The Barbara Walker Tarot

Three of Swords: Sorrow A grieving figure huddles in the corner of a narrow cell, trying to shut out the sight of three bloody swords in a triangle. As a card of lamentation and also “singing,” the three suggests a formal mourning ritual, such as temple women used to observe. Other interpretations include isolations, loneliness, imprisonment, bereavement, disappointment, and self-pity.

Two of Swords: Balance A blindfolded female Justice with two balanced swords is set against the sea and the moon. This traditional design indicates equilibrium between two opposing hostile forces, which cancel each other out. Woman is the trucekeeper or peacemaker, controlling the balance of weapons. The card means stalemate, karmic retribution, vengeful righting of a wrong with another wrong.

Ace of Swords: Doom The Death-goddess displays her emblems: the destroying sword, the crowned skull, the magic mirror that entraps souls. Her purple gown and horns are ritual equipment. As Morgan le Fay, or Morgana, third of the Fate trinity, she is the quintessential Crone. As Death, she is said to be stronger than any man. Her suit stands for the air element, home of bodiless souls who are sometimes supposed to ride the wind. Through dire in many predictions, the ace stands for release, new freedom, lifting of earthly restraints, lightness, a kind of salvation.

King of Cups: Dewi Holding his cup, the Sea King sits on his rocky throne and gazes over the waters to the horizon, where all heavenly gods entered the Abyss. The Welsh sea god Dewi (“God”) had two Christianized forms. He was canonized as Saint David, and vulgarized as Davy Jones. He was called Waterman, Fisher King, and Bran the Blessed, keeper of the Cauldron of Regeneration. He represents ageless power and strength like that of the cold sea, irresistible forces underlying a calm surface, protection for those exposed to danger.

Queen of Cups: Virginal The Ice Queen stands in the Cave of the Heart. Her crystalline cup rests on an inaccessible mountaintop. In Virginal’s glacial realm the water element is frozen. Like her eastern counterpart, Durga the Inaccessible, she once represented the Mountain Mother nourishing her world-suckling and remaining entirely indifferent to the adult male. Beautiful but nonsexual, she contributed some of her character to the medieval Holy Virgin. She stands for cold purity, dedication to high ideals, and apparent heartlessness, but may bring great spiritual nourishment.

Prince of Cups: Galahad Kneeling at a secret, private altar presided over by an ancestral spirit, the young knight aspires to the Grail mystery. Galahad was the son-lover of Elaine, and a self-begotten deity. His father-aspect was Lancelot or Lanceor, the Golden Lance, a personification of lightning. Grail myths said Galahad reigned as a sacred king for a year and a day, and died at the altar as he saw the vision of the Grail. He was apotheosized, like the heroes shown on Elaine’s cauldron. He represents the best feminine qualities in man: gentleness, gallantry, sensitivity, courtesy, aspiration, capacity for self-sacrifice. He may be a messenger of new ideas.

Princess of Cups: Elaine In her temple, the red-cloaked Lily Maid (Moon Virgin) reveals the secret identity of the Grail and the Cauldron of Regeneration. Elaine’s cauldron, modeled on the famous Gundestrup Cauldron, depicts the mystery of sacrifice and apotheosis (resurrection to a godlike condition). Her cup is precisely positioned against her own body to suggest a womb symbol. She signifies mystical insight, hidden knowledge, revelation, a person having the gift of wisdom, or one needing to acquire it.

I remember that the first time I laid my eyes on the Barbara Walker, I vowed to myself that I would one day have it. That was way before USG decided to release it in a tin, when all the remaining copies were heartbreakingly-priced. I recall promising myself just that in a post in AT lol. I just knew that I would, because its images stirred a slumbering locus in my core that reacted to its brazen, unrelenting vignettes. I felt that when we do begin a pas de deux, it would be one for the ages. And oh, how right I was. By all means, the deck should have turned me off. It had a 70's indie movie aesthetic that I don't find particularly interesting elsewhere. It was printed …

Ten of Cups: Salvation Guided by his fairy Anima, the seeker finds the Holy of Holies at the end of a golden road through the dark forest. Cups’ culminating pip cards shows a culminating experience: the apparently inaccessible Grail Castle, to which the divine maiden brings her charge after crossing the River of Blood. In Grail legends it was Montsalvatch, the Mount of Salvation; she was Repanse de Joie, the Dispenser of Joy. Ten cups mean salvation through love: a caring relationship, honor, concord, devotion, the achievement of the quest.

