Historians are not entirely sure why the black dots on dice or dominoes, or the suit marks on the numbered cards of a playing deck, came to be called pips. What we do know is that the so-called pip cards in Tarot differ significantly from the trumps.
Every Tarot deck includes 22 trump cards and 56 suit cards. The suit cards can further be divided into 16 court cards (four court cards for each of the four suits) and 40 pip cards. The pip cards, numbered Ace to Ten, are distinguishable by the number of pips (suit marks) on their face. In historical Tarot decks, like the fifteenth-century Visconti-Sforza, we can immediately see the difference between pip cards like the Four of Pentacles (or Coins, as it would have been known in the period) and the allegorically rich imagery of the trumps. In modern decks, like the Waite-Smith Tarot, the pip cards are usually illustrated as lavishly as the trump cards. But even in these modern decks, the illustrations typically still include the appropriate number of pips.
Four of Coins in the Visconti Tarot
The Emperor in the Visconti Tarot
I have my own theory about the pips. The white flesh of an apple looks a bit like the blank space of a card or die. Pip is also the name for the small hard seeds in apples (apples are themselves sometimes called pippins or pips)—and, by extension, in other fleshy fruits, such as grapes, oranges, and lemons.67
I love this idea that the pips of a Tarot card—the suit marks of that card—are like the seeds of a fruit. Just as a piece of fruit carries its identity within it, in its very seeds, so too does each of the numbered suit cards carry its germ within. A tomato plant will never grow from a mustard seed. A Four of Pentacles will never yield the truths of a Four of Cups. When we work with the numbered suits in Tarot, we’ll find ourselves working with those germinal aspects of the cards. We’ll grapple, for instance, with the “pentacleness” or “cuppiness” of any given Four. And we’ll also be working with number—with the ways in which expansion and contraction, structure and formation, can dramatically affect the expression of each suit. How does “fourness” affect the suit of Pentacles or the suit of Cups? If the pips are the seeds of each suit, then the card numbers are something like soil, water, and light: the conditions that shape what germinates.
Further Words on Trumps and Pips
As I’ve just suggested, the trumps and pips differ profoundly. The trump cards speak to us primarily through allegory and emblem. The pip cards, especially those in historical decks, speak to us primarily through number and structure. Even so, as part of a single and coherent mindful practice, both the trumps and the pips share the same fundamental orientation. Both extend the same invitation to open our hearts.
Here’s what we learn from the trumps: If we can lead our life mindfully and wholeheartedly, the individual path of self-discovery will convey us to the deepest integration with all things.
In every moment of our practice, we can trace out the path from Fool to World—from a narrow sense of self to the largesse Self: the self with a capital S. To recall the terms I used in the preface, the trump cards invite us to live large.
The four suits offer a similar invitation but in terms of the nitty-gritty of our workaday lives. The suits help us explore the day-to-day obstacles and opportunities of a mindful, heartful life. Here, the ancient Asian teaching of the Four Boundless Abodes provides a useful tool of analysis. As explored in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, this teaching approaches the human heart and mind from four distinct angles: care, compassion, cheer, and calm. Like the Western hermetic tradition, Asian philosophy also espouses earth, fire, water, and air as the elemental constituents of life. The Four Abodes map onto the Tarot so well because they map onto these elemental associations, especially as expanded to include our four functional capacities: body, will, soul, and mind. The abodes, with these corresponding associations, guide my card meanings here.
I also rely on the parallels between the sequence of trumps and the sequence of pips—a method I first learned through Alejandro Jodorowsky’s work. If we set aside the overarching pairing of Fool and World, Nothing and All, we have two sequences, or “decades,” of ten trumps: I, II, III, IV, V … and XI, XII, XIII (etc.). These two decades form ten dyads that can, in turn, be associated with each of the numbered pips. This interpretive method weaves together the two components of the Tarot, the trumps and the suits, into a kind of lemniscate: that figure-eight symbol for infinity. The method is particularly helpful for a practice like Mindful Tarot, which seeks to be as integrated as possible.
Nowhere are the pip cards more “pippy” than in their Aces. The Aces represent most directly the very seed of their suit, each bearing a singular imprint of the suit mark and embodying the suit’s identity in its greatest concentration and potential. What will emerge over the course of each suit’s succeeding nine cards first germinates here.
But the Aces are not just seeds. The Waite-Smith imagery borrows directly from the woodblock-style decks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A mysterious hand emerges from the clouds, bearing the mark of the suit: e.g., a sword crowned and wreathed in laurel and palm, or a rough baton, still bearing the marks of the living tree from which it was hewn. Each of these cards represents a divine gift, held out to us from the cloudy unknown. The element of the suit, the energy of the suit, is a gift from beyond. The Aces beckon us to take in, take up, and join in the energy of that gift and to skillfully expand it, empower it, and enliven it in our lives.
Ace of Pentacles
The most fundamental, basic way to think about our interconnection with all things is to think about the material world, the world of resources, the world of growing things, of eating, of giving, of taking and receiving. This is the realm of care, of the earth and the body, and of the suit of Pentacles. It’s also the world of work and resources, where we discern our relationship to a world that is given to us freely in every moment. Taking care of ourselves and our planet begins with the question of how we channel our energy. How do we work in this natural world? How do we steward and tend the world of our own bodies? How do we manage the world of material goods? Do we save or spend? Do we share or hoard? What does it mean to grow and cultivate, to build and create? What does it mean to then enjoy the harvest of our labors and to bring that joy into our community?
In the Waite-Smith imagery, the garden is the central symbol of this world. And, of course, in our Western culture every garden is ultimately an echo of the Garden of Eden. The Ace of Pentacles holds forth the full possibility of living in our everyday world as in a garden of paradise, where everything is offered freely and everything is freely taken. Can we even imagine such freedom?
Ace of Wands
The Ace of Wands starts out, rough-hewn, as a branch cut from nature. We see the gnarls and knots of the twigs it used to bear, the joints it used to have, connecting it with the rest of the tree and with the whole of the forest. And even now, a few diminutive leaves spring forth, reminding us that this remains living wood.
Wands are the oomph suit, the suit of fire and will. They bespeak vitality and invite a fearless compassion for a world that could use some art or some activism, some healing, some fixing, some transformation. But often the suit speaks most loudly in our moments of overwhelm. Our vitality can sometimes just feel like a heaviness in the belly: a sinking sense of ugh, okay now, time to pull up the big girl panties and get ’er done. Sometimes it’s as if we imagine a little engine in our gut that we’ve got to ratchet into gear. Got to get ’er done!
The suit of Wands invites a different relationship to that spark of fire, to that oomph and drive. The living wood of the Ace reminds us that vigor doesn’t come from within. It comes from the whole world—from the whole forest that once nurtured the solitary branch. Vigor is never truly solitary. It’s not “my” vigor. It’s the vigor that we’re harnessing—the vitality that we’re tapping into. This aliveness is a gift that we’ve been granted.
The Wand starts out as a branch. It has a relationship to the whole cycle of the seasons, to the harvest, to leaves and buds and fruit. The vigor that we gear up to get ’er done is actually the energy of life. Indeed, this is the vigor of growth, from seed to harvest. This is life flowing through us. If we’re feeling a little lackluster, we might try a grounding practice like 
“Dropping Anchor” (see Chapter 4) to feel our connection to the full expanse of a growing world. The gift of Wands begins there, with that sense of connection. Can we anchor ourselves in our lives?
Ace of Cups
It is the very nature of a cup to be a structured hollowness, a structured emptiness that enables collection and amplification. I think about my Tibetan singing bowl and the nearly magical way that the metal vibrates and reverberates through the empty center. That kind of amplification, that kind of resonance, is actually what the suit of Cups is all about.68
Cups, it is often said, is the suit of water and of emotions. The association to our emotional life may not be wholly inaccurate, but it seems narrow. We typically understand emotions as personal and private. Emotions belong to the individual self. If cups are hollow by nature, it might be because they reflect the essentially empty or hollow nature of the self.
Instead of emotion, the suit of Cups taps into the reverberatory, transpersonal world of soul. The soul is the “imaginative possibility” in our nature, as archetypal psychologist James Hillman puts it. We are beings who don’t merely feel. We speculate and reflect. We resonate with myth, art, and ritual. We grant our emotions the larger reach of meaning. As archetypal psychology defines it, soul sees the universal within the particular. Soul recognizes the person as the human, and the human as the divine. Thanks to soul, events rebound and amplify through dream and image. The soul wants nothing more than to continually deepen our sense of life’s beauty.
The Ace reminds us that the soul’s cup continually overflows because it manages to receive and to give simultaneously. Events echo and concatenate within the chambers of our soul, expanding through poetry and picture, myth and archetype, and blessing the world with meaning. “Soul is revealed in attachment, love, and community,” writes Thomas Moore in his book Care of the Soul. It’s in our attachment to the world, in our sense of community and commonality, that we feel the reverberations of each moment. At the same time, those reverberations create the community we feel. We should not be surprised that the Waite-Smith imagery of this suit invokes the ultimate moment of communing: the Eucharist.
The Ace of Cups invites us to drink deep—to imagine that this world, all around us, is a good world: a world of blessing, communion, and community. The gift of the Cups is also the gift we give others as we dive into the resonant abundance of the world.
