celtic cross
October 2008 
The cards never lie...
Posted on Feb 10th, 2008
by 
yeshe
yeshe
On the evening of the third day of our women moving the edge retreat, Maria and Sarah did a tarot reading on the collective question that had emerged from the centre of our circle during the previous days.
The pattern they chose for the spread was the Celtic Cross, where the central card, represenging what is at the heart of the matter, is crossed by what stands in our way. The horizontal line represents time; the vertical line represents consciousness.
The question: What is the next level of women’s leadership connected to source?
Central card: What is at the heart of the matter
The tower
The next level of women's leadership connected to source is breaking out of every structure, every paradigm, every thought form that we’ve known. This is going to be like a divine intervention - the lightning rod that comes through.
This is fundamental change, and it’s shocking. It’s painful, it’s frightening. You don’t have a choice of staying in the tower. You’re evicted.
The old concepts of masculine and feminine as we have known them are shrugged off. From the top to the bottom, from the left to the right, from the in to the out, change. It’s absolutely radical.
Transversal card: what is the barrier to that happening?
Seven of swords reversed
The right way up, we call this card the nightmare of perfection. You take care of every little detail, and you have to make sure that everything is perfectly right.
The fact that it’s reversed in this spread means that what’s blocking us is that we’re always looking at the bigger picture! We want to get it all perfectly in the big picture, it’s all very conceptual, it’s all up here in the head: we’ve got to figure it all out, and then it’s going to be OK.
That’s blocking us. Because we’re too ‘up there’ in the conceptual realm. We’ve got to ground it. We don’t know how it’s going to be, but let’s just do it.
Actually, we don’t have the choice, given that the central card is the tower. So the more we are sitting with our heads up somebody’s plough… It’s falling to bits, you guys! Let’s be real, we’re in disintegration.
Upper card: What is visible
Eight of pentacles
This is the apprentice card.
One way of seeing this is that we are making a new contract. We are starting to learn practices and we are apprenticing to learning a new way.
What the apprentice does is the same thing, over and over and over. It looks really mundane, but that’s how you slip through into the mystery.
It’s the archer who becomes the arrow. It’s not about getting the bulls eye, it’s the act that lets the mystery come through. It’s practice, practice, practice… prototyping - and NOT waiting!
Lower card: What is coming to our consciousness
The Emperor
This is the masculine. This is the king.
So what’s coming into our consciousness is, perhaps, how the masculine worldview is so deeply ingrained in us – that’s one way of reading the card.
But the other interpretation is about creating order. So it’s not about throwing out the masculine, but about creating a new order. Because that’s what the Emperor does.
We do need form. But we have to create from source. It’s not going to look like the tower. It’s going to be completely different. We're not going to sit down and design it: it’s just going to come through.
We’re realising – It’s not just about us feeling and loving and being nice to one another. It’s like: “What the fuck are we going to do now?” It’s creating more form. The form and structure are there, but it's what it serves that makes the difference… It’s going to be new, it’s not like the hierarchy.
This new level of women’s leadership connected to source is going to have form. It actually does something. There’s a masculine energy. It’s very clear and manifest. It’s out of the fundamental shift represented by the Tower that the form will come through.
Card to the left: what we need to leave behind
Judgement
We are stepping into a new life. We’re already in a new life!
We’ve been waiting for the judgement call. We’ve been waiting to be awoken to our new lives. There are still a lot of people in this world that feel that they are waiting to step into a new life that somebody else will have made for them. There are a lot of people talking about how bad things are. "It’s really bad, and we need the new life… Someone has to do something about it… "
And that new life is already here! We’re in this time! This time has arrived and we need to let go of waiting for someone to call us into it.
We have to call ourselves into the new life. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!
Card to the right: what is the near future we are stepping into
Wheel of Fortune
The wheel is turning. Get out of the way, it’s happening anyway.
We are the right people in the right place at the right time. Things are lining up. This is like the slot machine, about to hit the jackpot.
The next level, in terms of our breaking out of that tower into collective feminine leadership, is that all of us have got to be awake to the alignment. So if you’re not aligned, get the hell out of it! And go find the alignment.
