Hard Looks
Every tarot deck has its own personality, even when they supposedly rely on the same historical structure. I’ll delve into this more in future posts. For now, it’s enough to know that the most common historical template for tarot decks you find in the United States is the Rider-Waite tarot deck, co-designed by A. E. Waite and Pamela Coleman Smith. There are a number of reasons I’m not a fan of the original deck they designed, not least of which is that there are fundamental errors in the strongly patriarchal Euro-Christian elements smuggled into the deck through their association with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. No deck is perfect, of course. But slight tweaks in interpretation or gentle nudges to the symbolic representations on each card can brush away many of these problems without having to take a hatchet to the entire endeavor. It’s these tweaks along with the energy and ideas that each creator brings to a deck that give them that personality.
The deck I’m using today draws heavily from several historical world traditions that see Crows as representing the most important universal truth that all things are fundamentally equal and must remain in balance. This is not to say that all things are the same or indistinguishable, nor to say that we must nihilistically throw up our hands and refuse to make choices. Choice is inescapable. Even the decision not to choose is itself a choice, after all. But this insistence on equality serves as a nice corrective to the explicit hierarchies in the traditional deck that draw on a Christian tradition that consistently saddles every dichotomy with a good and a bad partner.
As a consequence, the deck can feel a little challenging for those raised in a culture that wants everything to be sunny and cheery, that thinks death is evil, darkness is evil, women are evil, weakness is evil. Where a traditional deck might see turning inward as a sign of weakness or a consequence of previous failures, this deck just says, Nah. Sometimes you just have to have quiet time. Why be afraid of the dark? Nighttime, sleep, and dreams is when the mind and body renew themselves.
Today’s reading starts with The Moon, which points us towards a rejuvenating self-reflection. If things have been holding you back, it is time to let them go. If you have been holding yourself back, take some time to examine your fears. Look into the dark and ask how, rather than running from them, you can accept these parts of yourself in a way that serves you while simultaneously respecting crow’s lesson of the fundamental equality of all creation.
The next two cards put a finer point on it. The reversed Tower suggests specifically that you’re avoiding necessary changes because of your fears, while the reversed two of cups points towards an imbalance in your relationships. Upright, the two of cups is a card representing healthy relationships (2, a pair, and cups, for the emotional world). The caduceus in the card growing from the heart between the crows draws on historical scientific and medical theories that saw health as a perfect balance between opposing qualities. Traditionally, this included an equal balance between masculine and feminine energies. Here, we could simply say the two partners in a relationship.
Since this is a reading for a wide audience for whom “check yourself with your significant other” will be only intermittently applicable, I read it in terms of relationships beyond intimate partnerships. Have you been disrespecting feminine energies in the world? Shitting on the masculine? What needs to change within yourself to approach other ways of being in good faith, but without ceding your own power? Given that most people reflect the fears of others back to them, one who wishes to change how the world relates to them would do worse than to begin here.