Ace of Swords
Wreathed in the palm and laurel of victory, the Ace of Swords offers us the airy gift of human accomplishment at its highest reaches. Similar fronds adorned the motto of fifteenth-century Italian humanist Bernardo Bembo, “Virtue and Honor,” and a later image for his even more famous son, the important sixteenth-century poet Pietro Bembo, depicts the palm and laurel in the mouth of the winged horse Pegasus. The Swords depict our capacity to take flight. Accordingly, the suit is identified with the element of air and with the mind. At stake with the mind is not simply the narrow sense of our intellect but our entire capacity to know and understand. In many Asian cultures, what we call mind and heart are denoted by a single term that represents two sides of the same capacity for understanding. As these cultures teach, we come to know the world not just with heady reason but also with our core being: i.e., our heart.
We might call such knowing by a better name: wisdom. The Swords represent our ability to see in all the deepest, wisest meanings of that verb. But the sword of wisdom, like the sword of justice, always cuts both ways. Illumination has its inevitable shadow side. We see some things because we fail to see something else. We grasp the world, but every grasping is by definition incomplete. The Sword of the mind is always double-edged.
Yet even this double-edged nature of the Swords has its own double edge. Our minds enable us to grasp the world—and at the same time, they also enable us to break through that grasping. We can come to see the very limits of our seeing, recognizing the frame that constrains our picture of the world. The suit in this way represents both the greatest achievements that define a self and our sublime ability to transcend those limits.
Sadly, then, the greatest gift of the Swords is also its curse. Our wisdom is both our medicine and our poison. The more we strive to understand, the more we realize we need to let go of our own striving, our own understanding, and ultimately the high and airy reaches of the self. And so, through an ongoing practice of letting go, the suit of Swords begins to cultivate a mind/heart of calm.
The symmetry of the natural world, including the symmetry of the human body, is perhaps the most influential fact of our lives. Early on in the life of cells, things branch out right and left, up and down. The cosmos continually expresses choice and mirror image. We see duality, balance, opposition, and reflection in nearly every phenomenon we encounter. We divide our experiences and our judgments into pairs and dichotomies. On the one hand … but on the other hand … We polarize our options into good and bad, male and female, yes and no. We’ve seen this profound tendency toward dualism already, repeatedly, in the Tarot—and it is a tendency most powerfully represented by the suit of Swords. Yet each suit grapples, in its own way, with the symmetry, polarity, reflection, and balance of life.
Two of Pentacles
Often understood as a card about creating balance, the Two of Pentacles might also invoke creation itself. For some artists and readers, the card represents the relationship between creativity and destruction. In general, the card points to those moments when life becomes a juggling act—when our best efforts require an ability to create flow.
In Colman Smith’s imagery for the 1909 Waite-Smith deck, behind the juggling figure we see two ships riding the waves. In a very real sense, we’re all waiting for our ship to come in. (We’ll see the same adventurous seafaring imagery in other cards, like the Three of Wands.) We all invest in the world. We all put ourselves, our abilities, our material capacities, “out there.” We hope for gain and return, but inevitably our investment brings uncertainty. When it comes to those wavy vicissitudes of life, there’s only so much that we can control.
The Two of Pentacles reminds us of the importance of fluidity in our efforts and engagements in the world. Our ship may not come in. We may not get what we want. Everything may founder and crash. It’s important to keep supple in our relationship with nature, in our relationship with the world of resources.
A friend of mine calls this “keeping your knees bent”: the wide, supple stance of a surfer. I only know about surfing from riding the El as a teenager in Chicago. But subway-surfing is a great art. Avoid getting too rigid. Keep the knees bent. Learn to let go of the strap and pole! Keeping ourselves supple is the only way to absorb the shocks and shifts of our busy, multitasking lives. The Two of Pentacles, with its nimble, bent-kneed figure, reminds us to ride the waves.
Two of Wands
With its robust living branch, the Ace of Wands offers the gift of vitality. At stake is our capacity to get “fired up” by the world around us. The Two of Wands now beckons us forward. “What is it you plan to do,” asks the poet Mary Oliver, “with your one wild and precious life?” 69
Answering this question can sometimes be paralyzing. As we’ll see again in the Two of Swords, the “twoness” of the Wands image presents us with the opportunity of choice. In the classic Waite-Smith imagery, the central figure looks between two upright wands as if looking through a window. The world is framed for him. A possible way forward appears. More to the point, he holds the globe of the world in his hand. “Here is a lord overlooking his dominion and alternately contemplating a globe,” writes Waite. “It looks like the malady, the mortification, the sadness of Alexander amidst the grandeur of this world’s wealth.”
The Two offers us a way forward. We are at a fork in the road of our life’s passage. The world, according to the Waite-Smith imagery, is quite literally in our hands. But, as Waite points out, this moment is marked by melancholy. Alexander the Great is said to have wept when he heard a philosopher theorize about infinite worlds. He knew he could only ever conquer the one world at his feet.
With any step forward, the world opens up before us. But it opens up in its singularity. It’s not every possible world that lies before us. It’s just precisely this world.
In its essence, our vigor is infinite, but we ourselves are finite. Accordingly, there can be a kind of restlessness, or even a restless exhaustion, in the suit of Wands. Alexander’s melancholy might also manifest in the compassion fatigue of a healer or social worker. Alexander wanted to conquer the world, but the Wands also speak to those who want to save it. The energetic pulse of the conqueror and the humanitarian is fundamentally the same, even if the means and ends differ wildly. (If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, just consider a figure like Daenerys Targaryen in this light!)
Can you pace yourself as you step forward? Can you recognize the singular perfection of this moment and this chance?
Two of Cups
Cheers! A man and a woman—friends or lovers or partners—share a moment beneath the wings of Hermes’s caduceus.
Everything we need to know about the Cups, and about the Two of Cups, we probably learned in high school—when we first read Romeo and Juliet. When Shakespeare’s play begins, we see a Romeo in love with love. He’s pining for a woman (Rosaline) whom we never meet, and whose only salient quality is that she’s completely unavailable. Romeo’s desire for her will not be fulfilled—and that’s what makes his desire so strong. We want what we don’t have. That’s the prevailing wisdom about love, both in Shakespeare’s day and in our own. Love comes from lack—and it makes us crave, grasp, and suffer.
Shakespeare’s play turns this logic about love on its head. Of course, it’s a tragedy, so things do not end well, but at least for its two hours of traffic on the stage, the play nourishes us with an image of the boundless heart.
“My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep,” Juliet tells Romeo, on her balcony. “The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.” There’s no scarcity or lack in Juliet’s love. Magically, the more she gives, the more she has. In fact, both giving and receiving reveal that this love is itself infinite. It’s like a boundless sea: an element that is unfathomably deep and endlessly self-renewing.
Can we wrap our minds around this boundless magic? Think about the cycle of rain and evaporation, and the way in which our whole ecosystem keeps moist and alive. How does our world keep holding water? It seems miraculous. Indeed, it’s the miracle depicted in the endlessly refilling, endlessly emptying Ace of Cups. Self-begetting abundance: this is the realm of the Cups. A card like the Two of Cups, with its image of the reflection between two partners, reveals the overflowing resources and depths of the human soul. The two lovers, friends, comrades of this card give and receive seamlessly. Their minds, hearts, and imaginations are intertwined like the two snakes of the caduceus. Theirs is a perfected love. That doesn’t mean it’s “perfect,” it just means that it’s mutual and interlacing and hence complete. No beginning or end.
This card invites you to love like the sea!
Two of Swords
As a meditator, I am often reminded that the suit of Swords is all about the air. About the breath. Indeed, the “twoness” of the Two of Swords matches the duality of our respiration: in-breath, out-breath. We breathe in the air of life, and the body lifts and fills toward the sky. We breathe out, and the body empties and sinks. Respiration, a function of the air, paradoxically also grounds us, dropping us back to the earth. Rising and falling. And at a basic, physiological level, this mere activity of breathing and releasing activates the parasympathetic nervous system. A few deep breaths downshift overactive, stressed-out nerves. Quite literally, breathing in and out calms us.70 With the Two of Swords, we’re at the very heart of the Abode of Calm.
Indeed, the Two often appears at moments of impasse, when we need our calm the most. Two roads diverge and we are stuck at the fork. Competing values, paths, worlds are crossing. But the Waite-Smith imagery is ambiguous. The blindfolded figure, with her two crossed swords, sits at the edge of the ocean. Is she blindfolded because she cannot choose? Or is she blindfolded because she will not choose? If she simply doesn’t know which way to turn, this ocean behind her and the moon above suggest the depths of intuition and soul. Perhaps she needs to trust the mystery—to get more comfortable with her own unknowing.
But perhaps the suit is less about knowledge and simply more about judgment. This blindfolded figure, with her sword tips aloft, looks a lot like Lady Justice and her balance scale. Instead of an impasse or ignorance, this card possibly depicts a dispassionate impartiality. The ancients spoke of a state called ataraxia: the serenity that arises when we suspend judgment. Ataraxia emerges when we let go of certainty and rightness; when we simply allow ourselves to flow with the ups and downs of experience, like our breath flows in and out. In those moments of evenhanded calm, the world can no longer betray or surprise us, nor can we any longer inflict harm in the name of our righteous ways. Perhaps it’s for this reason that Aleister Crowley, creator of the Thoth Tarot, called this card “Peace.”
