THE TAROTCAST: What the fuck were you thinking? How you got here; how you get out.

Week of May 30, 2016

There’s a well-known saying (well-known in these parts, anyway) by Scottish poet Robbie Burns that I’m going to quote here in its original vernacular:

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley”

Or, to put it another way, with all the planning in the world, there are still times when you find yourself up shit creek without a paddle.

This, dear traveller, is the intersection between the first two cards in this week’s reading: the Prince of Disks on the left, and the Ten of Swords to his right.

But what’s really going on here? And what is it reflecting about where you are — or where you believe you are, intrepid one?

Because you are pretty damned intrepid, make no mistake about that. The Prince of Disks in the foundation position suggests meticulous attention-to-detail; an unwavering commitment to a vision; a creativity that is also practical.

This all adds up to a facility in you to pin dreams on to the canvas of reality — to bring things down to fine detail so that they can be implemented practically.

You are an architect in whatever area of your life the Prince is expressing himself — and I’d suggest applying that title broadly. Disks are the physical world; you have been constructing something internally, you have been hatching a cunning plan.

One minute you had far-reaching designs. The next, you find yourself in the Ten of Swords, all off-kilter at centre, looking something altogether different in the eyes.

And it’s looking back at you. You may well feel more Frankenstein than da Vinci. The finely-drawn, light-infused amphitheatre in the mind of the Prince has turned to a semi-circle of inward-pointing swords caught in a background of black, their tips tinged with a blood-red fog.

“What the fuck happened?” I use those words mindfully: “what the fuck”. They might not be strangers to you right now.

The Ten of Swords is the insanity of a belief brought to its ultimate, technicolor, ludicrous conclusion.

The Ten of Swords is the mind in overdrive; it is what happens when we create the perfect circumstances to divorce us from our bodily wisdom and from our hearts.

It is a magnified, hall-of-mirror-warped statement that seeps into reality and sets up home there.

The Ten of Swords is the bottoming out of a situation that started when a thought or a belief becomes concrete enough that you build a chamber out of it, and hold yourself in there without the light of awareness to guide you.

And you find yourself in that window-less, door-less room that it has constructed for you — that you were constructing for yourself as your meticulous planning, your beautiful talent for bringing a vision into reality, was perverted and channeled into an old thought that has become so over-inflated that there’s little space for anything else.

Ah, there’s nothing like a dose of sabotage when you’re on the verge of creating beauty.

The interesting thing about “What the fuck?” is that it implies there’s a part of you that’s looking at all of this in disbelief. As well you might be. Are you starting to feel and hear the rusty squeak of cogs turning on your mental machinations? Is there a creeping awareness that what your facing down doesn’t look entirely grounded in reality?

Are you starting to see through a belief that, quite frankly, reeks of bullshit? Bullshit creek. No paddle needed. Because you don’t have to be there.

It’s all about the eyes in this reading. The light-infused vision of the Prince (whose true focus is not towards the Ten of Swords); the three-eyed grotesquerie that bears down on you in the Ten; and, finally, the blindfolded eyes of justice, whose vision is enwrapped by the cosmos.

Justice is not involved in the card to her left. She is disinterested. Not “uninterested,” but rather impartial: her vision is not subject to the whims of our entirely human minds.

She is a pure archetype, here to restore balance, one way or another, depending on which way her scales are tilting. She is not here to judge or place value, but to adjust. Plain and simple.

What does feel clear is that something is calling for balance in your life: a surfeit of mind over matter, where mind has been permitted to run riot. There is lack of cohesion that has caused your plans to gang a-gley. The lunatics have been in charge of the asylum, and things are due for a change.

Change, in fact, is inevitable: the Ten of Swords is the end of the line for this particular experience, and a shift into the 11 of Justice has the ability to connect you to something larger — something that lies beyond the convincing illusion of the chamber of horrors that has quite possibly taken up a lot of your energy recently.

She is nothing if not fair; she is nothing but fair — whatever “fair” is.

And what of the Prince of Disks? In this reader’s estimation, I do believe this adjustment will be the freeing of a creative will that can flourish and focus on the business of building something that reflects an altogether different world than the one you feel caught in now.

You are not your thoughts. That might count for little when a beady, blood-shot eye is bearing down on you insisting otherwise.

Justice will have her day.

Astrology Correspondences: Prince of Disks (the airy aspect of earth), Ten of Swords (Sun in Gemini), Justice (Libra)