Because that’s what we do: when we find that collective space together, we align with source. That’s what’s going to happen. And we will also know our alignment. It will be more visible. We won’t have to think “Am I? Aren’t I?” It’ll just be there.
This is the culmination of the practice we see in the eight of pentacles. This, we know we must do.
Adding the numerical values of all the cards in the spread, we get the hidden message, the river below the river: Forty-one
We start with the One: is the Magician. The new beginning. Pooling all the tools that we have to create magic. It’s a masculine energy, it initiates, it moves forward to the Four: the Emperor, which is giving form; creating the container in which things can happen. And then you add 4+1 to get 5, which is the Heirophant – or perhaps, in this case, the High Priestesses – it’s the new level of wisdom. In Greek, it means ‘to make the sacred visible’. He is the wisdom holder. He brings through and sheds light on the sacred.
It’s interesting to see all these masculine archetypes here. Part of what we have talked about in this women’s circle is the fact that we have mastered the models (thinking here, in particular, of cutting edge models like Integral Theory, Spiral Dynamics, U Theory, systemic constellations, the adult development models of Kegan, Cook-Greuter, etc). We understand how to do that, just the way the men do. And now we are remembering what so many of us have forgotten, during these long years in a world steeped in the masculine perspectives, that other bit, about connecting through our bodies to source. We do come through a masculine lens, no matter how much we’d like to think that we don’t. But the feminine is not some sit-around, wishy-washy do-nothing. She is a sassy chick - there is oomph to this! You get out there, talk through the bullshit and get it done! That’s part of what’s being shown to us.
In Greek mythology, you’ve got Heracles. Everybody thinks of Hercules as the big strong guy. In the feminine goddess history, ‘Heracles’ means ‘the one that does what Hera tells him’. Hera, in the masculine mythology, is the nagging wife of Zeus. But Hera is the feminine. So the masculine that does the bidding of the feminine is very powerful. We are talking about source. It’s for us to come through in a very clear way. It’s not about becoming something that we are not. It is time for us to come forward with this presence that we are holding.
We can see how we have been initiating (Magician) and bringing together the skills that we have in order to hold space – create the container (Emperor) in which all of these things can happen in order to shed light on the sacred.
Piece of advice - To help us step into this new level of leadership.
Three of Wands, reversed
Wands are creative energy. Three is a number that brings things together to really move forward and manifest in one direction. This is reversed, so we read this card as: “Let’s not put all our eggs in one basket”. There’s going to be many creative forms of the feminine coming from source that can be manifested in the coming time. The tailor-made, off-the-shelf version is not going to work here. It’s going to be different, and that’s fine. There are going to be many different levels and layers to how it needs to be offered. So let’s not try to centralise it, trademark it! Open Source! Because this is a reversed card, it means that sometimes the creativity can get diminished, because it’s not pulled together.
When we get a piece of advice that is reversed, we pick another one until we get one that’s not reversed. Sometimes this tells us the journey we may have to go on. So we picked another card, to see how we can heal the reversal.
Ten of Pentacles, reversed
In order to reverse that Three of Wands and get that creativity lined up, we are going to have to be extremely untraditional. We’re going to have to not do what the family has always done before, we’re going to have to be extremely different. However, it’s still reversed. Because it’s reversed, it means we’re not going to manifest the level of karma/potential that we can.
King of Pentacles
This guy is the personal level of the Emperor. He’s the manager. The one that creates order again, but on the personal level. There is a very strong message that’s coming through here, that the masculine really has to do its work. But doing its work gives form to the feminine. This is what we’ve been sensing during these days. We need to have form for the feminine to emerge in our world. For the source to be spoken – to be made explicit. Giving it language, having a model, inviting a gathering…
The pattern they chose for the spread was the Celtic Cross, where the central card, represenging what is at the heart of the matter, is crossed by what stands in our way. The horizontal line represents time; the vertical line represents consciousness.
The question: What is the next level of women’s leadership connected to source?
Celtic cross
Central card: What is at the heart of the matter
The tower
The next level of women's leadership connected to source is breaking out of every structure, every paradigm, every thought form that we’ve known. This is going to be like a divine intervention - the lightning rod that comes through.