Harmony, we might say, begins with three. The resolution of opposites requires a third mediating term. As we see repeatedly in the sequence of trumps, dualities can be reconciled when they become triads. (The Lovers, Trump VI, is a perfect example of this trend.) Three is the number of the dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), and three is the smallest number of musical notes required for a chord. Three marks the archetypal number of a family: mother, father, and their child—or, in Trinitarian terms, parent, progeny, and the love that joins them (i.e., Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). Three is thus the number of community, where the individual moves beyond their reflection and out into the world. Furthermore, both the Empress (Trump III) and her mirror in the second decade of the trumps, Death (Trump XIII), clarify the link between “threeness” and synthesis as a matter of creativity, fecundity, and renewal. There might be tears with the Threes, either of joy or of grief, since these are often cards of commitment and transition. Something breaks free in the Threes. The Threes bring us out of ourselves and into the dynamic cooperation of opposites through a process that might feel as hopeful as a new birth—or as mournful as a death.
Three of Pentacles
Being kicked out of the Garden of Eden was no joke. “Cursed is the ground for thy sake …,” God tells Adam. “Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee … In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground” (Genesis 3:17–19). Adam and Eve’s slacker days are over. The penalty for disobeying God is work. No longer can we live in harmonious Eden, freely partaking of the fruits of the earth. No longer can we live immortally, basking in God’s grace. Instead, our human lives are cursed by labor, and defined by death. At odds with nature, we work hard to sustain ourselves with food and shelter. We labor and we sweat in pain and sorrow from cradle to grave, from dust to dust.
Right. It’s a familiar story. Even if we’ve never read the Bible or if the Judeo-Christian myth means nothing to us, we’ve all imagined a life without work. Or at least we’ve imagined a life of ease, where labor doesn’t feel so, um, laborious—where the work of our hands and our hearts instead makes us happy. Fulfilled. Empowered.
The suit of Pentacles offers a vision of this life of ease. How might this planet of ours become a true paradise? The Three of Pentacles tries to answer that question with the idea of the masterwork, and the creative labor behind it. Importantly, in the Waite-Smith imagery, our master artist does not work alone, nor does she work for herself. Her sculpture recalls the accomplishments of the great Gothic cathedrals. These churches were built anonymously—hundreds of hands behind every stone, buttress, and beam. And yet these cathedrals were also filled with incredible works of art. Every fresco, every gargoyle and bas relief, and every stained glass window was a tour de force. The mastery of the great cathedrals required collaboration and community. No cathedral could have ever been built by a single person. (The same could be said, by the way, about the artistry of the Tarot.)
The Three of Pentacles invites us to transcend our individual aspiration. Work becomes liberation when it embodies the spirit of community—when it speaks beyond the singular and solitary self. We never live this life alone. To regain paradise, we need only recognize the masterful truth of our shared existence.
Three of Wands
As someone who lives in the damp and chilly Pacific Northwest, I know just how easy it can be to smother a flame with too little air, too much moisture, or with wood that’s still too green from its living connection with the earth. The element associated with the suit of Wands is fire, and the suit mark is hewn from living wood. For fire to ignite, you need both the brilliant flash of light—the spark—and the dry wood to be kindled. The causes and conditions need to be just right.
The Three of Wands shows us such a just right moment. The Two of Wands opened a window on the world. Now, with the Three of Wands, that window has become a portal, a gate. The synthetic force of the Threes has invited us to step across a threshold. The card asks for our commitment, for the active engagement of our will
Waite describes the scene as “a calm, stately personage … looking from a cliff’s edge at ships passing over the sea.” The ships, we are meant to understand, are their ships. This enterprising soul has cast their lot. Their fortune rides on the waves. Will their ship come in? The staves they lean on have been well staked in the ground. Much has been committed to this endeavor.
That’s the thing about the Wands. We need to show up, and we need to ante up, for the spark to catch fire. For some readers, this card also signifies partnership and collaboration: the synthesis of energies. An idea catches on. When the conditions are right and the heart is willing, it’s easy for the dry wood to kindle elsewhere. The whole world becomes filled with light.
Three of Cups
Cheers, again! The Three of Cups is perhaps the cheeriest and most delightful of all the 78 cards. The Two of Cups showed us the seamless mirroring of two friends, lovers, comrades. Their entwined alliance is greater than the sum of two individuals. Winding together like the two snakes of the caduceus, they suggest that we can’t make sense of the human soul from the isolated standpoint of the individual. How can love be something that “I” have for “you”? What flows between us is collective, flowing underground like the great aquifers. We share the depths of soul. It is among us and between us that we experience beauty. Collectively we thrill to the reverberations of life.
The Three of Cups celebrates this resounding truth: the communal truth of the human soul. With glasses raised high, this card celebrates the joy of human beings, being together.
When we encounter this card in a reading, it’s a time to whoop and hoot, and also to thank whatever or whomever we thank during such woot-worthy times. We have been touched by grace. Indeed, Colman Smith’s imagery self-consciously calls forth Botticelli’s depiction of the Three Graces in his 1480s painting “Primavera.” In Greek mythology, the Three Graces are Aglaea (splendor or brilliance), Euphrosyne (mirth or joy) and Thalia (abundance or good cheer). These three goddesses of cheeriness remind us of a world that’s one great and glowing gift: abundant, brilliant, filled with joy.
Three of Swords
Three swords piercing a heart: we know what that means. This card reads itself, doesn’t it? This is the card of sorrow and heartbreak, betrayal and disruption. If cards like the Three of Cups and the Three of Pentacles remind us that we never live this life alone, then the Three of Swords recalls our vulnerability. My husband calls this dilemma our fundamental human ailment: “cardiosleeveosis.” We can’t help but wear our hearts on our sleeves. Being human, being together, means that we’re going to get hurt. You’ve been warned!
But it’s also important to remember that all interpretations are subjective. The double-edged sword of the mind carves out both shadow and light. When we are absolutely certain that we understand the meaning of a card, any card, we might want to gently poke at our certainty, to flip it over like a very interesting rock on the trail, and to see what the forest may offer us in return—what treasures may lie in the shadow of our own absolute conviction.
In this case, it’s important to remember the origins of the Waite-Smith imagery for this card. Pamela Colman Smith evidently found her inspiration in the 1491 Sola-Busca deck, which decorates the Three of Swords’s heart with garlands and fruit. According to Sofia Di Vincenzo, author of the companion book for a 1998 reproduction of the deck, the card’s pierced heart is the Sacred Heart: an image of voluntary sacrifice and triumph. Jesus sheathes our suffering in his own heart, transforming sorrow into bliss. For Di Vincenzo, the Three of Swords thus denotes generosity, serenity, and joy.
Sorrow? Joy? Defeat? Victory? At the very least, the Three of Swords invites us to be curious about our own achy-breaky heart. When we bring curiosity to any moment of heartbreak, our vulnerability opens into something else again. Our wounds become portals of truth.
The swords of wisdom always cut both ways.
Four walls make a room, four ranks of soldiers make a square formation (used to great effect by the Duke of Wellington to defeat Napoleon at Waterloo), and although our planet is a seamless globe, the four cardinal directions define everywhere we go and the entire parameters of our world. Four is also, of course, a hugely important number for the Tarot itself: the four suits, the four court cards, the Four Abodes of the boundless heart. The “fourness” of the number four bespeaks the stability, strength, and refuge of our home and hearth. It’s also the number of the Emperor and Temperance (Trumps IV and XIV, respectively), and may suggest an impulse toward order and restraint. Both qualities are essential to build a sound foundation. But without humor, or faith, or grace, our impulse toward order can also pivot into stagnation. Or worse.
Four of Pentacles
Whether we think of the Pentacles as the suit of money (the original suit mark was Coins) or the suit of nature and the body, the Pentacles invite us to consider the impact of our actions on the world. How are we marshaling our energy and resources? And, on the flip side, how and when do we hold back? How and when do we keep our resources in reserve?
This set of questions brings us to this suit in all its “fourness.” The Waite-Smith imagery and classic divinatory meanings point to the shadow side of stability. The Four of Pentacles depicts reserve as mere avarice. De Angelis’s imagery for the Universal Tarot offers a particularly stark illustration. A King Midas–like figure literally sits on his riches. His feet, hands, and head all cling to the golden symbols of his wealth. Instead of providing strength and refuge, his resources promote only a kind of clutching. This king is a miser, not a steward. He fails to take care of a world held in common with others. Instead, our king’s care for his wealth only increases his cares, his worries. This Midas rules nothing because fear of scarcity already rules him. Despite his wealth, he already lives in a world of poverty.
By way of contrast, in the Crowley-Harris Thoth Tarot,71 the Four of Disks (aka Pentacles) is called “Power.” In that deck, we see the positive connotations of being anchored in one’s might, rooted in the conservation of energy and resource.
In its fullness, light and shadow, the Four of Pentacles is a card about holding back. The reserve it denotes can turn us into a Midas, an Ebenezer Scrooge, holding on to what is ours and pushing the world away. But a posture of restraint can also be skillful and empowering. We can hold back in recognition of the ebb and flow of life, recognizing this moment as a time for keeping it in, in order to enable future moments when the energy bursts forth.
From this standpoint, we can begin to appreciate the entire teaching of the Pentacles. We can begin to consider how we might best take care of our own and the world’s resources, cherishing this earthy embodied existence of ours.
Four of Wands
The Four of Wands—a card of joyous celebration—recalls the chuppah, or wedding canopy, in a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony: four staffs create a tent open on all four sides. The chuppah symbolizes the marriage union and the home and refuge it creates. This refuge is blessed by the heavens and open to all of God’s creation. Even though neither Waite nor Smith identify their image as a wedding canopy, nonetheless the chuppah is mentioned in a text that Waite wrote about extensively: the Zohar, the thirteenth-century master text of Kabbalah. From a Kabbalistic point of view, the chuppah marks the union of Shechina (the indwelling presence of God) and the Creator, and the subsequent potential for God’s creation to embody divine light.
