Sun Signs Everything Under The Sun!
Influence of Combining Cards Everyday
This week’s spread of Tarot card combinations packs a certain punch…at least at first glance. Let’s break it down, shall we?
This week’s spread involved a Tarot card combination of some rather hefty cards: Death + 9 Swords + Hermit + Temperance
I like the Death card in this deck. Because it’s Death but the skeleton looks like he is smiling and dancing in the mess of the severed limbs beneath him. The cheery, upbeat lyric “Always look on the bright side of Death…” of a certain Monty Python song goes through my head when I see this version of this Death Tarot card!
You have your usual keywords for the Death card here…transformation, change, reaping, trimming, endings, etc. but it was actually the next card drawn (9 Swords) and reading the two cards together in a Tarot card combination that helped clarify the Death (and the 9 swords!) Tarot card for me here. That’s something you don’t initially expect when getting Death and the Nine of Swords together!
Tarot Card Combinations
I have said this before, sometimes when making sense of a puzzling Tarot card combination we get so tied up in the keywords and slicing and dicing those keywords together and asking BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN???!!! that we forget to just stop, take a breath, and look, really look, at what is going on in the cards.
When I took a look at what was going on in the cards, Death and the Nine of Swords made a good kind of sense to me. There was a difference between what was going on in both of these cards, and there was a nice transition from chaos to order. From the chaotic, scattered pieces of limbs and heads on the ground of Death to the organization of the orderly, prettily, stacked swords of the Nine of Swords I got from this combination of cleaning up and organizing, both literally and metaphorically speaking.
This particular Tarot card combination felt like gleefully creating chaos, forging new “swords” out of that chaos (swords-like things such as new ideas, concepts, projects, etc.), and then organizing them as the swords in this Nine of Swords hang in an orderly pattern on the wall.
Combinations
In the Tarot card combinations, the next card drawn was The Hermit. The scattered remains in the water of Death become rich and different in The Hermit. Again, when combining Tarot cards it can be helpful to notice what is similar, what is different, what is going on in the cards, and the transition that is made from card to card. Where there are severed pieces in the water in Death, they become ships and life in The Hermit Tarot card.
When combining Tarot cards it can be helpful to notice what is similar, what is different, what is going on in the cards, and the transition that is made from card to card. Where there are severed pieces in the water in Death, they become ships and life in The Hermit Tarot card.
The bare staff of Death becomes a flowering vine in The Hermit. So, I took this to mean that all this cleaning, forging, and organizing will produce new life. And really, that is what Death does. It cleans and clears and makes room for the new.
That’s not to say it is easy. Any way you spin it Death is one of the heavier cards of the Tarot. So is the Nine of Swords. Heavy…but not bad or negative. Just heavy, as change is heavy. As stress and anxiety over that change (9 swords) are heavy. That’s what I mean.
The Hermit Tarot card
The creation and life in The Hermit Tarot card were taken a step further when I pulled one more Tarot card to add to this combination. I drew Temperance, which is interesting because Temperance follows Death in the Major Arcana line. Death reaps…Temperance shows! Temperance is one of the creation cards in the Tarot, it is alchemy, art, and inspiration.
So my general thought on this four-card combination is that there will be quite a bit of clearing, cleaning, and organizing to be done this week. There might be sending out of ideas and projects (the swords in the Nine and the ships set sail in The Hermit with the aid of the wind/air of the Swords suit!), a lot of creating this week.
Death was the first card drawn, and so I feel I have to acknowledge that. So my second thought on this four-card combination is that worry/concern/serious contemplation-philosophy (all of which is Nine of Swords) of mortality, either mine or someone else’s (as it is my experience that the Nine of Swords tends to crop up for worry over another) is going to be a theme this week.
Card Combinations
The Hermit thrown in here gives a reflective quality to the contemplation, questions, and anxiety surrounding mortality. Temperance to me here gives a quality of creative inspiration. As the week progresses perhaps I will feel inspired to write or create something surrounding the issue of mortality…or immortality.
Temperance here also speaks to the infinite impermanence of life. You can imagine the infinity symbol appearing between the two pitchers of Temperance as the angel pours the waters back and forth. Or you can think of it in the two mountains in the distance which are also the Two of Pentacles (cards make appearances within cards!).
Temperance in Tarot card combinations also speaks to the infinite impermanence of life. You can imagine the infinity symbol appearing between the two pitchers of Temperance. Think of it as the angel pours the waters back and forth. Or, think of it as the two mountains in the distance are also the Two of Pentacles (cards make appearances within cards!). So on some level, it could be that I examine Death and the infinite impermanence of life this week.
That isn’t a stretch for me. As a Scorpio rising I wouldn’t say that I am drawn to Death or the macabre. But thinking about Death doesn’t feel strange to me. The new job puts me with people who are approaching the end of their lives. I do feel like I’m watching a sort of Temperance-like alchemy before my very eyes as I watch this infinite cycle of life, decay, and creation around me. So it isn’t unlikely I would think about the infinite impermanence of things this week. I strive to put those words on the wall! We’ll see how I do!