This is fundamental change, and it’s shocking. It’s painful, it’s frightening. You don’t have a choice of staying in the tower. You’re evicted.
The old concepts of masculine and feminine as we have known them are shrugged off. From the top to the bottom, from the left to the right, from the in to the out, change. It’s absolutely radical.
Transversal card: what is the barrier to that happening?
Seven of swords reversed
Seven of Swords
The right way up, we call this card the nightmare of perfection. You take care of every little detail, and you have to make sure that everything is perfectly right.
The fact that it’s reversed in this spread means that what’s blocking us is that we’re always looking at the bigger picture! We want to get it all perfectly in the big picture, it’s all very conceptual, it’s all up here in the head: we’ve got to figure it all out, and then it’s going to be OK.
That’s blocking us. Because we’re too ‘up there’ in the conceptual realm. We’ve got to ground it. We don’t know how it’s going to be, but let’s just do it.
Actually, we don’t have the choice, given that the central card is the tower. So the more we are sitting with our heads up somebody’s plough… It’s falling to bits, you guys! Let’s be real, we’re in disintegration.
Upper card: What is visible
Eight of pentacles
Eight of Pentacles
This is the apprentice card.
One way of seeing this is that we are making a new contract. We are starting to learn practices and we are apprenticing to learning a new way.
What the apprentice does is the same thing, over and over and over. It looks really mundane, but that’s how you slip through into the mystery.
It’s the archer who becomes the arrow. It’s not about getting the bulls eye, it’s the act that lets the mystery come through. It’s practice, practice, practice… prototyping - and NOT waiting!
Lower card: What is coming to our consciousness
The Emperor
The Emperor
This is the masculine. This is the king.
So what’s coming into our consciousness is, perhaps, how the masculine worldview is so deeply ingrained in us – that’s one way of reading the card.
But the other interpretation is about creating order. So it’s not about throwing out the masculine, but about creating a new order. Because that’s what the Emperor does.
We do need form. But we have to create from source. It’s not going to look like the tower. It’s going to be completely different. We're not going to sit down and design it: it’s just going to come through.
We’re realising – It’s not just about us feeling and loving and being nice to one another. It’s like: “What the fuck are we going to do now?” It’s creating more form. The form and structure are there, but it's what it serves that makes the difference… It’s going to be new, it’s not like the hierarchy.
This new level of women’s leadership connected to source is going to have form. It actually does something. There’s a masculine energy. It’s very clear and manifest. It’s out of the fundamental shift represented by the Tower that the form will come through.
Card to the left: what we need to leave behind
Judgement
Judgement
We are stepping into a new life. We’re already in a new life!
We’ve been waiting for the judgement call. We’ve been waiting to be awoken to our new lives. There are still a lot of people in this world that feel that they are waiting to step into a new life that somebody else will have made for them. There are a lot of people talking about how bad things are. "It’s really bad, and we need the new life… Someone has to do something about it… "
And that new life is already here! We’re in this time! This time has arrived and we need to let go of waiting for someone to call us into it.
We have to call ourselves into the new life. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!
Card to the right: what is the near future we are stepping into
Wheel of Fortune
The Wheel of Fortune
We are the right people in the right place at the right time. Things are lining up. This is like the slot machine, about to hit the jackpot.
The next level, in terms of our breaking out of that tower into collective feminine leadership, is that all of us have got to be awake to the alignment. So if you’re not aligned, get the hell out of it! And go find the alignment.
Because that’s what we do: when we find that collective space together, we align with source. That’s what’s going to happen. And we will also know our alignment. It will be more visible. We won’t have to think “Am I? Aren’t I?” It’ll just be there.
This is the culmination of the practice we see in the eight of pentacles. This, we know we must do.
Adding the numerical values of all the cards in the spread, we get the hidden message, the river below the river: Forty-one
We start with the One: is the Magician. The new beginning. Pooling all the tools that we have to create magic. It’s a masculine energy, it initiates, it moves forward to the Four: the Emperor, which is giving form; creating the container in which things can happen. And then you add 4+1 to get 5, which is the Heirophant – or perhaps, in this case, the High Priestesses – it’s the new level of wisdom. In Greek, it means ‘to make the sacred visible’. He is the wisdom holder. He brings through and sheds light on the sacred.
