Sabbats, Seasons, and Tarot Spreads

I’ve been floundering about just a bit with these Weekly Readings, not quite able to “home in” on the exact format I want to use. I’m a reader who believes in using spreads, having specific positions to address different issues of a situation.

With a “collective reading”, however, there isn’t necessarily an actual “situation” on the table. Instead, there’s a more generic sort of advice being offered. This leads to vagueness, to what I often refer to as “spiritual mumbo-jumbo” and a lot of nice-sounding metaphysical platitudes that don’t really do any much good.

Even before drawing today’s card, I had already decided to revise my Weekly Reading format somewhat, to always look more deeply into the first card of the spread and not just “summarize” its meaning as “this is what we should focus on”, but to explore problem areas, to seek out and find possible conflicts we may be experiencing.

In other words… go looking for trouble? Or as Metallica once put it in a heavy-metal song, “Don’t go lookin’ for snakes…” Why? Obviously because you might find them, and what’s the point in looking for something that’s wrong?

Well, there is a point here. Many times things are “wrong” in our lives — individually and collectively — but we look the other way. Or maybe the ripples and undercurrents are so slight that they don’t draw our attention. We don’t notice them. But they’re still there, and little ripples can become big waves.

Now, let’s look at today’s card. We have the beautiful 7 of Wind — the 7 of Swords in traditional tarot decks.

My first thought when I turned this card over was “Oh, how beautiful!” I’m sure that it was intentionally designed to evoke this response. It is a lovely card. Yet so often beauty and loveliness can be deceptive. This is a large part of the meaning of this card.

I am, however, digressing. There is a connection here between my rambling thoughts and the card we’re discussing today. My realization that I needed a more “problematic” approach to these Weekly Readings (in other words, my decision to “go looking for trouble”) matches up nicely with the 7 of Swords.

So before we move on, I’m going to go back to the previous cards — The 6 of Pentacles and Judgement — to review, revise, and re-evaluate a bit.

How can the 6 of Pentacles represent a problem? It’s a “nice” card, a card of generosity, of giving and receiving. We spoke then of balance, and that’s important. Yet there are other problem issues hiding within the card. Are we being a bit too “smug”, a bit too eager to show off our goodness?

And what of Judgement? Isn’t this card calling us to be honest with ourselves? Here’s the situation as I see it. We know we should do good things, that we should help others, but are we really doing it? Or are we just giving “lip service” or even “showing off” for others in a “look how generous I am!” sort of way? The Judgement card from yesterday is calling us out, I think.

Now, with today’s cards, we explore the reasons behind our “outward goodness/inward selfishness”. Indeed, this is what it comes down to. This is the “lesson” tarot wants to teach us this week. This is what tarot wants us to learn.

We come to those words written on this card, keywords for interpretation: Deceit. Theft. Trickery.

We’re fooling ourselves if we think we’re fooling others. I’m approaching these Weekly Readings now with a more structured format, one that assigns “Card 3” as a foundational card. Let’s give this some thought. Why are we being selfish, especially in such a deceptive way, pretending to be good and gracious when all the while we’re really looking for what we can get out of the situation. Why are we doing this?

We’re doing it because that’s what we’ve seen in the past. This is how we’ve learned to look at the world. Everywhere around us we see lies, deceptions, and all sorts of trickery whereby people do as they please, take what they want, and the consequences be damned!

Like seagulls swooping down on their unsuspecting prey, people have taken advantage of us in the past. We now are following suit and saying “If they can do it, I can do it.” We might not actually speak those words aloud or even put them into a well-defined thought, but the feelings are there, lurking under the surface, just as the 7 of Swords here would appear “under the surface” of the first two cards in our spread. Here is how I place the first three cards:

Yes, our 7 of Swords is beneath the surface level here, part of our subconscious thoughts and feelings, and very much an influence on what we do. It’s a bit of a snake there. We don’t want to look at it. We don’t want to acknowledge it. We just don’t want to deal with those uncomfortable truths.

But this is what tarot is for! Tarot shows us what we need to see, and the 7 of Swords today tells us quite clearly that it’s time to be honest with ourselves. We’re not the noble, generous, philanthropic folks we want others to think we are. Maybe that’s who we’d like to be, but we’re not there yet.

How do we get there? By being brutally honest with ourselves, by admitting our faults, by seeing our flawed nature. It’s only then that we can take the actions that are needed.