Whether or not Waite and Smith consciously saw their garlanded bower as a chuppah, the image of marriage helps us clarify the vitality and passion of the Wands. How crazy, marvelous, and ultimately improbable it is that two people should come together and say, Yes, I will. “Will you take so-and-so to be your spouse? Will you love them, comfort them, honor and protect them, and, forsaking all others, be faithful to them as long as you both shall live?” Talk about “will power”! It takes the power of a vow to turn something as fragile as, let’s say, sexual chemistry, into the stability of a marriage. It’s downright miraculous that we humans can tether something as evanescent as passion to a future of home, hearth, and family.
The fire that the Wands embodies can either set us and our world ablaze—or fizzle out. This card invites us to bring our intention and our passion together: the application of ass-in-chair for the writer; the spouse’s countless daily acts of comfort, honor, and protection; the activist’s innumerable hours of ringing doorbells. It’s like that famous Edison quote: “Genius is one-percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” The suit of Wands as a whole offers us the gift of divine light—the gift of that one percent. The Four of Wands, with its garlanded bower, ushers us into the remaining ninety-nine.
When the Four of Wands appears for us, it heralds celebration, completion, and community. It invites us to find our stability and to lay a secure foundation. This card welcomes us to our truest home.
Four of Cups
On the Greek island of Ikaria, the tables are always big enough. No matter how many folks stumble in to the Easter feast, for instance, there’s always a way to squeeze in another chair. And every few minutes someone new will shout “Geia mas!”—To our health! Cheers!—and another glass of that potent homemade wine will get poured for us—all of us. This is about us.
The Four of Cups is not that card. This is a card about me. In the traditional Waite-Smith imagery, we find a scene of reserve—the restraint that characterizes the “fourness” of the Four. With eyes downcast, the figure “contemplates” (as Waite puts it) the three cups in the foreground with an air of fatigue and discontent, “as if the wine of this world had caused satiety only.” Stuck in the past—a difficulty we’ll find with the Five, Six, and Eight of Cups as well—the figure has drunk of the world’s graces and found no fulfillment. Now, in a replay of the suit’s Ace, the hand of divinity is again emerging from the unknown clouds to offer a gift. As Waite writes: “Another wine, as if a fairy gift, is now offered the wastrel, but he sees no consolation therein.” The bounty we see everywhere in this suit is decidedly present here. Our “wastrel” is being offered the elixir of the gods! And yet she remains parched, alone, reserved. She holds back. If we’re feeling particularly unkind, we might call her a miser of the soul. Her posture isn’t really so different from that of our Midas figure in the Four of Pentacles. Both cards are portraits of suffering.
What is keeping us from the big table? Is it sadness, anxiety, fear, pain? Is it greed or anger? Is it past injustice or present danger? It’s time to look up and to consider, deeply consider, what is being offered. Take the cup.
Four of Swords
More than any other suit, the Swords explore the challenges of being an individual. The very mark of the suit, that upright sword, recalls the posture of the human ego: the first-person “I” standing tall against the backdrop of the world. This upright singularity also recalls the knife-edge of a balance scale. The Swords evoke our ability to weigh our experience, seeing and understanding how the parts of our life stack up against each other. In cards like the Two of Swords, we’ve already seen how this ability can lead us ambivalently toward either peace or an impasse. The keen blade of wisdom offers us either the serenity of suspended judgment or the mental anguish of second-guessing. The Swords are the suit of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ever hobbled by “thinking too precisely”—but this is also the suit of Siddhartha, the historical Buddha, sitting under the bodhi tree.
The Waite-Smith imagery helps us see the “fourness,” or stability, of the suit. We face a Knight who lies in a suspended state. Knights tend to be “wandsy,” but there’s no fire in this Knight. He’s no longer on his quest. Instead, his sword lies as still as he does, and three other swords hang suspended in the air above him. Everything seems to be on hold. Traditionally this is a card of recuperation, convalescence after an illness, and retreat from battle and conflict.
But the card’s most important teaching is its sense of suspension. Can we find a middle way between victory and defeat? The Knight lies as still as the dead, but the blanket covering him belies a sense of life. In the Crowley-Harris Thoth system, this card is called “Truce.” The Waite-Smith suggests something more like a ceasefire. For now, at any rate, there is calm and peace. The swords still dangle overhead. Everything remains suspended—and perhaps nothing has been permanently resolved. And yet, the Knight’s palms press together as if in prayer or gratitude. We’re not in the blessed world of Cups, but this moment carries a grace all the same.
There’s a space between gain and loss, between joy and sorrow. Can we release our grip, lay down our weapons, and find that quiet refuge we’ve so long been seeking?
The Fives require that we gain perspective. The stability of four relates to its grounded nature, to the four cardinal directions and the four corners that make a room. Five connotes that something extra that forces us to think outside the box. “To the four directions of earth we add a fifth dimension,” 72 as Rachel Pollack puts it in Rachel Pollack’s Tarot Wisdom. Our world becomes less stable, but our perspective broadens. This something extra might be the axis of time, bringing a sense of cause and effect to the four quadrants of Cartesian space—or it might be the ethereal quintessence of medieval alchemy: the fifth element that transcends the physical realm. Five also marks the extra “suit” of trumps that fifteenth-century players added to an ordinary deck of playing cards. And, as it comes to that, Trump V (the Hierophant) and Trump XV (the Devil) both suggest that the Fives carry a strong sense of hierarchy. Thanks to the “something extra” of this number, we can now see above, between, and below—where before we surveyed only a broad and equal plain. A new sense of social interconnection emerges. Each card encourages us to explore the relationships and relative positions of the central figures. With the Fives’ sensitivity to time, each card also seems to depict a moment in an ongoing narrative: stories of gain and loss, mastery and defeat, cause and effect.
Five of Pentacles
Two figures, subject to the full force of the natural environment, rely solely on their own frail and mortal bodies. Snow, cold, injury. The Five of Pentacles illustrates our helplessness in the face of nature. Yet at the same time, this card demonstrates that there’s nothing natural about such helplessness. As Waite tells us, the two figures are “mendicants”—beggars. Their lack of material resources, their subjugation to the natural world, arises ironically within the economic context of a world made by humans. This is the world that King Midas—our miser from the Four of Pentacles—has built: a world of scarcity and fear, now seen from another perspective.
The mendicants walk past a church, its window glowing with warmth and the promise of sanctuary. But the church door is closed. The institution provides solace—but apparently not for them. Instead, the card depicts a hierarchy of inside vs. outside, haves vs. have-nots. There’s nothing particularly “natural” about these hierarchies.
How do we care for ourselves and for each other? The Pentacles explore our place in nature. As carbon-based life forms, participants in the great evolutionary pageant, we humans are decidedly a part of the natural world. But we are also somehow outside of nature—or at least we continually set ourselves outside of it, realizing our powers for good and for ill, asserting our dominion, and finding ways to transform the world in our own image. Are we a part of nature? Or are we somehow apart from it? More and more these days, I find myself thinking that the whole idea of “human nature” is itself an oxymoron. The world of humans and the world of nature: what could be more at odds?
The Five of Pentacles asks that we explore this oxymoron. Our natural frailty requires that we find ways of being more humane, and more human. Our planet requires us to do the same. We need to connect with each other and with this great blue-green marble. We need to feel community. The Five of Pentacles points to the sorrow that comes when community shuts the door.
Five of Wands
Add a fifth staff to the four poles that made our canopy in the Four of Wands, and we now find a restless sense of hierarchy: above, below, between. In its most benign forms, the Five of Wands evokes the creative and competitive spirit, where individuals hone their personal best in relation to others. In less benign forms, the Five of Wands is the card of politics, of striving against others in order to wrangle one’s way up “the greasy pole” (as nineteenth-century British statesman Benjamin Disraeli put it). Moving up the ladder, grappling up the pole, can be an energizing effort. It can also be bloody exhausting.
The Five of Wands could denote the energy of a team. Like five separate fingers, these staffs could come together in one hand, one creative endeavor.73 Instead, the Waite-Smith imagery portrays the concert of competitive spirits. Each individual’s will stands alone against all others. What is the impact of such competition? Will it create a more vibrant, more loving, more fruitful and flourishing world? As others have pointed out, these five staffs could come together to form the five-pointed perfection of the pentagram. How might the vitality of individuals come together to reveal something that we all have in common? That’s the kind of energy that the Wands can unleash: the energy that can transform not only a piece of the world for my benefit but the entirety of the world for all of us.
Five of Cups
The Fives tend to disrupt stasis, broadening our perspective with an additional dimension that reveals, for instance, above, beneath, and between. In the Five of Cups, this fifth dimension is time. Past, present, and future. Three cups have been tipped over. In Colman Smith’s depiction, red wine spills from two of the cups, while water seeps from the third. Two cups remain standing. Across the water, Waite points out, “a small keep or holding” stands in the distance. “It is a card of loss,” writes Waite, “but something remains over.” What has been lost? What remains? If we could only look in the right direction, what might we find across the bridge?
Classically, the Five of Cups denotes remorse and regret. Our central figure surveys the damage of the past—crying, as it were, over spilt water and wine. Indeed, the figure seems unable to move on, or to take refuge in what remains. Our protagonist’s back remains turned. Bygones could be bygones. This loss could simply be water under the bridge. But instead of heading into the future, she just keeps chewing on the past, ruminating over her grief. Such indeed is the nature of remorse—a word that literally means “to bite again” (re-mordēre).
