Amazing Aces: Coins

And so we get to the fourth in the favorite aces series. I've enjoyed doing these, and it's been an interesting exercise to see how the decks I chose from for these differed from my choices for favorite majors - though of course, the fact that decks keep going in and out of my collection is a bit of a factor too. It does make me more aware of the different strengths of various decks. For example, of my two most favorite decks, not one Ace appeared here.

In any case, last but not least in the Ace of Coins (also known as the Ace of Disks, or Pentacles). This is the card I associate with material opportunities - careers, finances, physical health and all that. It's a card that that I see as being the most solid, speaking of the pragmatic. Whereas other majors may fill be with inspiration or energy, in this one I often find relief; I suppose at this point in my life I am more likely to stress about finances then intellectual development or relationships ;] It's also one of the Aces I associate most strongly with color. I like to see earth in this card - green, brown, gold. So which ones speak to me most?

Shadowscapes

I must say, I really enjoy how this Ace is presented in the Shadowscapes tarot. Iguanas are definitely not an animal you see associated with this Ace or suit often. They really work here though, both color-wise and in terms of associations -  the iguana is an earthy kind of creature, after all. We see smaller lizards too, the progression of growth and accomplishment. The golden coin we at the bottom is stamped with what could be seen as a star, or a kind of sun, or maybe even a flower - all symbols of success, fortune, hope, growth.

Of course, the colors and composition in general are beautiful, as they are in most of the cards in deck. The two branches curving upwards subtly support the underlying message here, the opportunity for earthly, material growth, as does that ring of light behind the iguana. The green of this card offers a nice juxtaposition to the silvery purple borders - many of my favorite cards in this deck have this kind of greenish scheme. A bit unusual an ace, and lovely.

Alchemical Renewed

Once again, the Alchemical tarot presents a take on an ace that I rather adore. The clean lines and line-type shading work really well in this image. Earthy, nature scenery dominates the picture: a hill covered in grass, flowers, leaves and weeds. At the top of the hill we see a sturdy tree with bright green leaves, and right in front of the coin we have a rabbit, hopping forward. Rabbits are associated with fortune, aren't they? Well, their feet at the very least, but that is a horrible custom and I think whole, living rabbits make much nicer omens of good luck.

On the whole, the image is rich in color, in life. It makes me think of spring time, or early summer: beautiful weather, a great time to make a start of a new thing. The rabbit is a fast-moving animal, energetic. The trees and flowers show that the soil is fertile. The time is right, the situation is ripe, things can go your way, this card says. The animal theme continues in this suit as well: in the Ace we have a rabbit, full of energy but small, vulnerable; in the King we see a lion, mighty and powerful, on top of the animal kingdom.

Legacy of the Divine

Interestingly enough, LotD, one of my favorite decks overall, is a mixed back when it comes to Aces: two of them I really like, and two I don't much like at all. This, along with the aforementioned Swords ace, is one of the good ones. Again we have a nice big golden coin, with a star design and a convenient elemental symbol, surrounded by nice, green, earthy imagery. We have a bee and some acorns, which can signify hard work and potential for growth, expansion, wonderful things. Acorns can also be seen as a kind of nourishment - the resources needed to get you through hard winter times and towards those goals and achievements. We can also see, in the lower right corner, a hedgehog. Not a particular noticeable animal, not striking to the eye, and yet - he has his quills to defend him, and he moves steadily, close to the ground. Again, much of my liking of this card stems from its general atmosphere - the impression of richness, of fertility, lots of room for expansion, success and comfort.

taking on the challenge

So I haven't been having so much of a tarot-focused week...too many other things competing for my attention/thoughts, I suppose. Here's another pretty relevant quick draw I did this morning, though.

