Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Two of Disks


The lively discussion of my take on the Queen of Swords inspires me to pluck another page from my Tarot journal. The simplest way to get to know the Tarot is to draw one card for the day and stay in its presence until you develop a sense of what it means in your life, on that day. You'll want to study what the designers of the deck you are using and other knowing practitioners have to say about it; the books of Angeles Arrien, Mary Greer and Cynthia Giles are excellent guides. But first and last, you want to be present to the card that is looking at you, using all of your senses, inspecting the imagery in fine detail, alert to the feelings and sensations that are running through you and the memories and associations the card stirs in you.

You may find yourself drawn into the card, stepping through the frame, as through a door, into its own world, even entering the mindset of the figure or archetype that is depicted - as I sought to do with the Queen of Swords.

In the page that popped up from my Tarot journal, I am pulling one card with this question in mind:

What do I most need to know about in my life right now?

As in my encounter with the Queen of Swords, I am using a relatively unfamiliar deck, Navigators Tarot of the Mystic Sea. The advantage of working with decks that are partly or wholly unfamiliar is that it is often easier to look at the images with fresh eyes.

The card I pull is the Two of Disks, called in this deck the Two of Pentacles.

I see:

Two dancers, light and dark. They move in a pattern that may be ritual combat or the prelude to mating. The light dancer – male – wears a blue stone at the third eye position at the front of a vaguely Egyptian headdress. His pectoral ornament resembles an abstract fleur-de-lys. He is tossing a shield-sized disk, gold with a red pentacle into the air, in the direction of the black, female dancer. Her attention is on her own disk. She is getting ready to toss it like a Frisbee. Two white balls hand from the back of her skull-cap. She, also, wears blue stones.

They move in a dark desert landscape. The mound rising in the distance looks like Uluru (or Ayers Rock) in my native Australia. In a greener setting, it could be a mound grave.

In the sky above are six stars. The grouping on the left forms the letter A. With the pair to the right, they shine out the message A.

I feel:

It is thrilling to be here, playing this eternal game of the Twins.

My strongest association

I am being invited into an ancient story, a story that may have been seeking me. The story begins like this: Uluru remembers our game, which began among the stars. We are there, the twin stars to the right of the Alpha constellation.

The message

I can now express the message I have been given,in response to my question for the day, like this:

Without duality, there is no world, only potential worlds. You can type us as Light and Dark, male and female, but our attributions are not fixed. We may also be Order and Chaos, Good and Evil, Self and Other, Enemies and Lovers. In the suit of Earth, we are the beginnings of manifestation on Earth.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Robert~
The two of pentacles is all about balance... I find when I see this card I have a balance between the material and the immaterial worlds to work out...that focus is too much on one thing to the exclusion of something else important, but if I pull back I can find the proper balance. In your case, perhaps this card is about being able to walk in a balancing act between two worlds at the same time. The dream world and the waking world.

Check out Ciro Marchetti's Tarot of Dreams (self published) and Llewellyn's Mystic Dreamer Tarot for some interesting dream symbolism.

Glad to see a favorite author is a fellow tarot enthusiast!

The suggestions of Mary Greer are perfect - her "Tarot for Yourself" is a must have, and for those wishing to dabble but not dive, her "21 Ways to Read a Tarot Card" is a little less daunting...with each exercise on it's own...

Dream on & Read on!

~Grace

Robert Moss said...

Grace - I like your thoughts about balance and, in particular, about balancing the two worlds.

I've decided to add Ciro Marchetti's most recent Tarot deck (Legacy of the Divine) to my experiments. To my mind, there is no satisfactory substitute, in the end, for coming up with one's own personal deck, whether or not that is ever fully realized as a complete set of painted cards or remains a set of mental images.

Cynthia Giles (my favorite author on the history of Tarot) said with great perception, “Tarot is first and foremost an imaginative system, totally apart from any tangible medium. The tarot images exist in a nonspatial, nontemporal relationship to each other, and it is possible to memorize them and use them entirely mentally.” - (The Tarot: History, Mystery and Lore).

Nancy said...

Robert, I'm not familiar with the Navigators Tarot deck, but this image really speaks to me. These remind me of skilled athletes playing an important game, maybe Cosmic Coin Toss, seeking some answer on how to proceed. If I drew this card looking for guidance for myself, it would remind me to stay light on my feet, able to juggle what comes at me easily, remembering we're all players perfecting our skills here.

Robert Moss said...

Nancy - I like that phrase "the cosmic coin toss" and the sense of juggling is highly relevant to managing the dualities of life and keeping the cosmic game in play.