A world of plenty is plainly depicted here. There are more cups and flowing water than we truly need. But as with the Four of Cups, our protagonist can’t see the obvious. There’s a whole landscape in front of her, but she sees only loss. Just a few degrees to the right … What would it take to turn our head, just a few degrees? What would it take to shift our perspective, if only so slightly, in order to glimpse the possibility of crossing over, of joining the keep and community? We don’t have to take it all in, all at once. We don’t have to abandon the past entirely. But maybe we can turn our head just a few degrees …
Five of Swords
The “fiveness” of the Fives marks a widening of perspective: the capacity to add a new, extra axis to our map of the world. What was previously invisible can perhaps now be seen. Most dramatically, perhaps, we now can see the interconnectedness of our world. Poverty is connected to wealth (Pentacles). My vigorous striving puts me in conflict with others (Wands). The past can clear the way for my future (Cups). Halfway through the sequence of the pips, the Fives thus mark a turning point for the boundless heart.
The Five of Swords also offers this sense of expansion. We are presented a scene of victory, but one witnessed through a wide-angle lens. The three figures in the card represent three different relations to this conflict. We have the proud victor in the foreground, the completely dejected loser slumps in the distant background, and in the middle ground stands a figure who seems less unequivocally vanquished. (In Colman Smith’s image, the middle-ground figure still bears a cloak and stands erect.)
Some modern readers refer to this pip as the “pyrrhic victory card”: success is won, but at a cost. But isn’t that always the case? The card invites us to see the whole dance. No win or gain is ever simply about triumph. Every foreground has its background, and its middle ground too. In this human life of ours, there will always be the complexity of relationship and perspective. The Five of Swords simply asks us to take note of where we are in this dance.
Santa Fe–based artist Lisa de St. Croix beautifully reveals the card’s poignancy in her 2014 Tarot de St. Croix. Her Five of Swords depicts a family system: angry father, passive mother, and punished child. Her card reveals that any moment of conflict entails an entire constellation of enmeshed positions. As she explains, “The little boy [ … ] has become a pawn, cornered in a situation between his parents. The father yells while the mother silently and tearfully throws silent swords at her husband. There is no victory in a situation like this.” 74
How are we positioned in our own life’s constellation? And where do we go from here?
Six marks the doubling of three, the trebling of two, and thus denotes a complex sort of balance. The Sixes intertwine the vision of growth and harmony that we’ve seen in the Threes with the view of dualism and reflection so pertinent for the Twos. The Sixes are cards of meeting and recognition—but often with an added sense of going beyond or leaving behind.
In this context, some readers invoke the complex harmony of a six-pointed star: a combination of an upward and a downward triangle. This “Star of David” can be read as a joining of fire 
and water 
, of higher and lower: a powerful and stable overcoming of dichotomy. But the parallels with the two “six” trumps, The Lovers (VI) and the Tower (XVI), suggest instead a much more dynamic resolution. Both the Lovers and the Tower do bring high and low together, but they do so only in the context of a fall. In the Tower, human figures tumble from high to low as the edifice collapses. In the Lovers’ garden of Eden, heaven meets earth thanks to humanity’s fall from grace. Resolution doesn’t necessarily mean smooth sailing. There may be lightning, flaming swords, gnashing of teeth! Indeed, while the Sixes do tend to depict positive outcomes—moments of grace and recognition—they also suggest the potential costs of these happy endings.
Six of Pentacles
How do we recognize a world in need?
With its sharp depiction of poverty, the Five of Pentacles invoked a world out of balance. The Six of Pentacles seeks to even things out.
Waite’s description of this card is unambiguously positive. A merchant weighs money in a pair of scales and distributes it to those in need. Our merchant’s open left hand, golden coins tumbling forth, contrasts sharply with the closed doors of the church in the Five of Pentacles. His generosity, Waite tells us, “is a testimony to his own success in life, as well as his goodness of heart.”
Balance has been essential to the suit of Pentacles from the start, and the imagery of the scale—of measurement, comparison, and recognition—pervades this card. The good, prosperous merchant weighs his actions and has measured his resources. He knows what he has to give and where his wealth will have its biggest impact. The Waite-Smith imagery also suggests that he has weighed and measured the poor folks in front of him. He has determined who deserves his generosity more, turning his full attention to the figure on his left. Further, the merchant’s actions give the measure of the man himself. His charity is a “testimony,” as Waite says, both to his material success and to his good heart. The more the merchant gives, the more prosperous and kind he must be. In this way, the act of giving alms allows us to calculate the worth of both giver and receiver. Both sides of the scale of charity are weighed.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with calculation—with measuring, weighing, and comparing. It’s one way to achieve balance in a complex world, and it may even be inevitable in a world where there’s so much need wherever we turn.
But the Six of Pentacles also suggests that the scales will never be even—at least not as long as we try to keep score of giving and taking. As long as we try to weigh the balance of generosity and need, we’ll feel like our good deeds can’t even scratch the surface. The merchant stands above, while the needy kneel below. The deserving poor are on one side and the undeserving on the other. Our kindness is good and our efforts are well placed, but our generosity itself draws attention to the differences between one side and the other—even while we try to close the gap.
If we threw out the scale, would things finally balance out?
One wonders what it would look like to live in a world where resources flow freely, like air through a healthy ecosystem.
In-breath, out-breath. The Six invites us to imagine the freedom of such an exchange.
Six of Wands
Mirror, mirror, on the wall … It’s not just evil queens who crave recognition! We all want the mirror of our world to reflect us and confirm our worth. It’s part of how we craft our values, affirm our boundaries, verify our sense of self.
The Six of Wands is a card of victory and recognition. The warrior has returned, garlanded and celebrated. Waite tells us that the card can also herald great news: “it is expectation crowned with its own desire.” We’ve put our energy out into the world, and the world has responded with high-fives and huzzahs! This is a moment to savor, and to recall in quieter and lonelier times. But it’s equally important to see that we have little control over these moments of public honor. Sometimes things go well and bouquets are thrown at our feet, and sometimes our work and our worth are simply not recognized. Such is the nature of our social world. Some tweets go viral, fortunes are made, stars are born. And sometimes we languish in obscurity.
In those more humble and solitary times, when our efforts seem to go unnoticed, it’s important to remember that the world is always responding to us. In ways large and tiny, momentous and minor, what we do affects everything around us, and vice versa. The world is always our mirror. If we look carefully, patiently, we’ll find our beauty reflected back a thousand times over.
Six of Cups
Waite’s description for this card is one of simplicity: “Children in an old garden, their cups filled with flowers.” Such a sweet and simple image—an image from childhood. The garden is “old” because it exists in the past. Those children, those blooms, have long since faded away. We can’t go home again.
Nostalgia literally means “the pain of returning home”—and the Six of Cups reminds us that our distance from the past can ache. But remembering the past can also point the way for the present. The Five of Cups showed us a figure stuck in the past, chewing over the memory of loss. The Six of Cups, in contrast, shows us that memory can be a source of healing, a source of inspiration. Memory, with its overflowing cups and its childlike bloom, can be the mirror in which we recognize our truer self.
It’s time to remember that old garden—wherever and whenever it existed. Maybe it was actually a garden, or maybe it was your home as a child. But your “garden” might not even be a place. It might just be a feeling. Remember it. Honor it. You can’t swim back to those moments, but the fountain of their sweetness can nourish you still. Be the you that drinks those waters.
Six of Swords
What does it mean to move on?
The ferryman in the Six of Swords carries his passengers to the farther shore. The water ahead of the boat is notably smoother than the rough seas behind. We’re moving into calmer currents. We’ll be hitting solid ground soon enough.
And perhaps the journey comes not a moment too soon. The six upright swords in this punt recall the blades hanging over the Knight in the Four of Swords. The Four was a card of retreat and suspension. Perhaps the truce ended. Perhaps we recovered our strength. At any rate, what was up in the air has now landed, point first, and a decision has been made. We’re moving on.
The suit of Swords continually invites us to deliberate, compare, and decide. But decisions always come at a cost. It’s not so easy to turn our back on the past. The past defines us. We wouldn’t be here without our past. In this card, not only does the seated figure have their back to the past, but they’ve also turned their back on the ferryman himself. We couldn’t have done this alone, and moving on may feel like we’re betraying those who have helped us up until now. Moving on means letting go of who we were and how we got here.
Or does it? This card always reminds me of a death poem by the great Zen poet Ryokan: “Showing its back / and showing its front / a falling maple leaf.” When we move on, we carve our lives into a before and an after, a past and a future. But these two sides are just the front and the back of existence. Who we are, as we navigate the waters ahead, is everything we’ve been and everything we’re becoming. The past never really recedes. It’s the same water we’re gliding through now.
Seven has long been defined, in both Eastern and Western mythologies, as a number with exalted mystical relevance. There are seven days in the biblical story of creation (Genesis 1:27), and seven marks the number of classical “planets” (i.e., those easily visible to the naked eye: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), and the known metals associated with those planets (silver, mercury/quicksilver, copper, gold, iron, tin, and lead). The Indian Vedic tradition also notes seven planets, which are associated with the seven chakras. So powerful is the mystical heritage of the number seven that Tarot artist and scholar Robert M. Place identifies it as the structuring principle of the Tarot as a spiritual tool.
At the same time, Trump VII (the Chariot) and Trump XVII (the Star) remind us that spiritual progress requires a steady and constant hand. “After the ecstasy, the laundry,” as one modern-day mystic puts it.75 Moment by moment, the Charioteer needs to manage his horses, curbing and restraining, goading and prodding. No matter how compelling the mystical vision, the wagon can’t go anywhere without this patient and steadfast direction. The Star offers a similar depiction of the steadiness that enables navigation. That card depicts the seven wandering lights of the classical planets clustered around the eight-pointed Star of Bethlehem: the eastern star that leads the way.
