Judgment and Ambiguity: Creating Coherence from Uncertainty
Without any particular topic in mind for today’s reading, I asked the cards “what does the universe want my readers to know?” at which point I promptly pulled out the Death card.
I don’t like leaving readings only with Death. While it’s best understood as “transformation” and only much more rarely as literal death, it leaves too much ambiguity. The flowers in the card point to this. When the old passes away, it creates the fertile soil from which new things grow. But people don’t tend to like ambiguity, and it seems unkind to leave them hanging, especially in the current state of the world where there are more than enough reasons to be inclined to a literal reading. When the cards are ambiguous, then, I simply ask for more information (draw more cards) and I stop when I either have enough to put together a coherent story or find an ending I want. I decided to stop when we reached the Six of Wands, or “Success.”
Despite trying to tie a little bow around “Death” by taking away the ambiguity, the cards I drew proliferated it. “The Sun” is an optimistic (“sunny”) card. Reversed, it suggests that you may be either too optimistic as to be out of touch with reality, or you may be unnecessarily pessimistic. Likewise the King of Swords. Upright, he symbolizes the power of the air element — the wisdom of a sharp mind at its peak, whose authority stems from his ability to pierce the fog and see and align himself with the truth. Reversed, it may mean that this authority is exercised primarily internally and not at scale, but it may also mean the authority is wielded poorly and one’s wits are used to further oneself at the expense of others or in a haughty and condescending manner. Deception, which seems straightforward enough, still raises questions. Who’s deceiving whom? Are you deceiving yourself? Another? Is someone else deceiving you? The ambiguity in reading this card risks descending into paranoia for the incautious. And then, having traversed all these dangers, we suddenly arrive incongruously at “Success.” Success over what, exactly? And for how long? I declined to draw a sixth card, but perhaps it would have taken us on a turn for the worse. Or the better. Do we need to know?
Some might consider stopping at this point cheating, but it seems to me that this is a fundamental truth about how life works. You can’t know the story to the end. It will always be ambiguous. You are always reading into it. So how you choose to read it will inevitably say as much if not more about you than it will ever say about the cards themselves.
When confronted with a reading that is unclear like this, I look for the path through it that would make it true in all situations and that allow the cards to interact to create a coherent whole. Is the reversed sun saying that I should be more or less optimistic? Ideally, each of us should know ourselves well enough to answer that question on our own. But the true statement that would apply to everyone would be “Life is, ideally, happy. See things such that you position yourself to attain that without lying to yourself or others to do it.” This is backed up by the King. His authority comes from the strength of his judgment and his recognition of the truth of the world — that all things are fundamentally equal. If he derives authority from the truth, this is the truth he draws it from. He does not place himself above others in a condescending way that denies them access to what he has. He lets the truth shine on all equally. One does not, as the fox warns us, deceive oneself that they are either better or worse than others, nor do they let themselves be so deceived by anyone else.
If all things are fundamentally equal, that includes death and life. You can choose to see transformation and the passing away of the old into the new as a tragedy, or you can choose to see it as a blessing. You can choose to see it as neither, as what simply is. That is up to you. But learning to balance the old and the new while making space equally for the self and others and aiming for a life that grants joy and happiness liberally is a recipe for success.
