The Chariot

Among the Major Arcana, The Chariot, which is card number seven, is a peculiar and mystical card. It has to do with moving forward and, at the same time, with working to keep one's own inner and outer balance intact. It deals with courage, determination and danger, because it takes enormous courage to embark on a journey, as it takes a strong determination to doing it and an acute awareness that is can also be dangerous. But what is danger compared to the excitement of a journey!

Lust

 "Mitigate Energy with Love; but let Love devour all things".

Aleister Crowley

This is a beautiful and powerful card. In most tarot decks it is called Strength and it portrays a nice and delicate girl with her hands on a lion's jaws (here an example). It looks like she is closing them. The lion embodies our instincts, while the girl our higher feelings that can be cultivated once we manage to control our instincts. However, the presence of the lion underlines the fact that our instincts are a fundamental source of energy too and are connected with desire. That is why, Crowley, in his deck, opted for the alternative name "Lust", because he intended to focus on desire and not just on our possibility to keep it under control. In this card, we do not have a girl or maiden, as she is sometimes called, but a woman who is naked and is straddling not just a lion but a fantastic creature with seven heads and holding a sacred cup of red life-giving substance, reminiscent of the Holy Grail. I will return to this card as well. Crowley used to refer to this woman as the Scarlet Woman.

The Hermit

The Hermit is card number nine and in the Thoth Tarot it is depicted in a very fascinating manner. The magnetic centre is given by the light the hermit is carrying, a light whose rays spread all over the card. It is a lone figure, who embarks on a journey into himself (or herself) to find his (or her) way. Personally, I have been through a very difficult period which has weakened me greatly. I focused on The Tower because almost everything in my life fell apart. Recently, something happened that awoke an energy inside of me that I thought was dead. Things have not changed much, things keep on falling aprt in my life, but this sparkling light inside of me is making me think of The Hermit and his (or her) search for a path to find balance and sense again. That is why I am choosing The Hermit from now on as the card on which to meditate.

tarot reading as meditation

 I discovered the tarot world more than seven years ago. I worked as tarot reader for five years and fell in love with the cards and their shape-shifting meaning. I do not read the cards to predict the future or things like that. I use them to meditate and reflect on things that happen in my life or in the life of the person I am reading them to. I believe they are an insightful instrument rich in history and symbolism. I have various decks, but the one I prefer is Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot. At present, for example, due to grave things that happened to me, I feel my tarot card is represented by The Tower (see here) which is a tough card. In the picture you can see The Lovers which is a beautiful card dealing with choices. 

destruction as revelation - The Tower

The Tower, Thoth Tarot card XVI.

The Tower is usually considered to be the wrost tarot card of all the Major Arcana and it is but is not just that. The picture shows Frieda Harris's eloquent representation of this trump for Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot with a big overseeing eye emanating its rays over the rest of the image made of different figures and objects. Among them, a few abstract humans fall from an amost bending tower. At the bottom, a huge opened mouth shoots tongues of fires. This Atu, as Crowley termed his Trumps, is synonimous of destruction but also of liberation and, I would say, revelation. In this sense, as with all the tarot cards in general, even this one should not be interpreted univocally but in a more layered sense.