Tarot and the Tree of Life

by Isabel Radow Kliegman

  On her lap the Queen gently holds a pentacle. She gazes at it intently. Here we have the consummate mother holding the creation to which she has given form. It could be a baby, a flesh-and-blood infant, or perhaps her own pregnant belly. But it needn’t be a child of her body; it could be rather a child of her intellect and spirit—a painting, a poem, a concerto—any creative spark to which her nurturing has given form and thereby brought to actualization. As always, the Jungian perspective reminds us that the most valuable life to which we give form is our own. The being the Queen of Pentacles brings into the world is herself, her conscious self.

  The Queen of Pentacles, then, sits with some melancholy and much reflectiveness, gazing at her pentacle, the life to which, through Yetzirah, she has given form. Of course she looks into her pentacle as it into a crystal ball, but she looks as much at the past as at the future. Kabbalistically, we talk about the Nine Gates. As we go through life, gates shut behind us, and once a gate has shut, we can’t reopen it. We either go through that gate at the appropriate time of our life or we lose the chance forever. The Queen of Pentacles seems to ask, “Where am I now? What still lies before me? What lies behind me that has passed me by, or that I once had but will never have again?”

  Is there a mother alive who, with the benefit of hindsight, does not recall some aspect of her childrearing that she wishes she’d handled differently?

  “If only I hadn’t pressured him about school so much.”

  “Why didn’t I make more time to read to her?”

  “If I had been less suspicious, maybe he would have been more trustworthy. He felt he had nothing to lose.”

  “I thought I was doing the right thing when I insisted she eat every vegetable on her plate. Now she eats only half-packages of potato chips.”

  If a querent has lost a child, the Queen of Pentacles can represent sorrow too profound ever to be entirely overcome. The tender way in which she holds the pentacle in her comforting lap and the consuming focus of her gaze suggest that her child and her loss flood her consciousness at times and remain in her consciousness always.

  If the Queen of Pentacles turns up for a woman, it may indicate her wish to become pregnant; if she is in her thirties, she may be nervously listening to the ticking of her biological clock. If the card is reversed, she may not have an appropriate candidate for fatherhood. Or her mate may not want children, or there may be physical difficulties. Perhaps she has trouble conceiving or carrying a baby to full term. Pentacles are associated with the earth plane; for the Queen to bring forth her progeny, she cannot be reversed—for reversal symbolizes being out of harmony with Yetzirah, the realm of formation.

  Queen of Cups

  The Queen of Cups is the most intensely emotional of cards because she is both a queen and a Cup, and both carry the feeling function. She is a queen I always wanted to love—I felt the queen of feelings must be wonderful—but for a time, somehow I couldn’t. What put me off was the expression on her face. She peers with tremendous intensity at a covered chalice, as if she would drill holes in it with her laser gaze. I see in that look jealousy, resentment, suspicion, fury, or something equally dark. The way she would pry the secret from this closed cup is somehow menacing.

  Gradually, I came to recognize what is remarkable in this queen. Her throne is at the edge of the sea, and the waters of the unconscious swirl around her, into her very gown, so it is impossible to say where her gown leaves off and the waters begin. What we have in the Queen of Cups is a seer, a psychic, someone in touch with the great mystery, the great creative energy of waters. All life, we know, came from the sea, and so we associate creativity with water. Each of us floated in amniotic fluid for the first nine months of life, as we were taking form. The formative waters of Yetzirah bring us from the single cell of creative union to the complex beings we become.

  The wonders of the Queen of Cups do not end here, however. Although perched on an apparently precarious, tiny peninsula, the Queen needn’t fear. Her throne is on firm ground. She is balanced. She has not tumbled into the waters of the unconscious but has culled their treasures and grounded them. Notice the brightly colored stones that surround the Queen’s throne. She has retrieved these riches from the sea, tumbled them until they are smooth and polished, given form to the raw gifts plucked from the waters—dream images, meditational visions, passions, and inklings. Robert Louis Stevenson used to talk about his “dream people.” He used to say that he never wrote his stories but that in sleep his “dream people” provided them. It is this readiness and ability to tap into the great mystery of the unconscious, and give form to its contents, that the Queen of Cups represents. Childlike creatures similar to mermaids adorn her throne. Are these children of the sea perhaps the creations of her unconscious rather than of her body?

