XXI— The World
II — The High Priestess
The Seven of Cups
Three cards, drawn at random. These are the signs of What Was, What Is, and What Is To Come.
What Was — The World
The World is birth and death, alpha and omega, infinity and eternity.
How can eternity be in the past? Eternity means there is no time. No past, no present, no future. There is only existence. It’s not even the Now, you can’t have a Now if there was nothing before and nothing is going to change. There’s no Was or Will Be, there’s only Is.
Yet it’s right that The World should be What Was, because it is the foundation of everything. It is the Universe, not just the World. It is everything, so it must have been everything. For us, where it was, is, and will be is the Universe, the place that we know while we live in this world. It’s where What Is and What Is To Come will emerge.
What Is — The High Priestess
The High Priestess is our Rainbow Bridge between the Spiritual and the Temporal.
By Temporal, we mean the material, the time-bound, the stuff of our ordinary world. It’s Temporal because whether it crumbles away, or we die, the material world we know will vanish. We use time (Temporality) to map our way through our lives, but it only matters while we’re living. It’s not actually there and the Universe has no use for it.
We can be very glad to see the High Priestess as What Is. She embodies the very essence of what we are doing when we read the Tarot. She lives both in Eternity and the Temporal world, timeless and time-bound, comfortable with Now and No-Now.
When we consult the Tarot, we are making that connection between the material and the spiritual. We are bringing our consciousness of eternity into our ordinary lives. We are stepping outside of Time.
For thousands of years, holy men and women have embodied the spiritual for us. For centuries in the western world, the Christian church was the place to go. In the east, the north and the south you had the mosque, the synagogue, the temple, the hut on the edge of the village: all kinds of holy places to remind us of our spiritual lives, or to offer refuge or succour when we fell on hard times.
Today, we seem to turn more readily to counsellors or therapists. We talk about our “mental health”. We choose not to see it in terms of our spiritual wellbeing. We want pills and processes, and explanations. We’re not comfortable with the mysterious.
But it’s all the same thing. Our mental health suffers as we grow more and more separate from our place in the Universe. The High Priestess, serene and dwelling with equanimity in time and eternity, shows us that we are part of the Universe, and that this belonging gives us meaning.
What Is, is life, love, hope, despair, laughter, anger, joy — all the ordinary things that shape our days. All are temporal things, they pass quickly and when we die they are gone. The High Priestess, flowing, feminine, magical, mysterious, compassionate, intuitive, reminds us that infinity and eternity are also What Is and that they are our refuge and succour. They are where we came from, where we are, and where we will go.
As part of the Universe, we had meaning before we were born into this world. We have it while we are here (a meaning that exists beyond our jobs, desires and material needs), and we will return to it when our time runs out. The High Priestess brings the peace of the eternal into the chatter and racket of the temporal.
What Is To Come — The Seven of Cups
The Seven of Cups is new love, the rising flow.
Seven is a foundational number, it shapes what we understand as What Is. We have decided upon seven days in a week, because we could see that there were seven heavenly bodies moving around the Earth. We scoff at this notion now, but it worked very well for us for a very long time. We are still counting seven days.
Seven is sacred because it combines the triangle and the square, 3 + 4, and because it is a Moon number: the Moon has a 28-day (4 x 7) cycle of wax and wane, with its dark time mysteriously falling in between its magical appearance and disappearance.
In the minor arcana of a Tarot deck, seven is a transitional number. It is exactly halfway between the Ace and the King (the Knights mean there are fourteen cards in a suit, not thirteen). It marks the beginning of the positive path, after the uncertainty and fragility of the lower numbers.
Cups are water, the feminine spirit, the flow of expression. They are symbols of love, emotion and spiritual sensitivity. These are the aspects of ourselves that will flourish and guide us as we embrace the mystery of the Universe.
This is a card of hope, of, literally, in-spir-ation. It marks a change, a new beginning, an opportunity, which will open the way for What Is To Come.
It brings a youthful energy and optimism that must be nurtured and guided. If nothing changes, the future never arrives, and the choices and changes we make determine our future for us. This is our calling as we set out on the next stage of our spiritual journey. The Seven of Cups reminds us that our intuition and spiritual consciousness are our most trustworthy guides.
The spread
This is a powerful spread. We have two of the most potent cards from the major arcana and a minor card that is filled with spiritual potential. There’s no hiding from the message of this array: we are called to live our material lives with a deep spiritual consciousness.
We owe our existence to the Universe and we have been given a great gift of life. We are allowed to experience the Universe in all its mysterious majesty.
We do not have to find our way alone. There are wise and experienced guides who can help us on our way. All we have to do is open our minds, and then our hearts, and listen to our deepest intuition.
Ultimately, our way is defined by the choices we make and they are ours and ours alone. It is a great responsibility, but it is liberating and empowering. And the beginning and the end of the journey is the Universe itself.
