THE TAROTCAST: Time To Let The Masks Fall

Week of June, 27th, 2016

If you’ve been reading the Tarotcast over the past few weeks, you may have noticed that court cards have made a regular appearance, from the Prince of Disks, to the Knight of Wands (accompanied by the Prince of Disks for a second time), to the Queen of Disks, and, today, the Queen of Swords.

You’re going through a maturation process — or at the very least being called to one.

If you haven’t already, it feels like the presence, once again, of a senior court member, is indicating that now is the time to claim greater authority over your life. And, with swords on the table, that authority is around your beliefs, your thoughts, your voice.

The time is ripe to drop the personae that no longer work for you. What does this mean?

Your personae are the masks you wear in order to make yourself more palatable and acceptable to those around you. We all wear them.

Many of them are masks we have worn for years. Some masks we remain unaware of. Sometimes it is very much in our best interests to keep wearing them; and other times we begin to understand that the only way we can breathe more fully and freely is to step out of the closet by unveiling a particular truth or truths.

There is something that you have gone through recently — a foundational experience — that encouraged you to take a different look at life and your place in it.

“Encouraged” may be too gentle a word: frequently, the presence of The Hanged Man denotes a time where you have little choice other than to surrender. This surrender may have been imposed by external circumstances, or its cause may not be entirely clear.

What you will have experienced is a reckoning with the deep waters of the unconscious.

They may have engulfed you in your dreams. You may have felt like your life had a dream-like quality to it — almost surreal.

Perhaps an introspection. Perhaps a stillness, one in whose depths the unknown came to tap you on your shoulder. And, dammit, you couldn’t walk away this time!

The Hanged Man is the archetypal crucifixion. It can represent suffering — though this is a secondary response to your circumstances.

It is the imposition of authority from outside, or above.

It is where rules are upended, and in that lies the opportunity for a new perspective.

Specifically, there is the opportunity to hear the truth of something whispered to you about who you are, if you have been still enough (or held in place long enough) to contemplate this familiar-stranger reflected back to you from a part of you that, while hidden, reaches out to you across the void when you are primed and ready for its messages.

And something seems to have been received.

So what now?

I’ve spoken about the revelation of self and one’s own governing authority, but there is something more about the Queen, because at an elemental level she represents the watery aspect of air: hers is a strange brew of feeling-based knowing, more Neptunian than the King, who is the fiery aspect of air.

You, as the Queen, are balanced between two states:

First, there is the state of self-definition through the application of a keen insight that is tapped into a formless, fathomless knowing, and which is given shape through your voice.

By voicing what is emerging in you, you get to feel for yourself what fits, and what does not.

Essentially, you are using the mind and the heart together. This is the purest expression of the Queen, whose ability to declare the truth is both unimpeded by fear, illusions, wishful thinking.

Second, and indicated by the card to the right in the reading, there is the state of “Indolence,” where water wins out over air, where the thread of your truth becomes confused with those of others’, where your own agenda is unable to be defined from a web of competing ideas.

Indolence is where the truth goes to die — and it does this not so much by what you do as what you do not do. You let things slide, you fall into silence, you ignore the promptings of your new-found sense of yourself.

But that doesn’t have to be the case. There is a lot of water in this reading, for sure, and it can be hard to discern what’s up and what’s down, what’s mine and what’s yours in that place where consciousness dissolves into itself.

But you’re a Queen, dammit. And Queens are born to rule.

There is a court waiting just for you: it’s called your life. No-one else can live it — although you may have tried to pass this particular buck many times.

But the thing is: you don’t have to live it either. You can carry on going with the flow, letting others make choices for you — about who you are, in particular.

Or you can learn to work with the flow, and express what is both moving through you naturally and seeking your unique perspective to bring it into form.

It asks for the dropping of guises — particularly the ones that have kept your voice hidden.

But now that you have a clearer idea of what that voice wants to say, it probably won’t want to stay silent for much longer.

Whatever comes out, whether apparently pretty or ugly, whether whispered or strident, whether acceptable or unacceptable, let it simply be yours.

Astrology Correspondences: The Hanged Man (Neptune), Queen of Swords (the watery aspect of air), Eight of Cups (Saturn in Pisces)

[All cards are from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig © US Games, Inc.]