What Tarot Card are You?

You are The Empress

Beauty, happiness, pleasure, success, luxury, dissipation.The Empress is associated with Venus, the feminine planet, so it represents,beauty, charm, pleasure, luxury, and delight. You may be good at home decorating, art or anything to do with making things beautiful.The Empress is a creator, be it creation of life, of romance, of art or business. While the Magician is the primal spark, the idea made real, and the High Priestess is the one who gives the idea a form, the Empress is the womb where it gestates and grows till it is ready to be born. This is why her symbol is Venus, goddess of beautiful things as well as love. Even so, the Empress is more Demeter, goddess of abundance, then sensual Venus. She is the giver of Earthly gifts, yet at the same time, she can, in anger withhold, as Demeter did when her daughter, Persephone, was kidnapped. In fury and grief, she kept the Earth barren till her child was returned to her.

What Tarot Card are You?
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It had been a year or more since I had first taken the above fun test. When I came across it again, I thought I'd see if the result had changed. They had not.

When I do my own Tarot readings, I generally use one of two decks-- Gilded Tarot or the more traditional Rider-Waite which was my first deck. It helps, when you are learning, to have a deck that corresponds to most guidebooks. With time, you might use your own intuition regarding the card messages more than the books. (I have written about Tarot before most recently in [Tarot] so won't repeat it all here.)

Tarot is most useful for me when I have too much 'mind noise' going on. I go months sometimes without doing a reading. In January, when I began my 'finding a new dream' thinking, I thought a reading might be a good start. I brought out The Gilded Tarot deck.

Asking for a card to represent me in this exploring time, I asked for the white light around me, requesting that only the good would come through (yes, I believe in spiritually bad energies whatever one might call them), shuffled, cut, and dealt-- Six of Swords. Interesting card given my purposes.

The guidebook said, "By traveling over the water (her emotions) and carrying her same thought pattern (the swords), she is making a choice but is it a sound one? The toad seems to indicate more of a reliance on the reptilian part of the brain, from whence the "flight" impulse arises. You are running from something. Unless you examine the way you think, your running will accomplish nothing except an immediate escape from what is troubling you. Until you learn to face it, it will come up again in some other guise."

So I asked myself the usual-- huh? Was I running from something? Was a dream search my attempt to avoid facing something? The card encouraged me to think about what that might be.

About a month later, I got out the Gilded Tarot deck to check how things were going. Again, as one always should do when doing spirit work, I asked for protecting white light and wisdom, shuffled, cut, and this time dealt out three cards. One to represent me and two to modify:

The Sun represented me. That card alone is positive and would seem to say I am in good working order, in harmony with where I need to be. Now that does not mean my physical position but my inner self-- although it could be taken either way. The guidebook said:

'The message of the sun is of peaceful contentment with the world and its workings. You understand what you can and don't fret about what you don't. You understand yourself and your role in the universe as much as you can, and you are okay with that too. Life doesn't get much better than this."

Frankly I didn't feel I was in inner harmony. Why would I be looking for a new dream if I had it all together? But maybe the card meant I was heading that way. The first modifying card suggested I might be holding my resources too tightly and being fearful of losing them might be part of my problem. The second was a card of karmic completion, the end of a cycle.

Tarot can help to see directions and maybe where we are going versus where we think we are. The modifiers, in that reading, could mean I have a choice between holding tight to what I have or stepping out for something new.

So I went along thinking about this. Maybe another month went by when I decided to do another reading of three cards. This time the card I dealt for me was The Moon which is kind of interesting since last time it had been The Sun.

"The message of the moon is as shadowy as a moonlit night. Pay attention to your dreams and your intuition. Face your fears, even if you do so a little at a time. Attend to your soul. Be aware of not seeing clearly, of being afraid of shadows, or of being led astray by shadowy images that aren't what they seem."

The two modifying cards were that it is okay to grieve what I have lost but after awhile let that go and remember what I have left, and that I am ready for an adventure, a change. This all made sense to me. Most of the time when I do a Tarot reading for someone else, they understand where maybe I don't. This time where it's mine, I am the one who 'gets' it.

Readings from Tarot cards are not the end but only a way to see steps along the way. Often I find their meanings become clearer with time which is why it's good to write them down.

(All quotes were from the Gilded Tarot Companion by Barbara Moore.) I actually wrote this before I went to Tucson, but it never seemed to fit. Since it's about the process of using Tarot, and using it in the dream search, I figured just as well to post it now or I never will.