I really like this take on the nine of swords especially. A card that usually speaks to worries, anxieties, fears - the crippling fear that keeps you awake in the middle of the night, mad swirling thoughts. Here we see a sky full of dark clouds, stormy, but above it all we see quite literally, a light at the end of the tunnel. Things swirling up towards hope. And those dark black birds, the pecking, cawing thoughts, are slowly flying away from the girl. Or are they flying towards her? Could be read both ways, I suppose, but here I see them as flying away - as the need to let worries go sometimes, let them fly off somewhere else and focus on the good.

The influence of the wand queen, see. The shadowscapes is really one of my favorite decks when it comes to the courts. So detailed and expressive, so perfectly capturing the nuances of what the kings and queens and knights and pages each represent. The queen of wands is perfectly at home in her domain, creatively fulfilled, working on what she is good at and what she enjoys, supported by the animals and even the plants. There is light there, an aura of comfort, completeness, self-possession. She is a woman who has already grown much, traveled far, and she continues now to work on advancing further.

These two cards are good reassurance for me right now. I recently voiced my frustration with the uneven pace/student effort in my arabic classes and my wonderfully accommodating language school re-arranged things so that starting next week, my classes will be significantly more challenging. A part of my is feeling that 'oh crap, what did I just do/get myself into' nervousness, but these cards remind me that this is a good thing. Being challenged means learning, getting more out of my experiences, growing and becoming more confident, like this queen is as she plays her instrument.

Time to let the dark birdies fly away indeed.

working on many things

So yeah, the interesting phenomenon of the mind doing funny things/being all over the place even when, externally, there seems to be no reason for why that should be so. This has been me, the last few days.

Drawing some cards and thinking on things a bit, I think this might at least partly be due to a case of too much of a good thing...in this case, getting a bit hyper-focused on my arabic studies. Now of course, being very focused on productive endeavors is not a bad thing, per se, but I find that...too much single-minded focuses, in whatever, really tends to...take things out of perspective. It's easy to become over-invested, especially emotionally, so that things that should be no big deal, or a small annoyance at most, suddenly start to seem momentous, or horridly morale-crushing, or whatever.

Nice as it is to really get INTO your work sometimes, it also raises stakes unnecessarily, and narrows your inner world. Blinders and all that.

I drew some cards from the Shadowscapes to clarify the message/advice from a draw with the Thoth (multi-decking, ha) and got the Emperor for like, the third time in almost as many days. This threw me a bit at first - is it in relation to my approach to the studying? Because really, I don't see how I could be MORE organized - color coded obsessive re-copying of notes into different notebooks organized by topic and all that - but the Ace of Wands gave me pause. There are a lot of cards I might associate with my studies here in Tunisia, the arabic but at this point...Ace of Wands doesn't really feel right for that.

Narrowing of focus again, you see? Impulse assuming that the draw has to be related to the thing foremost on my mind. But take a breath, perspective, zoom out, think wider: what could this be referring to? And after that - it came to me. Ace of Wands for new beginnings, new projects, self-fulfillment, growth, ambition. I am reminded of the fact that I still have NO idea where I will be living, or working/interning when I get back to DC after the summer. While the housing situation is not something I can really work on resolving just yet....working on updating my resume, throwing together some cover letter templates, applying to some positions for the fall - or at least, finding some potential places I could apply to later on in the summer? All certainly things I could get working on now.

I do have some difficulties with self-confidence, mostly because attempts to get 'good' jobs or internships have pretty much been uniformly unsuccessful in the past, but that's where the emperor comes in. Self-discipline to keep working on it, to try again.. Organization in how I approach things. Head held high and all that. It's something useful and productive, an investment in the future, in further new beginnings, and at the same time, it provides some of that much needed wider perspective so I don't get so obsessed and bothered by the little things.

Living in the moment IS good, in many ways but...like so many things, there can be too much of a good thing in that, too.

weaving your way...

