What I Learned from Twelve Days of Tarot Epiphanies
What I Learned from Twelve Days of Tarot Epiphanies
Some of you know that during the Twelve Days of Christmas, December 26 through January 6, I did a daily live broadcast on Facebook Live, where pulled a card looking for a tarot epiphany.
After I did my own card, I spent some time finding tarot epiphanies for others.
You can review these videos on my YouTube channel, or here on my website.
Each day I used a different deck. It was fun to look through my collections and pull out some old favorites, along with some newer decks I haven’t explored well yet.
I asked each person who committed to do the Twelve Days with me to keep track of the cards they received each day. Then, at the end, we would each have a twelve-card spread for the new year.
Here are the twelve cards I pulled, along with some thoughts about them as a spread.
If you did this exercise, please share your cards, and your thoughts about them, in the comments!
Day One: Hanged Man, Morgan Greer Tarot
Day Two: Four of Swords, Crystal Visions Tarot
Day Three: Queen of Swords, Ancestral Path Tarot
Day Four: Knight of Cups, Encore Tarot
Day Five: Knight of Cups, Illuminati Tarot
Day Six: Knight of Wands, Spirit Within Tarot
Day Seven: Three of Wands, Golden Tarot
Day Eight: Strength, Ghosts and Spirits Tarot
Day Nine: Knight of Cups, Hanson Roberts Tarot
Day Ten: King of Cups, Tarot of Dreams
Day Eleven: King of Pentacles, Moonchild Tarot
Day Twelve: Devil, World Spirit Tarot
Seven of the twelve cards were Court cards, and three time the Knight of Cups appeared. To me, the predominance of Court cards offers two important messages for the year. First, I must make serving people my top priority. Second, I must embody the characteristics of the particular Court cards that appeared. Since the Knight of Cups was predominate, that card will be my guiding light this year. I must be a warrior for love.
That’s a huge challenge. I must contemplate how love presents itself, and how to present with love in each situation. I don’t expect to be able to completely live up to that challenge, but I will surely try.
There were more Wands and Cups than any other suit. This pleases me, and makes me think that this can be a year of creativity, as I work to share love with the world.
The two cards in the beginning, Hanged Man and Four of Swords, remind me to be meditative and thoughtful before springing into action.
When I look at the three Major Arcana cards, I remember that Strength is my birth-card, and also the card associated with my rising sign, Leo. That the first and last cards are both Majors seems significant to me. They seem to act as bookends on the reading. I must enter the year with surrender, contemplation and meditation. The Devil as a final card seems to both warn and encourage me. The Devil warns me against obsessive thinking and attaching to things that don’t serve me. At the same time, the Devil seems to encourage me to approach my work this year with a strong sense of duty. I must make myself a slave to my purpose. My purpose, apparently, is to be the Knight of Cups.
For me, this will be about enslaving myself to my love of tarot, my desire to spread good and helpful information about tarot, and to read for as many people, and teach as many people, as possible. And, I must do all of this with genuine love in my heart. In some ways this might be a hard thing to do. Yet, because my love of my work is so very authentic, in many ways it will be the easiest thing I could do.
There is something else that strikes me about the Knight of Cups in this particular context. The Twelve Days of Christmas mark the time from Christmas Day to Epiphany, which is celebrated as the day when those mythical Three Wise Men, or Three Kings, brought their symbolic gifts to the Christ child. Could the fact that the Knight of Cups appeared three times symbolize those three kings, known as Balthazar, Caspar and Melchior, and the three gifts they brought, gold, frankincense and myrrh?
It is interesting to note that today, those three items are still used in the magical rituals of many cultures. I will think about the symbolism of those three magical tools, and how they might enter in to my life and my work this year.