  It is fascinating to see that the handles of the chalice are angels with enormous wings, but it is equally instructive to note that the angels are black. When we release ourselves to the unconscious—and thereby to our creativity—we are subject to the dangers of the darker elements of our psyches. Yet this is the only way to avail ourselves of the brilliance and blessedness of our brightest angels. The Queen of Cups is here to remind us that not all emotions are sweet.

  Let us now return our attention to the covered chalice itself. What I have come to understand from listening to creative people, whether they are craftsmen, therapists, stand-up comics, painters, dancers, or whatever, is that after they produce their finest work, they never know how they did it. The composer’s notes barely graze his pen. It is as if he is literally inspired.

  One of my favorite stories concerns Laurence Olivier, who once gave a performance at London’s Royal Theatre that brought the crowd to its feet. The applause continued for twenty minutes. When a cast member saw him in his dressing room after the performance, Olivier was pacing back and forth, visibly in torment. His fellow actor said, “Larry, why are you so unhappy? You couldn’t have had a greater triumph!” Olivier replied, “I know! And I don’t know how I did it!”

  Robert Browning once said of a line in one of his poems, “When I wrote this line, only God and I knew what it meant. Now only God knows what it means.”

  What the chalice conceals is the final secret, not to be grasped by the ordinary mind. It is a mystery not only to others but to ourselves, except when, in dream or trance, we see with the eyes beyond our eyes. When we return to everyday consciousness, the veil again descends, closing off the chalice, leaving us dumb and bewildered. The Queen of Cups, volcanic with untempered feeling, rages against this moment! At her darkest, she is unstable, subject to fits of possessiveness, jealousy, and rage. If she loves, she would suck the very soul out of a man, unable to tolerate any boundary, even the separateness of individuation. Yet at her best, no one loves as fully as she, or as passionately. And it is through her that the formative energy of Yetzirah converts glimpses of the mystery into art. Who can blame the artist for wanting to will the muse into her presence? Without insistent yearning there would be no creative act.

  When the Queen of Cups is reversed, another possible interpretation presents itself. Holding the chalice in her right hand leaves her left hand virtually free. Rather than trying to bore through the cover with her eyes, why doesn’t she remove it? Why doesn’t she lift the lid and simply look inside? The answer, I believe, lies in the darkness of the angels. To lift the cover is to open Pandora’s box, the box that, according to Greek myth, held all the misery, pestilence, and horrors of the world. In opening the box, Pandora unwittingly turned them all loose; they torment humankind to this day. Yet also from the box where it had been imprisoned with its dark companions, in all its grace and loveliness, flew hope.

  Pandora’s box—or the covered chalice—represents our own unconscious. Evil and danger lurk within, but also our greatest brightness. When the card is reversed, the Queen, again out of harmony with Yetzirah, is unwilling to risk the darkness. Her passionate desire to give form to her creativity is overcome by he
r fear of what lies within. She is afraid to confront parts of herself she may find morally or societally unacceptable. So although she is able to tap into her great generative gifts, she remains peering impotently at an obstacle she could easily overcome, frustrating the expression of her best self, her inner mystery locked away from any possibility of formation.

  Queen of Swords

  Queen of Swords? My best buddy. If I had to choose one friend from all the court cards, I would choose the Queen of Swords. I’d probably have more fun with the Page of Cups, but I would choose the Queen of Swords anyway. If this lady tells you she’s going to do something, you can start talking about it in the past tense. This is an entirely solid, reliable person.