Seven of Pentacles
“A young man, leaning on his staff, looks intently at seven pentacles attached to a clump of greenery on his right; one would say that these were his treasures and that his heart was there.” For Waite, this card offers an image of investment and deep care. The work of our hands in the natural world is not just our treasure but is already a part of us—bound to our innermost core. Contrast this image with the Midas figure in the Four of Pentacles. Instead of hoarding our resources and investments, the Seven of Pentacles offers a vision of waiting, of gestation even. There’s a natural process underway, tied to the pulsations of planetary time, to the turning seasons and the movements of day and night. Our farmer is a part of all of that.
But our farmer is not only tied to the turning seasons. She is also the person who turns the earth. She tends not just the plants, but also the soil—taking care of that steadfast womb of all that germinates, that embracing tomb of all that dies. “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all,” 76 writes Wendell Berry, the great American poet—and farmer. The soil, he continues, “is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life.”
Of course, the Seven of Pentacles isn’t necessarily about farming. The card’s clump of greenery may represent other investments in our life, other projects and processes. But the card nonetheless reminds us to honor the fundamental soil of our world—to attend to the rhythms and resources that make any harvest possible. This card invites our patience, our steady care, and our trust.
How can we steady ourselves? How do we sustain an open and expectant state, ready for and accepting of whatever comes? How do we plant ourselves more firmly in the soil of our lives?
Seven of Wands
Again and again the suit of Wands asks me how I engage my will—whether alone or in community. It asks me, further, about that community. Is this a world of sisters and brothers? A world of rivals? A world of enemies? Where am I in relationship to this world?
From the vantage of the Seven of Wands, the answer to that question seems pretty bleak. The central figure stands against the world. Like so many of the Waite-Smith Wands images, this warrior fights alone. He is also grossly outnumbered, and stands with his back to the edge of a cliff. But this warrior does have the advantage, standing on higher ground. We may feel grossly under attack—but at the same time, the Seven of Wands offers a steadying and encouraging message. We can stand our ground. We have the upper hand.
This is the Michelle Obama card: “When they go low, we go high.” 77 Most profoundly, the Seven of Wands invites us to “go high.” The Waite-Smith imagery places us on the mountain. The warrior figure of this card is aware of a higher path—aware of a path that might be more arduous than wandering along in the lowlands but is also potentially more nourishing. The card’s imagery isn’t as bleak or oppositional as it first appears. Steadfast and resolute, the Seven of Wands’ warrior doesn’t just stand her ground. She goes high and leads the way for all of us.
Seven of Cups
A proliferation of options, a mesmerizing array of possible lives. Our seeker seems frozen in place. “Manifesting all of these seems possible,” writes Waite, “but so far, they exist only in his vision.” An embarrassment of riches. Any one of these fantasies could fulfill our yearning—but somehow the Seven of Cups suggests that more is less.
In this digital age, I always think of the Seven of Cups as the “internet card.” A figure, with their back turned to us, faces a vaporous world of dangers, riches, revelations, honors, adventures. If Colman Smith were painting the image today, this figure would be facing a computer—or the glowing LCD rectangle in the palm of their hand: a proliferation of pixilated options, a universe of fancies and fantasies, images and ideals. We can imagine almost anything, and surf along with those visions indefinitely. In the twenty-first-century we have an unprecedented opportunity to immerse ourselves completely in a world of dreams and projections, always just one click away from something even more tantalizing.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that! The world of dreams and visions is also the world of the soul. The Seven of Cups shares a deep lineage with the High Priestess and the Moon—with the depths of the mystic and with the cloud of unknowing. And yet, why do we need so many choices? What will it take for us to feel like we already have enough? Will we ever find ourselves fulfilled and content? Must we keep surfing our options?
As the suit of water and the soul, the Cups remind us that we’re sometimes so thirsty that we forget there’s water all around us. If we’re feeling parched and dry, if we’re still yearning, it’s not necessarily because there’s something missing. It may simply be that we’ve forgotten how to drink. Instead, we may simply have gotten better and better at being thirsty.
This card may well be inviting you, simply, to stop surfing and splashing around. Our imagination is deep, profound, and wise—but we can also easily lose ourselves amid a sea of distractions. Maybe it’s time to turn away from the screen. To blink a few times. To let our eyes adjust to the light.
The Seven of Cups invites us to steady our imagination. It’s time to drink deep of this present moment.
Seven of Swords
The Seven of Swords is often thought of disparagingly as the “deception card” or the “thief card.” We are behind the scenes at a battle. The soldiers’ camp, Waite tells us, is unguarded. Its tents are unprotected. Their occupants are oblivious and far away, silhouetted in the distant background against a campfire. Meanwhile, our thief tiptoes away, booty in hand, evading all notice.
And yet, the thief leaves behind two swords, staked upright in the ground like battlements. In the Waite-Smith depiction, the central figure stares back at those two swords, as if they denote a choice or a matter of principle. Staked in the ground, the swords bespeak a kind of steadiness and honor in the face of battle. One recalls here the imagery of the Five of Swords, where the immodest victor has taken all—and where two vanquished swords lie in the dust like fallen soldiers. In contrast, these two upright swords bear witness to an act of discretion. The Seven of Swords is a card of restraint rather than theft.
Restraint. There are always things that we hold back, even when we think we’re revealing everything or being completely transparent. Our choice of words, our gestures, our posture: everything communicates something, and does so at the expense of communicating something else. There are always ways that we’re wielding our sword to shape the situation, to tip the scales one way or another. The Seven of Swords asks us to be rigorously honest with ourselves. What are we actually choosing?
It will again do us well to remember the Swords’ lineage with the trump of Justice. Our views of the world are always partial, but nonetheless we need to act on the basis of what we know. And then, we need to live with the consequences. The Seven of Swords reminds us to survey the whole scene, as best we can. Now is a time to be cautious and discreet, to keep our own counsel perhaps. We cannot see it all, and more will surely be revealed over time. There is always more to see and know.
Restraint in this context is, in fact, the antidote to pride. Thieves, deceivers, and con artists typically assume they know all—or at least more than their dupes. But there’s no position from which everything can be known. There’s no position from which everything is visible and exposed.
I am always vulnerable to error. That’s why restraint is required.
Alone among the pips, the Eights have three corresponding trumps (Strength, Justice, and the Moon) instead of the usual two. 78 Three instead of two trumps, just as eight is the number two raised to the power of three. Eight is the number of the heavenly spheres in the Ptolemaic solar system, tucked inside each other like so many celestial Russian dolls: the spheres for each of the seven wandering stars (the planets), and a culminating sphere that holds the fixed stars. Eight is a doubled image of stability (4 x 2), and it is dualism raised to the power of the trinity (23): a kind of divine overcoming of all opposition. The Waite-Smith imagery reminds us that eight is also the number of the lemniscate, the infinity symbol we see placed over the Lady’s head in the trump of Strength. Eight thus signifies perfection and offers the infinite perspective of cosmic balance.
In short, eight takes us to the mountaintop, to a vantage from which the world is still, laid out in its entirety. From such a vantage, there’s nothing to do but surrender. The Eights invite us to yield to simplicity and stillness. This is the stillness of the Lady’s hands around the Lion’s mouth, or of the scales of Justice finding their simple balance. It is also the still simplicity of the watery Moon: the fathomless waters of the soul from which all beauty and meaning arise.
Eight of Pentacles
There’s an admirable simplicity in the Eight of Pentacles. This card shows us an apprentice at work. The focus is on consistency and precision of effort. With patience and painstaking labor, the apprentice is learning their craft. There’s no room here for self-expression. There’s no room for the vaulted cathedral mastery of the Three of Pentacles. Instead, the apprentice gets out of the way, puts self aside, so that the work itself may come to the foreground. With chisel in hand, the apprentice’s labor is less about product and more about process, less about masterpiece and more about peaceful work with the materials close by. The apprentice simply surrenders to the work. Dedication to the craft is everything.
The Eight of Pentacles imagines a world where work itself is a deep spiritual practice. It reminds me of the famous Zen saying “Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.” Our work might feel like mere drudgery—the antithesis of a mystical pursuit. The fire won’t keep itself lit, our garden needs watering, our thirst needs slaking. Chop wood, carry water. We do what we have to do. But these day-to-day tasks actually are the spiritual path. Our work in the world is the very ground and expression of our awakening.
Chop and carry. The Eight of Pentacles simply urges us to dive into our work, our craft, our relationship with the world of matter—with the world that matters.
Eight of Wands
In Waite’s wonderful phrase, the Eight of Wands shows us “that which is on the move”—that sense of life hurtling forward, of endeavors coming to fruition, of news and answers about to arrive. This propulsive energy is native to the Wands—intrinsic to this suit of fire. Fire rises, blazes, spreads. Fire streaks across the sky. With the streaking javelins of the Waite-Smith imagery, the Eight of Wands shows us that our projects are literally projectiles. Our energy in the world has been launched forward and is now coming in for a landing.
But might there be another way to read this card, especially in the context of Mindful Tarot? In the Sevens of each suit, we witnessed a turn toward steadiness and restraint: an encouragement to wait, to stand our ground, to abide within the present, to keep one’s own counsel. Now, with the Eights, we’re being invited to surrender to the movement already under way. Everything is still up in the air, but there’s nothing left to be done. Our bodies may be flooded with the adrenaline of the moment. But our energies and our projects require only our faith.
