Ancestral Tarot: Between Past and Future

The political theorist Hannah Arendt once said that man is trapped at the miraculous and impossible point that sits between past and future. While emerging from the past, the present is not inextricably bound to it such that new things cannot leap out from that tiny space. That, after all, is what it means to project — to throw something new forward into the future from the present.

To continue thinking about ancestral readings, I decided today to create a trinity spread with a twist. The first card for the past — what do our ancestral mothers & grandmothers wish from us? The third for our future — what do our daughters wish of us? And the middle card for that impossible space between, the one that gives meaning to both and animates the directions we choose to take them today.

Today’s draw:

The Queen of Cups
The King of Wands
The Empress

Deck:
The Field Tarot, by Hannah Elizabeth Fofana

The first, from our ancestral mother(s): to channel them and the gifts they’ve given us by following our intuition. We know what’s right when we truly search inside ourselves, because they are always there, whispering in our ear. And where we walk, we pave the way for our daughters to run. If we embrace our intuition, it is so that our daughters can embody that even more fully in their role as the Empress, the archetype of feminine creativity, fierceness, power, intuition, and compassion. When we seek this power for ourselves and even more for our daughters, we find that we stop allowing ourselves to be manipulated by emotionally immature and unfit leaders like the reversed King of Wands, whether those leaders be others or ourselves. A good leader takes the time to master their own power and become comfortable with it, not by oppressing it or others, but by approaching problems firmly and compassionately so they can serve as trustworthy guides instead of capricious, misguided tyrants. This is what we orient ourselves toward when we prioritize our power and our daughters’.

But what do the guys think about this one? I did a second reading using the same structure, but for the masculine side of things. It turns out that, if our feminine ancestors and descendants want us to step up into our power, our masculine ones want us to understand that it doesn’t necessarily look the way that a lot of people in the present seem to think.

Second draw:

Ace of Cups
Six of Disks
The Chariot

If our grandmothers had us looking to the culmination of the cups, our grandfathers do as well, being explicit in reminding us what the power of that suit is founded on from its beginning. Love. The animating spirit of the emotional world is a journey to find love. And just as our daughters made the leap from the minor arcana to the major, so, too, do our sons. They would like us to give them room for the type of complexity that comes with true equality, and on which love itself is founded. The way to honor both of these demands in the present is with generosity. One cannot be truly generous or loving with those who are not equals. If they are less than you, those qualities become patronizing. If they are greater, the qualities are obsequious. Neither is love nor generosity. If we wish to move forward into a better future for our children, then, it is time to honor our fathers and our mothers, as well as our daughters and our sons. Let our daughters embrace their power, which they are not given enough of. And let our sons embrace their ability to love and be complex creatures.