By Sarah Taylor

Between Scylla and Charybdis; between a rock and a hard place; the devil and the deep blue sea. The Lovers have a choice to make, and it may be useful to bear in mind that the most immediate choice is not the only one available to you. Nor the second, even. Let’s look at both of those choices first.

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

To the right of The Lovers sits the Nine of Swords. Cruelty. This is the card that comes after the Eight of Swords (seen in the centre in the linked picture here), its presence implied in this reading, where the protagonist — you — felt trapped by circumstances, unable to find a way out, when in reality it was simply your mind and its fixation on a particularly narrow set of circumstances that held you in place.

Now, the Nine is the concretisation of your predicament, your indecision and misgivings solidified into barbs and razored edges that you’re wont to turn on yourself. The Nine is regret, pain, anguish, worry.

“Why did I let that happen?”
“What if I’d made a different decision?”
“I knew I’d fuck it up.”

The most painful part of the Nine is not, however, the truth of your circumstances, but the supposed ‘truth’ you buy into without subjecting it to thorough, dispassionate scrutiny. It is also the supposed ‘truth’ you buy into when you’ve forgotten your blood-red heart beating in your chest, and the love that it holds — for yourself, for others.

You don’t need to go there. You’ve been there before and you know what it feels like. This time, you have a choice not to go there. The Lovers lie at centre, choice embodied.

What else can you choose from? To the left of The Lovers lies the Five of Wands. Wands are associated with creative energy, whether that’s artistic, performance-orientated, sexual — anything where you feel that fiery drive in the pit of your belly and an urge to harness and make use of it.

Except with the Five there is a sense of being separated from the truth of what you want and need to create. There is a lack of fully owning and directing your creativity. When the Five of Wands is in activation in your life, something feels like it’s holding you down and back. Nevertheless, the yearning and drive remain. You can do this. There is the potential to break free from the strictures of inertia and ambivalence and come to stand fully by your own side. The Five speaks of the quest to find your inner authority by getting behind your creativity. Who’s going to support what you’re doing if you don’t?

And so there are the two obvious choices: self-denigration to the right of you, disorganisation to the left. Back to the card at centre, which has its own message.

In the Tarot de Marseille, one of the oldest incarnations of the tarot, The Lovers depicts not two people, but three. As does it in the Rider-Waite Smith tarot: the man, the woman, and the angel. Here, in The Röhrig version, we have three hands. The third choice is a creative one that isn’t immediately available if one is stuck in the land of duality. In our world of up-down, in-out, back-forth, masculine-feminine, we tend to forget that we are on a sliding scale of experience. We don’t need to choose between two black-and-white options: looking between the obvious, we find the shades of grey.

The paradox is that duality offers every option under the Sun.

Maybe it is that you find yourself at a point where there are two very familiar roads in front of you. One road is associated with the negative self-talk that has the power to undo what you have worked towards but so far never quite attained. The other road is associated with a lack of cohesive effort to bring to fruition what has been calling you to shape it into existence for — how long, now, dear reader?

Because, make no mistake, there is something beautiful that is present in your life. A balance that creates a third way. You are being watched over by angels as you sleep. Maybe now you can wake up and see what is available to you — what has been available all along. The power and will to step into a version of yourself that has creativity at its core. Your desire to bring something to life, to bring it down to earth, to feel the rush of life through your veins.

It’s not an illusion. You can do it. Time to steer away from what has always felt fatalistic and shift tracks, shift out of familiar patterns, reach for what is there. And take it.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Five of Wands (Saturn in Leo), The Lovers (Gemini), 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.