Eight of Cups
This card looks like moving on, like the kind of transition card that we’ve already seen in the Six of Swords. But our central figure isn’t just moving on; she’s moving up—toward the mountains in the distance. This is the card of the renunciate. This is the card of the seeker who surrenders to the pilgrim’s path, staff in hand, making her lonely way across the rugged and unfamiliar terrain.
Note that the cups she leaves behind are neatly stacked. We should be touched by the tenderness of that detail. There’s no spillage here, as we saw in the Five, nor the kind of disgust we saw in the Four. There’s no remorse or aversion present in our pilgrim’s landscape. Instead, the tidiness of these abandoned cups suggests that our pilgrim doesn’t, simply, disdain the world she leaves behind. Indeed, she may love it so deeply that turning away is her only choice, her only chance for freedom.
I’ve called our central figure a pilgrim, but of course this card might also simply depict a natural process of maturation and letting go. Mary Oliver describes this moment in her famous poem “The Journey,” as the protagonist—the “you” of the poem—learns to harken to her own voice, keeping her own self company and following her own best intention:
[Y]ou strode deeper and deeper
into the world, …
determined to save
the only life that you could save.
Whether the journey is overtly spiritual or a more mundane path (as Oliver puts it) “into the world,” the Eight of Cups reminds us that sometimes we have to stride forward alone.
Can we move ahead with love and ease? This card challenges us to keep our hearts open and whole, and to keep the cups of the world lovingly stacked even as we leave them behind.
Eight of Swords
The Eight of Swords introduces a difficult three-card sequence in the suit that apparently takes us from imprisonment (Eight) to nightmare (Nine) to death (Ten). However, this sequence actually marks the fruition of the path carved out by the Swords: a path that cultivates calm, true equilibrium and peace.
In the first place, the hoodwinked and bound figure of the Eight of Swords is scarcely imprisoned. Her binds are loose; the stockade of swords around her offers a minimal barrier at best. She is a self-made prisoner but doesn’t know it. Liberation requires only a slight shift of her shoulders, a slight repositioning of her head. She doesn’t realize that she is already free.
We are all self-imprisoned in this way, blinded by the particular way we tilt our heads and incline our hearts. Despite our incredible minds, there are always things we don’t see, know, comprehend. As finite beings, we inevitably inhabit particular perspectives and points of view. We actually can’t see everything.
But we can see that we can’t see. And herein lies the wisdom that is the gift of the Swords. The double-edged Sword empowers us ultimately by helping us comprehend the limits of our power. It’s like the oracle of Delphi, who famously declared Socrates the wisest man alive because Socrates knew that he knew nothing. The Tarot can likewise be the good oracle that helps us see our own not-knowing. Like a close and intimate friend, the Tarot can thus reveal our truest wisdom.
For now, however, the figure of the Eight of Swords remains blind and enslaved. She is confined by her own mind—as represented in the Waite- Smith imagery by those eight upright and discriminating swords. To be wise and free, she need only surrender to her own not-knowing.
Might we surrender our knowledge and discover our wisdom? What cherished view are we zealously guarding in our own life, right now? Chances are that it’s actually guarding and confining us.
Number 9, number 9 … Nine signifies culmination, the last single digit before the sequence turns a corner with the double-digit Ten. As the final digit in three consecutive sequences of three (1, 2, 3 … 4, 5, 6 … 7, 8, 9), nine also represents the squaring off of the number sequence: 9 = 32. But there’s also something deeply internal and enclosed about the Nines. Nine months of gestation in the womb precede human birth, and Trump IX (the Hermit) reminds us to keep our light turned inward. Nonetheless, birth will arrive. In Italian and Spanish, a euphemism for giving birth is “to give to the light” (dare alla luce; dar a luz). The inwardness of the nine, the inwardness of gestation, will ultimately need to move outward. The internal light of life will need to give itself forth, into the external light of day. And, indeed, by the end of the sequence of trumps, the inward light of the Hermit will find its outward manifestation in the universal illumination of Trump XIX, the Sun. The Hermit is born as the Sun.
The Nines, for all of their squared-off completeness, remain latent and reserved. Each suit will find its fully birthed conclusion in the final pip: the Ten.
Nine of Pentacles
The “nineness” of the Nines entails a self-contained perfection. These cards all mark a culmination in the energy of the suit, and remind us that culminate derives from the ancient Latin word for roof-pole. Just as the gabled peak of a house completes and encloses the dwelling, so do the Nines both complete and enclose the essence of their suit. In the Tens, by way of contrast, we’ll see the roof blown off. There, the suit will transcend itself, moving toward a more universal realization.
We certainly find this sense of self-contained perfection in the Nine of Pentacle’s garden. The Pentacles take up one of the Tarot’s central and prevailing motifs: the myth of humankind’s creation in the Garden of Eden. Can we regain a world of harmony, where the earth provides what we need and keeps us safe? Can we find a balance between scarcity and plenty, between self and other? Or will our efforts to balance things out only add to the world’s growing disparities?
With this card, we have regained our paradise. Work has been replaced by ease. The qualities of steadiness and surrender that preceding cards cultivated have now yielded their fruits. The toiling, expectant farmer of the Seven has been replaced by a lady of leisure. Her proprietary hand gently rests on a hedgerow of flourishing grapes. The garden seems to grow effortlessly, bountifully. Time is no longer tied to labor, and thus we can meander slowly, like the snail in the card’s lower left corner. The world has become a sanctuary, a meditative and luxurious bower of deep contentment, wealth and abundance, stillness and peace.
We don’t see an entrance to this garden. We see mountains in the background, but we don’t see any access to those mountains. In the Tarot, mountains always seem to signify a kind of striving onward toward spiritual growth. But our lady’s striving is over. She’s fully at rest. She’s a falconer after all—a figure of nobility, able to pursue hunting for sport. Yet her falcon wears a hood. To pursue this sport, she must keep her falcon in the dark. In the symbolic language of Tarot, the hooded falcon offers another image of the enclosed garden itself. Fully at peace and ease, our lady is nonetheless walled in. Eden has been regained, but its limits are more pronounced than ever.
Now don’t get me wrong! This is a lovely card to receive in a reading. The Nine of Pentacles suggests that our efforts have paid off, that we’ve achieved joy, comfort, and well-being. We should enjoy this earthly paradise! But we can’t linger here forever. This garden is not our truest home.
Nine of Wands
Throughout the sequence of pips, the Wands have seemed to comprise a suit of action—of engaged and ardent response. But the Nine of Wands culminates the sequence with an image of inaction instead. In Colman Smith’s original artwork, the central figure is clearly battle-worn, a bandage around his head. Waite refers to the eight upright wands behind him as a “palisade” and tells us that the soldier awaits the enemy. Traditionally this card depicts forbearance in the midst of an ordeal—and our figure is clearly forbearing. We can see how weary he is. He supports himself on his fighting staff. But nonetheless he stands watch. He waits, motionless, for whatever comes his way. He’s here for the long haul.
After all of the outward-facing energy of the Wands, we should be curious about the quiet vigil of the Nine. This suit of fire and will has repeatedly shown us what it means to hurtle forward into life—to pick up the staff in response to the world’s call. But now we’re being greeted with a vision of persistence and presence. This warrior has simply shown up. There’s no action here. He will remain standing, for good or ill, for as long as it takes. In his solitary watch, he embodies the fearless valor of the suit by reminding us that it all begins when we show up. Our dedicated responsibility, our willingness to stand forth no matter what: this is where compassion begins. This is where the hero is born.
Nine of Cups
Like the Nine of Pentacles, the Nine of Cups offers a vibrant image of contentment and abundance. Modern Tarot readers often call this the “wish card”—and its appearance in a spread can suggest the fulfillment of one’s efforts. Not only is there deep satisfaction in the present, but, as Waite suggests, the “abundant refreshment of wine” indicates that “the future is also assured.” The core quality of the cheerful heart—a deep joy in the abundance of life—is realized in the central figure’s smiling repose.
And yet, the figure is alone. In this context, his smile can seem smug and self-satisfied. De Angelis’s imagery for the Universal Tarot depicts a straight row of cups behind him, but according to Waite, the counter of cups is “arched”—just like the rainbow overarching the happy family scene in the Ten of Cups. But the Nine’s rainbow is pallid by comparison. It’s just a row of cups. Without a family or community around him, the Nine of Cups figure seems to enjoy only a provisional, inward state of fulfillment.
The Ace of Cups holds out the chalice of good cheer and invites us to drink deep. But from the start of this suit, the implicit caution is that this cup belongs to us all, not to any one of us singly. The cup of cheer is the cup of community, the cup of communion. It is the cup of an abundance that from the very start transcends the individual, invoking the imagery of the grail, and the sacrament of the Eucharist.
Ultimately this suit invites us to drink deep of gratitude, reminding us that the word eucharist etymologically means “grateful.”
Nine of Swords
We tend to view mind and soul—the two faculties associated with the Swords and the Cups, respectively—as individual human capacities. I think about my mind, my intellect and understanding—just like I think about my soul, my imagination, sense of feeling, and intuition. I think about these things as if I could localize them in an organ or body part. And yet, these are the faculties of meaning and sense. We no more own such things individually than we own the air that we breathe. Image, concept, and indeed the matter of our body or the energy of our will are all part of the universe’s great collective archive. The faculties associated with the four suits of Tarot, like the four elements they represent, are part of a shared and common resource. And the Tarot repeatedly reminds us that we suffer when we miss such a fundamental truth.
