Week of August 8, 2016
Before you do anything else, take a look at the lone figure that appears in all three of the cards in front of you.
Now imagine for the purposes of this reading that this figure is you.
Progressively, from left to right, the cards describe a situation where you become larger, filling the card more and more; you shift from back- to front-of-stage in a particular part of how the story of your life is playing out.
Seen another way, you shift from an archetypal experience, to an altogether more human experience; from being acted through and upon by largely unseen forces, to meeting that action in a far more visceral way.
Or, seen in yet another way, you move from an experience of illumination, to a conflict that clears out what that illumination showed up for you, and then into a time of personal agency, where you choose to take on a burden of responsibility in the name of your own learning and evolution.
The Sun, to the left of the reading, is that archetypal experience that I refer to above.
Many people think of The Sun as an altogether beautiful, bountiful time of expansion and joy. I tend not to approach the card this way, because to do so is to do a disservice to a card that is both far more complex and transpersonal than it is often interpreted.
The Sun uncovers. The Sun is a breakthrough into consciousness. It is the broad, unremitting light of awareness of what rose up from the primordial depths of The Moon, aided by an opening to Soul-based forces in The Star.
It excludes nothing; it embraces the good, the bad, and the ugly because it is impersonal and disinterested.
As The Sun, it does not differentiate morally. In fact, it uses no human means of differentiation.
Like our Sun, it makes no exceptions to what it lights up, save for those areas that remain out of its reach, in the darkness.
Carl Röhrig’s version of The Sun here gives fitting acknowledgement to this interpretation by depicting the Sun’s rays as blood droplets as they near the ground.
This is life-force that is released. It is your life-force that has been released by a breakthrough into consciousness of something that had been held in the darkness.
It is vital, it is vivid, and it also denotes the possibility of a vulnerability to the fragility of life when we are so close to its source.
Like a mother who bleeds at the birth of her child, so we can bleed, even if metaphorically, when something is moving through us and into awareness.
It is a sign that we are living, breathing, human. Mortal.
And so you can be wounded and you can wound.
As you shift from The Sun, what is impersonal takes on the mantle of something personal and unique to your story in the Five of Swords: a battle over beliefs, a war of words, a legal skirmish, a take-no-prisoners attitude.
A conflict in this case has been brought to light, and it may have felt sharp, alienating, and uncompromising.
But, but ~
It cleared the air. Nothing was taken that wasn’t over.
You may be hurting, you may have caused hurt in turn, but all parties are free to move forward an into a greater sense of integrity, still guided by that light that appeared in its most pure form in The Sun.
Back to the drawing board.
That’s the feeling of the final card, which to me feels like the landscape which you now find yourself contemplating as you step from Five, to Three.
You are now the light; you embody it so fully it may frighten you to think that it has disappeared.
It has not.
This is a process of alchemising that initial illumination so that it serves a new purpose, a more personal purpose.
Consequently, that light is going to feel denser because you are holding it within; it is being mixed with the material of your own evolution: you and everything that you carry with you.
It is a substance that is indistinguishable from the very limbs that carry you, the mind that serves you (or that you serve), the heart that beats in you, and the powers of creativity that rush behind all of that, invisible.
The Three of Disks is a willingness to assume a level of density in your life by being willing to learn again.
In a key respect, you become a neophyte, a beginner.
You will need support in this, and you have it — both in terms of physical and human resources, but also in the capacity to bring into form the potential of the Ace of Disks.
It’s going to be hard work, and it will ask for dedication, but it seems to be a choice you’re either considering, or you have already taken, and it is one that will serve you well.
It is an investment. It has the potential to repay you. But first, time to buckle down.
You gave it your blood, whether you knew it or not. Now it asks for your sweat.
About the Author:
Sarah is a tarot-teaching, tarot-reading, tarot-writing witch with a devoted interest in getting people turned on to the magical, alchemical, utterly transformative possibilities of these potent 78 cards. With a background in psychotherapy and certification as a somatic sex educator, Sarah is not only supremely interested in tarot as an art-form, but also in every client and student who comes through her virtual doors, and how they can forge their unique rhythm with the cards.
You can find Sarah at her website Integrated Tarot, and on Facebook.
Astrology Correspondences: The Sun (Sun), Five of Swords (Venus in Aquarius), Three of Disks (Mars in Capricorn)
[Cards from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig © US Games, Inc.]
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