“What’s going on with my mariage?”, asked Suzan while she was sitting down at my table.
“Let’s put a few cards on the table and try to get some meaningful information”, I replied while she was nodding.
I pulled my tarot and started shuffling the majors. I added “I want you to think about your problems while I shuffle”. I gave her the deck to cut and pulled three cards from the top.
“We have La Roue de Fortune, La Maison-Dieu and La Papesse” I said, while successively pointing with my finger at each card.
“The first two cards are pretty straightforward. We first have these two entities turning around the wheel, until they cannot hold anymore, and then, the wheel becomes that tower, breaking, and the two people fall. What was built in between them is crumbling down.” And we started having a conversation about La Papesse…
I am sure every reader has seen this scenario. We have a situation with lots of ups and downs, until something finally breaks, and then everything gets destroyed. Be it love, friendship, work, or other situations, we see this almost daily around us or in people we read for.
The problem is often how they act or react. With the popesse terminating the string, I call it passivity. If we look at these three cards altogether, we see La Papesse looking at the two previous cards; looking at the tower self destroying, and further away at the wheel.
There is a total lack of agency here. The Wheel just turns, with these ups and downs, with nobody controlling it. The Tower breaks apart, these two people falling down have absolutely no control. And La Papesse just sits down and passively watches what happens.
It happens a lot in life. We all know someone with an awful job, unhappy, fighting fire after fire without reacting, until the company goes bankrupt or they get laid off. Or that couple that looks so nice, but fighting under the covers and nobody talks about it, until finally one day we learn that they’re getting divorced. And they seemed so nice together seen from the outside.
The problem in these cards is that nobody takes control. Nobody takes control of that handle on the wheel to try to steer the situation into another direction. La Papesse just sits and watches what is happening instead of standing up and taking the rudder of that wheel. Passivity and waiting kills many things.
Deck: Ancien Tarot de Marseille, by Grimaud.