Looking at these cards, I'm kind of struck by how apt a representation this spider image is for all that the eight of pentacles usually stands for. Think about how weak, how thin, how delicate a single strand of spider silk seems. Almost laughable, that anything substantial could be made out of that. And yet, undeterred the spider weaves and weaves its way up, creates something it can live on and off of, creates a complicates web, a network of shimmering lines. A method in madness - it connects to branches, to leave, to those glowing green bulbs...it makes something out of seeming nothing for itself, a little niche just right for it. Patience, determination, hard work. How many times does someone, something, casually tear down a spider's web? And out again the spider crawls, afterwards, and starts to weave again and again.

And weaving from what onto where? The girl in the five of cups, surrounded by bowls, some spilled, some still full of fish? What does she need to hold onto, focus on, and what is best left spilled, abandoned, put back in the sea? You lose things all the time. Some losses feel unbearable. Some losses you need to fly free. And yet, in either case, it is so easy, so tempting to focus on the loss, to count so carefully what you still have, and what is no longer yours. It is easy to think ahead, already imaging when you will lose the next bit, and how.

Melancholy, if you let it be, that. The spider doesn't dwell on all the webs its weaved before, the ones that were destroyed, ripped apart, dissolved. It focuses on the one it is creating now, the one that will tie it into the future, the forward tense. Create and create. Hard work, patience. Letting yourself get lost in the motions of the work as a sort of mediation, an acceptance of all the things you must let go of, cannot change. Look around, at nature. Look at how, despite everything, so many things stubbornly weave, crawl their way up.

quotes and a new deck

As much as I did enjoy this time with my most favorite deck, which was especially lovely as I was getting acclimated to my new surroundings, it doth be time, one feels, for another switch...

"It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways." 
-Buddha

“Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future.”
-Deepak Chopra

"Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself-and be lenient to everybody else."

-Henry Ward Beecher

My Favorite Majors: The Tower

The Tower is, without a doubt, a major with a very well defined, strong message. Regardless of what deck I am working with, when THIS comes up in a reading, I have a good idea of where to begin reading/what it could mean. It's been kind of a theme in my thinking about life for a while now, so pretty familiar with this card, and actually do have a certain odd fondness for it.

That said, it was rather difficult to pick out favorite cards for this one - not because there were so many that I loved, but rather the opposite. Not that I actively dislike most tower cards more...I feel neutral towards many. They are nice enough, and they get their point across well. But very few, I find, really shine either aesthetically or conceptually.

XVI. Tower

Favorite:
There's a lot to like about this tower card, for me. Firstly, the color scheme makes a nice change from the warmer tones found in many Tower cards I've seen, all the runny blue and purple. I also like the idea of the tower as a tree type dwelling...once very alive, vibrant, now old and rotting. The lighting ignites it, which is in fact what happens in nature all the time to trees, and here we see the result. The burning of the branches and leaves, the coming apart of old things. The composition of the images is also quite nice and works well for really seeing what's going on in the card. It's a pretty simple tower card, overall, but the color and the metaphor especially really work for me.

Runner Up:
Another from the Thoth, ha. What can I say? There's a reason this deck so rapidly came to be one of my favorites... But yeah, the card is very...put together. The reddish-orange color scheme meshes perfectly with the card's Mars association; the black tones exemplify the darker, more difficult aspects well. Love the art style - it really is a visually stunning image, and one that really, really does not pull it's punches insofar as the meaning of it goes. Lots of great symbolism - the eye of shiva, the dove in the corner, the bars in the windows and doors of the breaking tower, the crystalline figures falling out of it, so afraid they will break apart when they fall... There really is  a lot to latch onto, and unsurprisingly, I've gotten some really good readings when this card came up in the spread, both for myself and others. And honestly, the mouth in the bottom corner of the card...silly amusement on one level, a certain extra level of fondness for the card.

My Favorite Majors: The Chariot

The Chariot is a pretty cool major. It brings an interesting mix of concepts to the table, because on the one hand, it means good things: victory, success, battle won, good job! But on the other, it is a BATTLE won, not the war, and it was won because of your ability to take control of opposing forces within and without. It comes as an interesting place in the progression of the arcana, and of course, the association with Cancer... ;]

Anyway, though, it took a good bit of thinking and pondering for me to settle on my favorites for this card...a good number of decks did not have Chariots I found particularly interesting, while those that did...it was hard to choose between them. But well, here they are.