It’s interesting to see all these masculine archetypes here. Part of what we have talked about in this women’s circle is the fact that we have mastered the models (thinking here, in particular, of cutting edge models like Integral Theory, Spiral Dynamics, U Theory, systemic constellations, the adult development models of Kegan, Cook-Greuter, etc). We understand how to do that, just the way the men do. And now we are remembering what so many of us have forgotten, during these long years in a world steeped in the masculine perspectives, that other bit, about connecting through our bodies to source. We do come through a masculine lens, no matter how much we’d like to think that we don’t. But the feminine is not some sit-around, wishy-washy do-nothing. She is a sassy chick - there is oomph to this! You get out there, talk through the bullshit and get it done! That’s part of what’s being shown to us.
In Greek mythology, you’ve got Heracles. Everybody thinks of Hercules as the big strong guy. In the feminine goddess history, ‘Heracles’ means ‘the one that does what Hera tells him’. Hera, in the masculine mythology, is the nagging wife of Zeus. But Hera is the feminine. So the masculine that does the bidding of the feminine is very powerful. We are talking about source. It’s for us to come through in a very clear way. It’s not about becoming something that we are not. It is time for us to come forward with this presence that we are holding.
We can see how we have been initiating (Magician) and bringing together the skills that we have in order to hold space – create the container (Emperor) in which all of these things can happen in order to shed light on the sacred.
Piece of advice - To help us step into this new level of leadership.
Three of Wands, reversed
Wands are creative energy. Three is a number that brings things together to really move forward and manifest in one direction. This is reversed, so we read this card as: “Let’s not put all our eggs in one basket”. There’s going to be many creative forms of the feminine coming from source that can be manifested in the coming time. The tailor-made, off-the-shelf version is not going to work here. It’s going to be different, and that’s fine. There are going to be many different levels and layers to how it needs to be offered. So let’s not try to centralise it, trademark it! Open Source! Because this is a reversed card, it means that sometimes the creativity can get diminished, because it’s not pulled together.
When we get a piece of advice that is reversed, we pick another one until we get one that’s not reversed. Sometimes this tells us the journey we may have to go on. So we picked another card, to see how we can heal the reversal.
Ten of Pentacles, reversed
In order to reverse that Three of Wands and get that creativity lined up, we are going to have to be extremely untraditional. We’re going to have to not do what the family has always done before, we’re going to have to be extremely different. However, it’s still reversed. Because it’s reversed, it means we’re not going to manifest the level of karma/potential that we can.
King of Pentacles
This guy is the personal level of the Emperor. He’s the manager. The one that creates order again, but on the personal level. There is a very strong message that’s coming through here, that the masculine really has to do its work. But doing its work gives form to the feminine. This is what we’ve been sensing during these days. We need to have form for the feminine to emerge in our world. For the source to be spoken – to be made explicit. Giving it language, having a model, inviting a gathering…
Access: Public
Seems like my intuition is quite intact!
I think that your interpretation of the card is interesting, and appropriate to what you have been going through and given meaning to. And yet I wish to express some different interpretations here – not as a critique, not to know it better (I don’t!) but because I want to take your questions of two, three days ago up and give another take…
I see the tower as a masculine metaphor. And when looking at these figurines falling out of the tower on first glance it looks like women; but most likely it's supposed to be a man and a woman falling.
What that metaphorical picture tells me is that indeed the old ideas of women's (and men's) leadership are destroyed by naturally enforced insight or even intervention; by critical or catastrophically understanding/happening.
You interpret the 7 of Swords as “the nightmare of perfection”? I see a guy sneaking away with 5 swords, leaving 2 swords behind sticking in the ground. I see sneaking off, moving away in secret, maybe stealing and maybe a separation from a camp this fellow has been party of. And if you interpret that card as what is blocking the tower from falling (or from seeing the fact of it happening), this necessary destruction of the old ideas/situation of ‘women’s leadership’ or maybe ‘women’s situation’, then what is blocking the necessary catastrophe is sneaking off and taking some of the arms away or with you.