Nine of Cups: Happiness True lovers are perfectly united in the sacred grove over its central Rose of Love. As Diana/Dianus, the Goddess and her God led the way to the paradise garden, symbolically likened to the body of Mother Earth. Their union was a sacrament said to bring about all fulfillment, fruition, and blessings. Their card refers to a pinnacle of emotional stability, goodwill, sympathy, wholesome living, kindness, and sexual compatibility.

Eight of Cups: Loss The Goat God weeps for his lost rites. The Willow-maid yearns to comfort him. Helice the Willow, virgin form of Hecate, once joined the Horned God Pan on Mount Helicon, home of the Muses. Their cult was declared devilish and was suppressed, but nineteenth-century romantic poets continued to regret the passing of their Arcadian nature worship. Pan’s eight spilling cups speak of loss, sadness, melancholy, rejection of Nature’s gifts, desertion of old loyalties, regret at parting from something that was beautiful.

Seven of Cups: Dream Along the Left-Hand Path, the poet invites his Muse, Female Soul, or Anima in her opaline veils of magical glamour. There are complex attitudes towards the Left-Hand Path of mystical insight. The inspired poet welcomes the vision of the Muse, but sometimes her gifts seem to melt away like fairy favors or dream treasures. Like the hidden path into the unconscious, the Way to her fairyland is alluring but perilous. Seven drops in her seventh cup signifies a communion of poetic vision, insight or revelation possibly veiled in fantasy, wishful thinking, or false hopes.

Six of Cups: Childhood Naked and vulnerable, a child returns to the awesome Great Mother. To overcome an impasse such as the five suggests, the six invokes a usable psychological technique: the inner return to childhood. Hidden memories of childhood impelled the ancients to visualize their divine ancestors as giants, which is how every child sees adults. Therefore the primal Great Mother was a giantess, a mountain, or a pyramidal tomb-womb, in humanity’s legendary Golden Age (the period of dependency), when law was based on maternal blood bonds. Such a psychic return means deep memory, old fears, loves, and longings, living in the past or searching the past for help,…

Five of Cups: Regret A man and woman sit isolated from one another by strife or resentment. She gazes at her own element, the sea, while he sulks. As fives stand for low points in tarot cycles, the five of the love suit means lack of sympathy between those whose feelings should be shared. The hollow five-pointed star within a circle once symbolized the nadir of the underworld. There the Goddess abandoned her love god and stilled his heart. Thus the five means alienation, frustration, loss of pleasure, poverty of feeling, indifference, disturbance of relationships.

Four of Cups: Decline On the night of the seventh veil, a king sits apprehensively watching the sacred dancer. In ancient cyclic philosophies, each period of fulfillment was followed by a period of decline. The Goddess decreed the death of her lover the king, following him into the dark seclusion of the underworld. She removed one of her magic veils at each of the underworld’s seven gates. This was the real meaning of the Dance of the Seven Veils performed by the high priestess Salome (Salom, Peace) in Jerusalem (“the House of Salom”). “Peace” was the sacred king’s word of farewell. The fourth cup, overturned, is the cup of oncoming darkness, wintry stagnation, disil…

Three of Cups: Grace The Three Graces dance in joyous celebration on a woodland altar. Charisma, the Grace of the Mother, was viewed as the gift of the Triple Goddess in her guise of the Three Graces, or Charities. Her three female figures dance together in sacred art from Greece to India. Even early Christian Gnostics called the Triple Goddess an incomprehensible and indescribable Grace, “She Who is before all things.” Her card represents charis or grace in the old sense, that is, all forms of love: joy, pleasure, fruition, abundance, goodwill, mother-love, giving, and contentment.