And thus we come to one of the Tarot’s most poignant scenes of suffering: the Nine of Swords. This card most fundamentally expresses our urge to comprehend everything, to claim the faculty of mind as our individual own, thereby illuminating all the corners of our experience. It is the anxiety card—the card of waking up at 2:38 a.m. with the heart pounding and the mind reeling. We’re trying to make sense of it again, aren’t we? We’re trying to scoop up all the corners of our cosmos—the past, present, and future—the real and the imagined—the likely, the possible, and the sheer lunacy of the improbable—the light and the dark, and the even darker. And scooping it all up is like trying to drink up a swimming pool through a straw or to sweep up every speck of dust in Grand Central Station. The scale of the endeavor is supremely out of whack. I once had an anxiety dream in which I’d been instructed to care for two sugar ants like pets. I could barely see them, much less feed them or “walk” them. Both I and they were doomed!
The Nine of Swords is known as the “nightmare card.” Its central figure, bolt upright in bed, is tormented by their own thoughts, by daggers of the mind. But the nightmare itself is not the problem. Our shadow thoughts are not, ultimately, what torment us. Instead, what sharpens these blades is the effort to contain and control.
Siolo Thompson, artist and author of the Linestrider Tarot, offers a beautiful take on this card in the companion book to her deck. She depicts a red fox under a black and moonlit sky. “The fox looks up at the night sky with a haunted look on her face,” Thompson writes. “She has forgotten that foxes are nocturnal and that the night is their natural place.” There’s nothing wrong with the shadows, or with the pitch blackness of not knowing. Once we recognize that meaning and understanding are too big for one human heart to own, we can again find our ease in the darkness. We, too, are nocturnal beings.
The Wheel (Trump X) turns, the Angel (in Trump XX) calls, and in the widening gyre of spiritual practice, a cycle has been completed and transcended. In the Roman numeral system, ten is the X that depicts both a meeting and a crossroads. X marks the spot, a point of convergence and departure. Robert Johnson meets the devil and creates the blues. A pirate buries his treasure and creates the hunt. A legal document is signed, and a future is sealed. The Greek letter chi (X) brings us to Christ (
), who is both alpha (
) and omega (
). In the Hindu-Arabic system, 10 closes the gap between ones and zeroes, between all and nothing, between World and Fool.
The Tens are how it ends and how it all begins.
Ten of Pentacles
The Nine of Pentacles gave us luxury and comfort and a solitary figure in an enclosed garden. With the Ten, everything has opened up. An archway “gives entrance to a house and domain,” Waite writes. A family stands in the threshold—there are no sharp divides between inside and outside. And indeed, the aged family patriarch sits just beyond the archway. The father once responsible for house and domain now watches from the perimeter.
The Ten of Pentacles brings the suit to fruition. The card reminds us that it is impossible to remain a solitary figure in an enclosed and sealed garden. Whether one raises a family or not, the life cycle of an individual inevitably extends into the next generation. What are we leaving for the future? What has been left for us? In the embodied world of the Pentacles, the way we care for self and others ultimately takes us to the question of legacy—to the question of our heritage and our bequest. What will our impact be on future generations?
As it happens, today is April 22: Earth Day. I find myself recalling the words of Gaylord Nelson, the holiday’s founder. “The ultimate test of man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.” 79 In the Ten of Pentacles, we see a bit of that conscience, a bit of that sacrifice. The patriarchal figure who sits just outside the gate has no doubt enabled the domestic happiness of the husband, wife, and child who stand at the threshold. But no one seems to note the old man’s presence. He is Odysseus returned home, unrecognized. And, like Odysseus, only the dog seems to care.
This card recognizes gain and wealth, the stability of home, the deep roots of family and heritage. And it invites us to ask: What made all of this possible? In whose debt, on whose shoulders, in whose shadow do we stand? And what will our legacy be?
Ten of Wands
There’s a reason why the bards and poets of yore invoked the muse. They recognized that the flame that kindled their hearts and their hands came from beyond. Ancient poems customarily began with an act of petition and devotion. “O Divine Poesy,” Homer prays in the invocation at the beginning of The Odyssey, “Goddess-daughter of Zeus, sustain for me this song. … Make the tale live for us in all its many bearings, O Muse.” The muse has become an abstract idea for us moderns, but for the ancients the gift of fire was a sacred reality.
In contrast, we moderns tend to think we can do it alone. By the time we get to the Ten of Wands, we see a figure who is burdened by their commitments in the world, burdened by the tasks and projects they’ve taken up. The card sounds a cautionary note for the entire suit of Wands: nobody carries the work of this world by themselves. If we think that the fire in our belly is our sole proprietary possession and responsibility, we will surely burn out. There’s no way to keep the flame of Wands alive on our own. Once we’ve learned that, we can move on.
I got my first glimpse of this truth when I was training as a medical chaplain and about to make my very first patient visit. I was sitting in the hospital chapel, nervously lost in my thoughts. Suddenly I had the absolute clarity of insight that, indeed, I was completely unworthy of the job. I simply didn’t have the goods, the answers, the Truth with a capital T. In that sense, I was a fraud and a fool. I suddenly knew down to my toes: If this is up to me, up to Lisa, we’re all sunk. I can’t do it!
The funny thing was, I almost laughed out loud. The insight was not even remotely dispiriting. It was instead joyously, deeply liberating. Yes, of course! This isn’t about you, Lisa. This is about you showing up. Be present, and love will do the rest.
We’re not in this alone.
Ten of Swords
The row of cups behind the solitary figure in the Nine of Cups has now become the rainbow that blesses a family scene. For Waite, the Ten of Cups signifies “repose of the entire heart.” We can finally and fully repose at home in this world. Finally and fully, we can realize the world’s absolute goodness.
It’s not insignificant that this scene is blessed with a rainbow. In the book of Genesis, the rainbow is the sign that God offers to Noah after the flood—the reassurance that future generations will be safe and beloved. “I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth” (Genesis 9:13). The rainbow is the sign (Waite calls it a “prodigy”) that we have a holy promise. The world is wholly ours.
Of course, there is a little glimmer in the biblical account that everything isn’t quite so peachy-dreamy-creamy-wonderful in the postdiluvian world. After all, as part of the covenant with Noah, God also promises humankind dominion over all the rest of creation: “And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered” (Genesis 9:2). Yeehaw! It’s all ours. This is the shadow side of our homecoming. We have dominion, and they do not. Our warm refuge may inevitably leave others out in the cold.
The rainbow arches across the entire span of the sky. The entirety of our heart finds repose. Now that we’ve truly come home, can we make sure that our cup runneth over, nourishing the whole wide world without exclusion, without exception?
Ten of Swords
“A prostrate figure, pierced by all the swords belonging to the card.” As Waite himself suggests, this is a card of overkill. It simply does not take ten stabbings to kill a person. Rachel Pollack summarizes a wide swath of contemporary readers when she suggests that the card signals self-pity and hysteria (see Rachel Pollack’s Tarot Wisdom). As the nurses in the ER like to say on a quiet night, “More drama than trauma.”
Nonetheless, the Ten of Swords is also a card of profound transformation and change. It is the card of ego death. It signals the overcoming of our identification with the small s self. This loss of self may feel like death or loss, or desolation. It may feel like that, but in truth this transformation is not happening to us from without. This is not our Ides of March, not our death by a thousand cuts.
Instead, the Ten of Swords depicts the outward manifestation of an inner stirring, an inner drive to transcend the narrow little me. This drive has propelled the entire suit of Swords from the get-go. The suit of mind, the suit of air, simply cannot be contained. The self by its very nature must expand.
And so, something is going to fall off the rim, as this wheel turns. But would we really want to stop this turning? Would we really want to halt this revolution?
67. The venerable Oxford English Dictionary (OED) tentatively agrees with me on the link between pip as a seed and as a suit mark. See pip n.3 in the 2006 third edition. Incidentally, references to Tarot are becoming increasingly common in the OED. Pip n.3 even quotes Tarot expert Barbara Moore.
68. My thoughts about amplification and resonance have been shaped by the work of the Slow Holler collaborative (http://slowholler.com/), a queer/southern artists’ collective. In the guidebook to their 2016 Slow Holler Tarot deck, they write: “Slow Holler: A slow and building yell. An amplification of queer and southern voices and of the intersections where queer and southern overlap. A place of refuge for queer / southern creators.” Holler is Appalachian for valley.
69. Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day.”
70. In this context, see M. M. Meleen’s discussion of Trump VIII, Adjustment, in the Tabula Mundi Tarot in Book M: Liber Mundi.
71. From 1938–1943, Aleister Crowley’s ideas for the Thoth Tarot were painted by Lady Frieda Harris—an artist, an anthroposophist, and ultimately a disciple of Crowley’s. As with the Waite-Smith Tarot, the Thoth Tarot is a collaboration.
72. Pollack, Rachel Pollack’s Tarot Wisdom, 279.
73. See, for instance, the flaming-hand imagery that Robert M. Place uses for this card in his two Neoplatonic decks: the Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery and the Alchemical Tarot.
74. “Five of Swords,” Tarot de St. Croix, http://lisadestcroix.blogspot.com/2013/09/five-of-swords.html
75. Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.
76. Berry, The Unsettling of America, 86.
77. Line in her speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
78. Waite follows the Golden Dawn’s decision to transpose Strength (originally Trump XI) and Justice (originally Trump VIII) in order to follow the Kabbalistic associations of Leo, the lion, with trump VIII and Libra, the scales, with trump XI.
79. Cited on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s website: https://www.epa.gov/history/quotations-about-environment.