  Here is something new for the Swords court cards: for the first time we see an entire sword. The Page and the Knight have truncated swords. The Queen and the King have swords which are fully visible. Swords are associated with intellect and will. The less developed of the court cards, the Page and the Knight, carry the energy of determination and willfulness, while the Queen and the King,’ being more highly evolved, carry the love of truth and intellectual acumen.

  What has happened to the birds? Only a single bird braves the sky. And we see something else very interesting—the Queen sits totally above the clouds. If we recall the Seven of Cups (the silhouetted figure in an apprehensive posture with his head in the clouds) we become aware that the Queen of Swords presents us with an opposing image. In the Seven we saw someone involved in projection, a subjective reality of his own making, his head literally in the clouds. The Queen, with her head above the clouds, enjoys the clarity of objectivity.

  The Queen’s sword is held in a perfectly vertical position. This is not a sword poised for action. It is a sword of judgment, suggesting impartiality, justice, and accurate analysis. What is this aggregate of symbols—the vertical sword, the single bird, the head above the clouds—telling us? The Queen of Swords has a single focus: she wants the truth.

  I wouldn’t mess with this mama no matter who I was! Her imperious gesture says to all, “You may approach. Yes, you may speak.” The vertical sword says, “You will get a fair hearing, but always remember that I hold a blade of steel. Spare me your twaddle!”

  The key to this card may be found in a brilliant interpretation by Rachel Pollack and resides in the funny little tassel that hangs from the Queen’s left wrist. If we think back to the Eight of Swords, we recall a figure whose arms are tied behind her back, who feels trapped, isolated, helpless, and victimized. She’s not having a good day. What Rachel Pollack suggests is that the tassel is the remnant of the ties that bound her.

  What we see, then, is the image of a woman who has used her pain to become wise—not bitter, cynical, hard, or cruel. She has metamorphosed her pain into power. The proper use of pain, we have learned from the Three of Swords, is to take it into our heart. Having done this, she has learned what she needed to learn from it. She has freed herself from it and emerges, phoenixlike, with strength, confidence, and authority. She is a woman who knows her own worth. Through that experience, through freeing herself, she has become the queen of her own life. Not just the bird, but the butterflies on her throne and crown are the symbols of her soul taking flight.

  How do we temper steel to make a sword? We heat it and freeze it and heat it and freeze it until it either cracks and becomes trash to be discarded or grows strong enough for us to depend on when we need it most. That is the reward of the Queen of Swords. Finally in the court cards of the Suit of Swords we see an image of tranquility.

  The negative of the Queen of Swords is harsh criticism. She is not a nurturing mother. She sets extremely, perhaps unrealistically, high standards and is exacting and possibly intolerant, particularly when the card is reversed. The child on her throne is just a head. Pure intellect. It will be evaluated for its mental prowess alone. The Queen’s double-edged sword cuts no slack for herself or anyone else. She can make mincemeat of an effort, a gift, a relationship, slicing it to bits, analyzing it to death. She can be rigid beyond reason, forgetting the spirit behind the letter of any law. At her worst, Swords symbolizing intellect and mind, her verbal abuse can cut deeper than a knife. Whoever said “Sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never harm me” got it backward. The truth is, sticks and stones can break only our bones—and bones can heal.

  The Queen of Swords begins her slow trek to royalty as we all do—as the pupa of the Eight of Swords, swaddled in the cocoon of preconception and immobilized by a sense of her own helplessness. Through the form-giving love of Yetzirah, she is transformed into a butterfly, serene and free.

  Queen of Wands

  The Queen of Wands. Actually, if I had a friend like the Queen of Wands, I wouldn’t sleep nights. Look at her! This is a totally amoral person! She sits on her throne in a position that would give any reader’s grandmother fits! It isn’t ladylike! If I may paraphrase a Hollywood line, “She isn’t looking for Mr. Right. She’s looking for Mr. Right Now.”

  As I have mentioned, pentacles and cups suggest female energy, while swords and wands suggest male energy. It’s very interesting to see how these energies play off against one another. In traditional terms, the Queen of Pentacles and the Queen of Cups are clearly the two most feminine queens, while the Queen of Swords and the Queen of Wands are masculine in their tone. In the case of the Queen of Swords, masculinity comes across as strength. The Queen of Wands carries a kind of sexuality generally associated with the male rather than the female and likely to be called promiscuous in women.

