Welcome to my personal blog.
Here you will find my musings, thoughts and observations, all inspired by my experiences as a full-time professional tarot reader.
The Power of the Tarot Aces
Do you think you know the Tarot Aces? Look again, there is more there!
I have a huge affection and affinity for the four Aces of the Minor Arcana. Within these cards I find power and magick, and many opportunities for truth-telling.
Typically, in a reading we can see each Ace as a new beginning. The sort of new beginning is determined by the suit.
For example, the Ace of Pentacles might be a new job, or new money, or a new way to care for your health, such as a new diet.
The Ace of Swords might be a new idea, a new understanding, new information, new technology or a new sort of communication.
The Ace of Wands might be a new creative project, a new passion or a new energy or sense of vitality.
The Ace of Cups might be a new relationship or a new connection within a relationship.
Yet, there is so much more to be found in these four cards. Not only do they each speak of a new gift, or a new journey, they also speak of untapped potential. Each Ace can be like a seed waiting to sprout, or an egg waiting to hatch. Within these cards we can see the incubation, as well as the beginning.
Each of the Aces can also speak to a need to find the source, or the essence of something. Sometimes a journey leads us back to the root. In these cases, the Aces can each be the goal of a journey, or the successful end of a journey.
The power of each Ace is to hold the essence of their element. The Aces can tell us where we are going, they can urge us forward, and they can help us keep our goals firmly in mind.
The Aces can also tell us what we need to nurture in order to get to where we are going.
The Aces are the Four Tools of Magick. We can use them to invoke their elements and to create sacred space.
The Aces correspond with our chakras. We can use them in chakra healing and activation.
The Aces are archetypes. The Ace of Cups is the Holy Grail, while the Ace of Swords is Excalibur.
The Ace of Wands is the priapic symbol of life waiting to happen. The Ace of Pentacles is the Earth Mother herself.
It is easy to dismiss the Aces simply as the energy of new beginnings. They are that, and so much more.
There are many tarotists who find similarities between the Aces and the Pages. Some even have a hard time finding the differences between the Aces and Pages of each suit. I think when we fail to find those distinctions, we do a disservice to ourselves.
Both Aces and Pages strongly hold the energy of their element. Both Aces and Pages can speak of something new or young. But, to me, that is where the similarities end.
Pages are about youth, learning, and communication. Aces are about initiation, essence, and source.
We can also see a correlation between Aces and Tens, since they are numerologically the same. We might see the Aces as the beginning of the journey, and Tens as the end. Yet, we could also reverse that and see the Tens as the situation we find ourselves in when the story begins, and Aces and the solution to which we eventually arrive.
I often like to see the Tens as the higher octave, or next level, of the Aces.
It is always a good exercise to find more connection, information, and power within individual cards and sets of cards. This is especially true when we believe we know the cards well. I think the Aces are especially important to explore because their simplicity can cause us to miss their depth if we don’t take the time to look.
The Process in a Tarot Card
Try these simple exercises and divination techniques to enhance your work with tarot.
The Process in a Tarot Card
There are so many ways to understand a tarot card, so many different depictions of the archetypes of tarot, and so many ways to use the brilliant tool that is tarot. Today I am thinking about one particular way to use tarot – to find a process within each card.
I first started thinking about this about ten years ago when I wrote my first tarot poem about the Eight of Cups. That poem is now published in Arcana: The Tarot Poetry Anthology. (You can also read it here on my website.)
It’s still fascinating to me that we can know our cards well, use them daily, and still find in a card, at a certain moment, something we had never seen before, or thought about before. On the day I wrote that first tarot poem, what I saw in the Eight of Cups was a process of healing.
Over the ten years since I first saw a process in a tarot card, I’ve been thinking a lot about how each tarot card might convey a process. We could use this concept in a few different ways.
First, as an exercise in viewing the cards a new way we can look at each card and see the process within it. This is much more than asking what the person is doing in the image, or what the action is within the image. Rather, this is looking at each card as a metaphor for something larger. For example, we often see the Four of Pentacles as being a miser or holding on to resources inappropriately. Yet, when I look at this card with the goal of seeing a process, I might see a process of self-protection such as establishing boundaries or increasing self-care. A card without a person pictured can still discuss a process. For example, the Ace of Wands could speak to me about the process of stoking one’s internal flame.
Another way to play with this concept is in divination. If you pull a single card at random and look for the process within it, you might find a reflection of a process you are already doing in your life, or advice for a process you need to begin.
You could also try a two-card spread, with the first card indicating the process you need to begin, and the second card offering advice on how to make it happen.
When we find within each tarot card a process, we make the wisdom of tarot even more pertinent and actionable in our daily lives.