And I agree on the apprentice or working person as depicting what’s visible in the situation you’re in.
You are making an effort. And I really love the effort that I read about in your blog. It’s a big and diligent effort. (And I know how much and hard you work day by day) So what is visible is you working really hard at getting it, at paving the way for ‘new women’s leadership’.
So what is rising, getting known – coming to consciousness, as you say?
How easy it is to keep returning to these traditional ideas… seeing the IV, the emperor, as a prototype of the masculine. I see order of the feudalistic type (the king sitting on the ram headed throne). I see an old king, maybe Saturn, restriction, conformity, old mountains behind him; his sceptre saying, “This is life,” whereas it is just restrictive order – and you interpret is as masculine.
The emperor or king stands for holding on to the traditional order. Nothing new created here. An unquestioned standing on the foundation of history. Not creating but upholding the given rule of the world.
At best this king stands maybe for where you're coming from, where women leaders are going to have been coming from, a world which still is ordered in many ways like an ancient kingdom. And if you do want to see this as on a consciousness axis, than the king sitting squarely (4) on his throne still believes consciousness to be the ordering principle, that is the ruling paradigm (“if only we were conscious enough, things would turn out right”). That order, ruling, leading, consciousness as knowing about matters of state, business, spirit, whatever is very closely associated and traditionally equated with the masculine rule.
But I don’t buy this to be masculine – I think what is masculine is of a different kind altogether, multidimensional and multifaceted… not reducible to the old rule, the patriarch. Men, the men that will gladly follow the new kind of leadership – by women or by men or by children – that will support it gladly, have moved away from the throne…
So instead of going into more detail I feel that overall this deck of cards is about what you (and us all) are being shaken out of, the whole ideas of what is feminine and what is masculine, among other things like the “What is leadership”?
In among the women-folk and the men-folk there are leading-folk; serving the community with their talents. We sure don't know what it's going to look like once we start to appreciate the many, many sexes: men primarily drawn towards men, men drawn to both women and men, women drawn to women, women drawn to men, hermaphrodites being drawn to men, hermaphrodites being drawn to women, soft men full of intuition and foolishness, feeling and intelligence, hard women full of domination and coolness, of feeling and intuition… and so endlessly on. There are many sexes, and the dichotomy between masculine and feminine is too coarse, I feel.
Yes, we can - depending on our preferences and fears - place ourselves on a continuum between utmost male and utmost female… but what's the point?
Yes we can, and should, support young girls everywhere to not fall into the ancient trappings of cultural destructive ideas of femininity, as much (and surely not equally as much; equality is something for statisticians) as we should protect our boys from falling for the ancient rites of destructive masculinity.
And yes, we might develop through the different layers of cultural concepts about what it is to be a woman and what makes a man just that. But I really see no point in affirming old ideas about what is male and female (and the tarot cards you choose are very traditional depictions of cultural concepts, by the way) if what the game is about is the next level of women's leadership – mind you, it might be neither female nor male in any sense we know it…
And last but not least: In the time our towers were safe, we could see what was coming from afar. Nowadays we don’t know what’s ahead…
Woohooo Mu! You've done it again!
My initial intention in putting the tarot spread on my blog was as a reminder to the women who were there when it was interpreted. It's wonderful to get other interpretations.
I love going with Maria's interpretation of the Emperor as form and rigour. And you'd better believe that we didn't spend our time wallowing in the stereotypes of masculine and feminine. We were most aware of how drenched we - both men and women - are in our cultural surround. Many of our realisations came around the need to be much more verbally and cognitively explicit about our subtle knowing. And that can certainly be greeted with distaste by women (or men) with an aversion to the cognitive mode… It does require rigour, and that is a new discipline for us, too. How to be rigorous without slipping into scientific reductionism…
Gotta fly. It's Monday morning and I'm wanted elsewhere.
hug
wow! respec'!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The cards never lie … BUT what they are saying IS always open to interpretation ,,,
and a continuous process of re-interpretation, unless an awareness of the need for disconnecting the mechanism of interpretation IS established in The MIND, as a result of opening the door.