.”

— Giovanni Giorgio, songwriter and producer

The reading today is unambiguous: the events from the eclipse period and their effects are still at work in the psyche. You are being encouraged not to turn away from what was revealed to you, and to follow the call of what is yet to emerge into full consciousness, even as the land of The Moon seems alien to your thinking, logical mind. Your thoughts — and here, specifically, thoughts that are enmeshed with fear — are not the focus. The Moon, by its presence at centre, is asking you to acknowledge your fears, and to shift your attention to meet with what feels right in the depths of you. It is painting its desire on the canvas of your heart.

Ten of Swords, The Moon, Nine of Swords from the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck, created by A E Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. Click on the image for a larger version.

How to bring what The Moon is asking to be manifested to light? The card itself points this out in the form of a pathway, which runs between the two towers in the background, which I see as being associated with the Ten of Swords — where you have just come from — and the Nine of Swords — what might potentially re-emerge as a result of that experience.

The Ten of Swords suggests a time of hitting rock-bottom. It is the card of inevitable surrender to a circumstance, whereupon you discover in your prone position that the sky in the distance is clearing. What has happened is done, and the sacrifice you endured was what you needed to go through in order to emerge on the other side with a new perspective.

Now, as you move into uncharted territory, there might be some fear about the re-emergence of something in the Ten of Swords that you know only too well. The Nine of Swords is the card of thought as a mode of self-injury. It represents a deeply engrained belief that has the power to hold you to ransom and thus to isolate you.

Know this, however. The power of the Nine of Swords lies in the power you give to it. When you understand this, you are able to see that your beliefs are a matter of choice. And in that understanding we can all make the courageous choice of taking another path — the pathway that strikes out in a new direction.

The Sun radiates. It is action-orientated. It represents the conscious, which is more readily accessible to the intellect. The Moon works in a different way. Its light is reflected and therefore it is passive. It asks for receptivity rather than activity. It asks that you still the chatter. It asks that you embrace your creature-self, which is more adept at walking through the shadows (think how much better a dog or a jackal can see in the darkness).

Often, we are tempted to avoid The Moon because it isn’t fully understandable. What can happen when we enter the wilds is that we can try to explain it by falling back on prior experience — the Hindu notion of sanskara. There’s your Nine and Ten of Swords. The Moon is bringing you face to face with thought patterns and asking for some deep work around the releasing of those that no longer work for you or serve your highest purpose.

Choose differently. Ask for the help you need to see what you cannot see, and to look at what is so close to you that you hadn’t considered it wasn’t a part of you. Choose the unknown, choose your intuition, your feeling body, a path that is hazy and indistinct, but which calls to you wildishly. Be patient. Above all, be gentle and loving with yourself. This wildish connection is feminine, of the earth, feeling- and body-based, tuned to the world of Spirit; it moves in its own rhythms. It exhorts you in a strange tongue. Learn this language and you learn a new way of relating to your thoughts, to yourself, to others, and to your life.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Ten of Swords (Sun in Gemini), The Moon (Pisces), Nine of Swords (Mars in Gemini)

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

Whoa there, tiger! Before you go rushing off, sword drawn, ready to make your conquest, why not let these questions compassionately penetrate the membrane of your consciousness:

“Am I headed in the right direction? And what am I running from?”

Knight of Swords, Five of Cups, The Moon from the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck, created by A E Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. Click on the image for a larger version.

There is no coincidence that this is the second appearance of The Moon in the triple eclipse period that has taken place over the last four weeks.

The first eclipse was a lunar eclipse on April 25/26; the second a solar eclipse on May 9/10; the third a lunar eclipse that took place May 24/25 — in other words this weekend.

The first time The Moon card appeared during this period, on May 5, I wrote:

If we can let go of our fear … and accept a period where not everything is clear, where it is best to travel light and remain flexible, where details are obscured, and where there is an ‘edge’ to our experience that is jagged and chaotic, then what these three creatures [jackal, dog and crustacean] bring to us is contact with something that has a particular kind of wisdom.

Yes, it isn’t rational, and it is impervious to our need to analyse, categorise and understand. It is nevertheless an integral part of us and one that we often disown or ignore because it plays by different rules. …

Thus the Moon becomes a gift — the potential for something to become manifest.

The time is ripe for you to stop racing ahead — to stop your thoughts racing too — and move within to discover and embody fully this gift while the power of the three eclipses is only just beginning to take shape. The suggestion here is not to be side-tracked by a need to embark on a crusade that would have you rushing from pillar to post, in attack mode. “If I just get in here fast enough, then everything will fall into place.” “If I get out into the world, show them who I am, then I’ll get places.”

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