Repetitions and Variations on a Theme
For today’s draw, I decided to revisit a ten-card spread I developed and wrote about previously that focuses on healing cyclical patterns.
To recap the spread for those who don’t want to dip over to the previous post: the question driving this is “what needs healing before you can manifest healthy things in the world?” The spread uses five sets of pairs, or ten cards. Although eight is traditionally the number associated with manifestation, adding the extra two that bring it up to 10 represents the full cycle of fruition, one that doesn’t just stop with what you got out of something. The first four pairs describe 1) your starting point, 2) the light that you find yourself growing towards and your relationship towards it, 3) the heart of the matter, and 4) your ideas or interpretation about the process. The last pair of cards describes 5) the spirit that imbued the manifestation process throughout and so reveals the full picture of where that process takes you. In each pair, the bottom card represents the underlayer or interior part of the pair that drives the action, while the upper card represents the exterior manifestation or outside force that affects the interior.
I found today’s draw especially interesting because the message it contains, loudly, insistently, is that we keep doing the same damn thing over and over and over and over. As I read it, every last one of the five pairs says the same message in a slightly different way, something I find endlessly fascinating about both tarot and teaching and learning in general. If one way of putting something doesn’t get the message across, perhaps a slightly different way of putting it will. Sometimes the universe can be just as stubborn in trying to hammer home its messages as we can be in ignoring it. Today’s draw also really wants us to know we are screwing up — every last card was drawn in a reversed position. Today’s draw can be called a lot of things, but subtle is not one of them.
Today’s draw (all cards reversed)
1. Three of Coins & Death
2. Seven of Wands & the Tower
3. The Fool & Six of Swords
4. Seven of Coins & Ten of Wands
5. Queen of Coins & Page of Cups
Deck
The very first card in the lower left represents the starting seed that marks the beginning of our journey. In its upright position, the three of coins has us learning from a wise mentor as we set out on our path so that we can grow and mature and find the best way to attain our goals. Reversed, however, it warns that we are either refusing to accept our need to learn or we have hitched ourselves to a poor mentor who is not giving us the knowledge we need. When that internal refusal materializes in the external world, it appears as a refusal to change. Death reversed is a card that embodies resistance to necessary transformation.
What, exactly, do we desire by doing this? The reversed seven of wands suggests that we may be feeling overwhelmed by all of the choices, paths, and work in front of us. Rather than embrace the directive that life gives us to grow, learn, and change, we would rather dig in our heels and throw up our hands and simply…refuse. If reversed Death is the card most associated with a refusal to accept the reality that life is change and flux, the reversed Tower is perhaps the second-most powerful card saying the same thing. But this time, it adds a little admonishment to that — you are your own worst enemy. Your refusal, more than simply resisting the necessary, has consequences. And the root of those, the reversed three of coins and the reversed seven of wands, is your fear.
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The pattern that is beginning to emerge is one of a vicious cycle. We resist change because we are overwhelmed by the magnitude of problems requiring that change, but that resistance itself creates problems that add to the mountain of burning fuckery that looms in front of us. So what do we do? More of the same. The reversed Fool is the card at the heart of the matter. Rather than learning from our mistakes, we have our hearts set on a kind of perpetual childhood, free from the consequences of our own actions. To accept responsibility for our actions and recognize the need to learn how to do something different would be the first step of our transition into spiritual adulthood. Something the reversed six of swords, like the reversed tower and reversed death, is clear that we are avoiding out of fear.
Having set our hearts so firmly on the imagined safety and security of perpetual childhood, we are inclined to lie to ourselves about the source of our woes. The reversed seven of coins points to a false sense of security and stability, one that wants to cling to a false narrative about where safety can be found and become stubborn in holding onto things that do not work for us. It, too, is a card profoundly resistant to change, and the result of trying to live in this place is that we load ourselves with burdens we needn’t carry (the reversed ten of swords).
The illusion that our woes are from outside of ourselves leads us to try and identify alternate explanations for our problems. In this case, we turn to blaming our parents (the reversed queen of coins) or other adults who we imagine are the ones who should be taking care of us, rather than recognizing that we are of the age that we should be taking care of ourselves and each other. In doing so, we grant far too much power to our inner children (the reversed page of cups), allowing them to be petulant and stubborn, living in a fantasy world of the far-fetched stories we have spun for ourselves.
We have, in other words, ended up exactly where we began: unwilling to listen to what the world has to teach us as we learn and grow, preferring instead to stay in a state of perpetual arrested development taking instruction only from our most childish selves even as we sit and wait and wait and wait for someone else in the room to be the adult for us. But that adult, as the deck makes clear, will only come when we recognize that we are the ones being called upon to step into that role by recognizing the ways that we need to get up to speed and getting ourselves there. What would it take, the deck asks, for you to simply change this story by flipping over that three of coins — or the Fool, or the seven of wands, the seven of coins, or…well…any of them — in order to begin developing a healthier relationship to learning, growth, and change?
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