VI. Chariot

Favorite:
I surprised myself with this one, because this wasn't originally a deck I thought to look to when considering my favorite Chariot card. Once I saw it though, I really did like the concept. The idea of a buddha type figure as the charioteer makes a LOT of sense given the conceptual ideas associated with what's necessary for the success described by this card. There's something about the way he is sitting in that lotus position, cradling the crab that just says, YES, YES, that is what this card is about to me. The way that the chariot is drawn, the perspective...is funky, but in an intriguing way. I like that the chariot is pulled by the bull and the...actually i'm not sure what the second beast is, exactly, but the juxtaposition of those two, and the black and white contrast...its a very interesting card, visually, and it really captures the essence of this major for me.

Runner Up:
This was one of several very pretty Chariot cards from among my decks that I had a really difficult time deciding between. Ultimately though, there's a lot I like about this one. I really dig the water association, the fact that the Chariot is riding over the waves...interesting metaphorical significance there, and ties with the cancer associations quite nicely too. Again I really like the perspective...the way you can see the castle and clouds above in the distance, the chariot, and also beneath the water, the patient turtles and the cancer crab aglow. Love the capricorn-like beasts pulling the chariot as well, aesthetic appeal there for me too. The attitude and posture of the chariot figure is spot on for me too, a kind of self-assured, I don't even need to hold the reigns right now because this chariot WILL do what I want...and like that it is a lady here, too. It's traditionally a male figure in this card, but why shouldn't a lady be able to do just the same? So yes, lovely card, lovely art, lovely composition and use of color.

My Favorite Majors: The Hierophant

So I have a kind of funny relationship with this major. See, the Hierophant is actually my birth card, which has always seemed kind of funny and not right to me, largely because I associate it a lot with the traditional RWS image, the Marseille tradition Pope, etc. And let's just say organized religion is as far away from 'me' as you can get. But on the other hand...as the previous post focused on...I do actually do a lot motivated by duty, obligation, external sense of necessity etc. so...

Well in either case, one nice thing is that this is a major that comes with a lot of variety in between decks. Many artists take quite a few artistic liberties or come up with some really interesting and thought-provoking spins on the concept. That said...

V. Hierophant

Favorite:

There's a lot I really like about how the Shadowscapes tarot does this card. I love the concept of the Hierophant as a tree - steady and grounded, hard and strong and unmoving, unyielding, old. It's made better by the fact that it does have a kind of severe face/expression, and that wizard's staff, amusingly enough. It kind of brings together a lot of the underlying concepts of this card while completely removing the religious connotations/imagery present on the RWS and its closer clones. Which is useful to be because a lot of the time, religion is quite not what this card is really about in religions, and yet that has so many connotations for me personally it makes it a bit hard to separate from while reading. And of course, I love the nuanced details here, the colors used as well. Creator of this deck is an amazing artist and it really shows in this and other cards.

Runner Up:

Well, makes sense to pick a traditional take on the card that's all about tradition among other things, right? I may not like the RWS version of it very much, but the Thoth? Yes, I do quite approve of Crowley's approach. I like the ancient Babylonian look to this hierophant. Like all the cards in the Thoth deck, this one is chock full of esoteric symbolism. I'd be doing it a disservice trying to detail what I only half-understand but I do love that it's there, adding meaning to the card and waiting for me to study it/know it better when I get the chance. Mostly though I love this aesthetically - the orange and dark tones, the lighting effects, that window in the back, the masks - it all really adds to this image of forbidding, powerful, sacred, removed from the world, construct. Very much brings to mind a whole bunch of ideas and concepts associated as soon as I look at it, which is helpful in readings and yeah. Thoth. Does it right.