The Tarot Speaks: Celestial Tarot

Like most tarot readers, I have lots of tarot decks (over thirty-five at the last count, and that's not including the oracle decks...). Also like most tarot readers, there are some which are my working decks, some I use to read for others, some that I use for personal work like meditating or ritual. Others are somewhere in between. Each deck brings different gifts and perspectives, and sometimes its good to check in with the deck itself to see what these gifts and perspectives are. There are lots of fabulous deck interview spreads out there, but I find a single card is enough to give the deck a chance to speak for itself.

 A deck that I use regularly, but would like to use more, is the Celestial tarot. With beautiful artwork by Kay Steventon, each card is linked to a constellation, planet or sign of the zodiac. I'm not always keen on correspondences (there's a whole other post in my head somewhere about why I dislike the "traditional" Golden Dawn astrology - tarot correspondences), but this deck makes gentle connections and leaves space for intuition. At least it does for me. So I asked it how I can best work with it, and pulled the Seven of Cups.

In the Celestial Tarot, the Seven of Cups is linked with a fixed star, the only card in the deck linked with a fixed star. So perhaps the first message is simply that this deck links the images of the tarot to the stars. The star is Al Risha, which forms the knot tying the tails of the two fishes together in the constellation of Pisces. This knot has been seen as symbolising the cords that bind loved ones together, in both a positive and a negative sense. Some knots are so tight they cannot be untangled and we lose sight of ourselves as individuals. Other knots hold us together and keep us grounded, allowing us to grow into our best selves. In the Celestial Tarot, this card represents a relationship which is "bonded but not bound", closely linked but not excessively tangled. There is a need to cut through emotional chaos, to separate the true bond from the false illusion. It may be linked to a fixed star, but this is usually seen as a nebulous card of daydreams and wishful thinking, the energy of Pisces and Neptune. Of course, emotional and psychic bonds are often lost deep in the unconscious self.

So I can use this deck to untangle reality from illusion, to gently pull on the psychic knots it shows up and see where they lead. This deck's strength lies in untangling the unconscious, separating the true mystery from false imaginings. The astral correspondences add lots of extra information, perhaps reflecting the Seven of Cups as a card of overwhelm and too many options. There is a need to follow the flow of intuition in reading with this deck, perhaps working with dreams and guided meditations to tease out the links between the cards and the stars and find meaning rather than confusion in them. I find that this deck gives good gentle readings, answering the question at hand subtly at times, but always meaningfully.