Both the written and audio readings for the beautiful 2016 annual edition, Vision Quest, are now immediately available. Order all 12 signs at a great value or choose your individual signs. You may access written and audio excerpts from the Vision Quest main page.
By Sarah Taylor
Okay. Something is going on somewhere in your life, whether directly to you or as an event that you’re now aware of, that is testing you. It may be edging you well beyond the line that you consider to be the outer boundary of your comfort zone. It may be far from comfortable — a haranguing and overbearing dissonance. This is the card at the centre of today’s reading: the Seven of Swords.
Alchemy, Seven of Swords, Two of Stones from the Haindl Tarot deck, created by Hermann Haindl. Click on the image for a larger version.
As always with tarot, however, every problem has a solution, every bitter encounter has a balancing antidote. Readings are nothing if not supremely practical.
Here, the antidote is two-fold, and comes in the form of the cards that flank the Seven of Swords: Alchemy (also known as “Temperance” or “Art”) on the left, and the Two of Stones (Pentacles) on the right. They are a complementary pairing, working less visibly than the Seven of Swords, behind the scenes.
The three cards together are a reminder that conflict-as-distraction can be a compelling and effective way of maintaining a status quo that feeds off those who feel disempowered enough not to do anything about it. Let me say that again another way: if you are feeling “uselessness,” it’s not a side-effect of what’s happening — it is the purpose for what’s happening.
This conflict may be an external one between two parties, or between you and someone or something else. Or it may very well be an act of sabotage that you are playing on yourself — it’s just that that part of you has managed to get away with it. Until now, that is. Because now you can see it, clear as day, in the card in front of you at centre. When I look at the Seven of Swords, I get a visceral feeling that can only be described as squirrelly. There is a weakening discomfort that writhes in my stomach — like iron butterflies. If you’re feeling that somewhere in your life, then perhaps this reading both offers a spotlight so that you can identify it, and points to how you extricate yourself from it.
This extrication is a subtle one. This is not a situation where you go in, sword drawn, with a loud rallying cry. (Not least because it may be you on the other side of that battle line, too.) Nope. Enough with the warring, the belligerent rhetoric, the stinging words, the judgements — all niftily concocted to keep you on the back foot. To fight is to identify with the Seven of Swords; it’s more of the same.
What you need to do is to perform an act of magic — alchemy, in fact. You do this by holding a paradox. Your task, if you want it, is to find an equilibrium between two different ideas that appear to have no resolution.
Carl Jung said that he didn’t work with people under 40. One of the reasons for this, he said, is that they did not have sufficient ego strength to look inside. The ego has to be defeated, the subject humbled, before they are able to do the great work of inner alchemy. Another reason is one connected to this: when we are younger, we want to solve paradoxes, not hold them. A younger ego doesn’t like that squirrelly feeling of non-resolution. It wants control; it wants to be in charge. It resists mystery, it resists not-knowing, it resists being unable to square that circle.
Here, you are in a position to work your magic by allowing that circle to exist alongside that square. This means not moving into the conflict in order to defeat it in the same way it’s being waged; nor is it about identifying with it so fully that you can’t step back to see that there is space around it. It is this space that you can perhaps allow to draw your interest.
It might be something that doesn’t quite sit with the fighting — a part that is not interested in joining in.
It might be that you can feel something present that is not the Seven of Swords, but which is in some way connected to it.
There may be an alliance that you can seek — a form of co-operation or a partnership with other/s — that builds something alongside the Seven of Swords. Not in reaction to it, nor to address it directly. This thing offers an alternative that doesn’t play by the same rules. I’d like to write that it’s a “game-changer,” but what you’ll be creating is more like a quantum shift: it takes it out of the game entirely. No more game.
Or, rather, no more games.
There is the possibility of harmony at a time when harmony may seem entirely impossible. Harmony is there, though. It is accessible through that alchemy, which is a state of holding the impossible while not trying to solve it, and simultaneously being receptive to what else is arising around you that feels better — far better than this old, stale story that’s taken centre stage in a part of your awareness for long enough. Magic seems to me like a far more exciting option.
Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Alchemy (Sagittarius), Seven of Swords (Moon in Aquarius), Two of Stones (Jupiter in Capricorn)
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.
I just had an absurd image for the Seven of Swords: the fish-slapping dance from Monty Python.
Certainly there’s an element of pointlessness surrounding the battle in question. It’s like an OCD ritual, or a grudge held long after the real anger has dissipated. When we’re questioning the point of a habit, feeling enervated and disempowered by it, that’s likely a sign it needs to be dropped for something healthier and pleasanter.
Remember the center XX Sun of last week. Well that was me, feeling free, Saturday at sunset riding my friend’s horse. Although with clothes on (unfotunately). Have not ridden in 15+ years, and I thought he was kidding when he intially mentioned it was one of his Stallions. After the ride it became clear, no joke, he was mate to the pregnant mare. It was a great weekend culminating in energy flow, with this archetype message / ride ( you can’t make this stuff up).
I was seeing another major dream, vision materializing for me over the preceeding days from Thursday that was on the verge of contract, happening quite rappidly, Yet, later that night in an email the negotiation which was a big push on their side, which i modulated along, fell apart with a quick change of their heart. It will be interesting to see what transpires tomorrow with the New Moon.
As I become more aware of all these concious (and subconscious) connections magnetically attracting to me, i realize they are also a part of me. And in their re-creating in physical form, are not a failure if the energy pattern may not complete. Rather, are helping to better work the shift of timing, and cycles of waves.
As you say in your reading Sarah, this may be the actual purpose. The practice of the balance of emotional strengths within us.
And just as Amy suggests, i am finding modulating the energy, led by spirit (higher self) timing is everything. Understanding the patience and accptance of the energy process in time, rather than blame, or judgement (of self or other) which only turns the energy round in internal static, or reactive push.
Sarah, it’s rather hilarious to me to know you had already pulled these cards before we spoke yesterday. They fit my situation from the weekend so very well, even though the cards I had pulled for myself about it were so different. Same basic meaning, though; same basic insights, I think.
It’s great to see the message affirmed here in this way.
Thank you Sarah! I homed in on ‘squirelly’ because what has been testing me are squirrels , who gnawed their way into my loft last week seeing it as a great place to set up home together. Have ( sadly) had to get pest control in, but I am now looking at the metaphysical layer to this invasion overhead! Your reading has helped
This weekend I told an old stale story to my husband. I outlined it completely, described its contours, aspects of feelings, the loneliness and hopelessness, the lack of spiritual connection, the desert of ancient resentments I feel myself in. Now, on Fire Monkey Monday, I can’t remember a thing about it. I don’t think it’s gone. It may come back again. But something is different. The last thing I feel like doing is battling anything. But I’m hoping that the story is falling away of its own accord. Or alchemizing (not a word) into something new and different.
“Squirrelly” is obviously having its synchronous moment in the sun. Last week a friend of mine asked me what he should wear to a book launch being held on groundhog day. I said “something velvety” because, as an Englishman who seldom watches comedy films, I had no idea what a groundhog looked like and thought it was probably some kind of mole. When I discovered via Google that groundhogs are members of the squirrel family, I emailed my friend again and told him he should wear something squirrelly instead, a coat made of hair brushes perhaps. (Well, it was a gay book launch.)
And because spellcheck was so determined not to let me use the word “squirrelly,” I thought I must have invented it. Ha!