  There is an open invitation here that does not seem to be terribly discriminating. On the throne of the Queen of Wands are the maned heads of lions. There are lions on the screen behind her throne, and another on the clasp of her cloak. This is the fiery male power of Leo. What we do not find is any sign of children. Sitting with her legs spread in frank sexual invitation, she apparently doesn’t care about “right” and “wrong.” She doesn’t care about “nice” and “not nice.” Another woman’s husband can satisfy her needs as well as an “eligible” man.

  The Queen of Wands cares about only one thing: she cares about power. And she is a very powerful queen; this is clear and understandable. Libidinous energy is extraordinarily powerful, and she draws on it fully. Because she’s totally open to the life force, she can tap into it at all points on the spectrum.

  The scepter of the Queen of Wands is the sunflower. We see sunflowers on her throne as well. Now, the sunflower is a very important emblem here, because it is capable of tracking the path of the sun across the heavens. We don’t know how it does that. As children we’re taught that the sunflower always keeps its face turned toward the sun. But the sunflower doesn’t have a face—or eyes to watch with, or muscles to turn with. It doesn’t have a neck. And yet by some magical power it stays attuned to the sun. What does this mean? It means not losing touch with cosmic energy, solar energy in particular, which in every society is male. The Queen of Wands doesn’t care by what magic she taps into this power.

  The Queen of Wands’ black cat, always a symbol of black magic, is a dead giveaway. Magic is magic. It’s all the same to her. Black or white, it’s the magic that interests her. She has as well the signature three pyramids of the Wand court cards to intensify her powers. What she cares about is the charge, the power, having the energy flow through her. (I’ll bet that unhappy-looking, scrawny little black cat would prefer to belong to the Queen of Pentacles, who would remember to feed her once in a while!)

  Because I don’t like the Queen of Wands, she obliges me by turning up in my readings when an adulteress is needed. (If you love her, she will not show up for you as the adulteress. Maybe the Queen of Cups will, or the Queen of Pentacles, reversed.) Since I have always felt that the Queen of Wands is ruthless and amoral, she fills that function for me.

  However, I have come to recognize that I not only have Queen of Wands energy within me, but that I like it! This is the fiery warrior queen. This is the Amaz
on, the defiant, queenly force that says, “I can’t do it because I’m what? You can do it because you’re a man, but I can’t because I’m what? You’ve got to be kidding! I can do anything you can do—probably faster, better, and with less help!” She is then apt to remind you that Ginger Rogers did everything the far more famous Fred Astaire did, but in high heels and backward.

  Additionally, the Queen of Wands is extraordinarily creative, as a result of continuous contact with solar rays. The position in which she sits need not be interpreted as sexually inviting. It is the most common birthing position for women all over the world. (In few societies do women lie down between white linen sheets to give birth. Most women sit in a birthing chair or squat.) Of course the birthing position represents not only the physical birth of a child but also bringing forth all the creations of one’s being. Perhaps she is bringing forth creativity itself into the world. To bring her child to maturation, the Queen of Wands depends on the gift of formation from Yetzirah.

  The Kings

  The kings carry the most highly evolved energy of their suits. They need this high degree of development, for they find themselves in the olam of Assiyah, the realm of action. This universe, you will remember, is occupied by the single vessel of Malchut, the kingdom. Here in the world which corresponds to Earth, they must reign with wisdom and justice; the action taken in Assiyah has consequences that for most of us, most of the time, are the most real.

  As I have mentioned, the court cards as well as the suits represent Jung’s four functions of consciousness. To the kings are assigned the intuitive function. This means that each king carries the intuitive aspect of his suit, indispensable to those in power. Kabbalistically we are taught “as above, so below.” Only the kings can take on the responsibility of implementing this equation.