Two of Cups: Romance On the shore of a deserted lake under the moon, two lovers pledge their devotion in cups. Minnesingers wrote of secret places dedicated to their Love Goddess, where lovers could safely practice the ancient way of communing with the divine through the physical. By way of their romans or love poems, the term romance came to be applied to any affair of the heart, especially those blessed by the lovers’ own deity, the Moon Mother. Two cups indicate intimacy, sympathy, trust, engagement or marriage, fulfillment of desires.

Ace of Cups: Love Beside her water wheel, the fish-tailed Love Goddess drinks her element, pure water, once called the feminine Arche or Mother of Elements. Minne, the medieval Love Goddess worshipped by minnesingers, often appeared as a mermaid or merreminne. As fish-tailed Aphrodite, she represented the marine womb of all life. Fish were eaten in her honor on her sacred day, Friday. Even now, fish are called the food of love. The Ace of Cups invokes her qualities: pleasure, happiness, fruitfulness, birth, home, nourishment, satisfaction, caring. As the power of love has always done, it enhances other good influences and mitigates bad ones.

King of Wands: Valraven Under his trefoil crown of shamrocks or “clubs,” the king listens to his messenger, the black bird of magic speech. Valraven was a Danish version of the totemic raven-king reborn in fire. He understood the mysteries of the Triple Goddess, one of whose emblems was the trefoil. This king is credited with a hot, energetic, active nature, powerful, hard to control, attractive but possibly dangerous.

Prince of Wands: Dagon On his sun-and-moon altar, the god displays both animal and human characteristics. Dagon’s wand and cauldron symbolize fire and water, as his goat head and fish tail symbolize earth and sea; these appeared later in the zodiacal sign of Capricorn. Also called Yamm, Phoenix or Molech, he was a dual-natured consort of the cyclic Goddess Atargatis. His card suggests the unconventional, unexpected, unpredictable, or startling; seeming irrational but having underlying consistency.

Princess of Wands: Atargatis Floating between sun and moon, the Sea-goddess represents both giving and taking, her traditional breast-offering pose countered by the dangerous, devouring vagina dentata. Like other forms of the middle-eastern Goddess, Atargatis/Astarte/Ishtar stood for both nurture and destruction. At Der in Babylon, she devoured the phallic god Oannes and gave him rebirth, a myth later repeated as the biblical story of Jonah. Her card means irresistible power, a perilous compulsion, symbolized by another of her totems, the spider. Though risky, her path might bring great rewards.

Ten of Wands: Oppression A victor complacently watches his defeated rival fall into a dark, dangerous pit. Like Gnostic Christians who revered the defeated Lucifer, “Light-bringer,” and regarded the triumphant deity as a tyrant, interpreters of the culminating card of the power suit recall that absolute power corrupts and leads to injustice. The ten might mean misuse of power, selfish authority, and too much pressure generating resentment and possible mutiny.

Nine of Wands: Defense Behind nine bars, a naked savage crouches mistrustfully and clutches his knife. The barred cave signifies either defense or imprisonment, in either case a need for protection from something dangerous. The naked savage of the inner mind might be confined for the sake of those outside, or he may seek confinement in a fortress of his own making. This means a hidden position, insecurity, suspicion, inner doubts, barriers, expectation of trouble.

Eight of Wands: Fall The hero slips from his heaven-climbing moon-horse, dropping his wands in a barren landscape. “Riding for a fall” frequently expresses the eight of wands. Upward progress or an important journey, like that of apotheosis on the Muse’s flying horse Pegasus, might be spoiled by over-aspiration. The eight means haste, excessive speed, overconfidence, hubris; also motion, travel, changes of scene.

Seven of Wands: Challenge A princely juggler of seven flaming wands struggles to keep them under control, while he is menaced from above by a sharp moonsickle hanging from a single hair. Such is the precarious nature of public eminence, which must be maintained by constant vigilance and effort, and is always vulnerable to challenge. In the legend of Damocles, doom was suspended over the king’s head. The seven indicates powers and responsibilities similarly threatened; dynamic equilibrium preserved with effort, skill and risk. High ambition may take on too much.