I’ve been doing a lot of shadow work recently. Shadow work is a long, ongoing process, but the specific work I’m doing started a little under a year ago. It’s mostly daddy issues.*
Some time back, I shared a spread I’d created for shadow work. I talked about some of the problems I have with how many of us conceive of shadow work, and I proposed a different, aretaic approach to shadow work—one rooted in finding the proper way to flourish in various areas of one’s life. The spread I provided in that post is aims to show the path to flourishing (eudaimonia if you’re a fan of Ancient Greek) in the areas of life belonging to each of the suits of the Minor Arcana. It’s a damned good spread, and today I revisited it to help me with my own ongoing work. That reading, performed with the magniflorious Numinous Tarot, is transcribed below.
Air (Swords/Bells):
We start out with the element of air—thought, speech, communication, and the like. Many of the cards in the Numinous Tarot have non-traditional names, and the suits have all been renamed, but the three cards I drew are the Mystic of Vials [King of Cups] rx, the Diviner [High Priestess] rx, and the Six of Vials [Six of Swords], also rx. Lots of inversion going on here, which is interesting. When I see a lot of reversals in a reading (or, in this case, a section of a reading) primarily concerned with Air, I immediately note that there’s a problem of over-thinking and over-analyzing. Even before looking at the specific meanings of the cards, I see a need to stop, breathe, and let some shit go.
It’s unsurprising to see the High Priestess here. She’s transformative, and so is shadow work. In my experience, readings dealing with shadow work—at least, in cases where the querent is genuinely committed to doing the work at hand—often turn up the High Priestess, the Hanged Man, Death, or Judgment.
Likewise, the Six of Swords at the end of the line shows a change in perspective. It shows growth and carries an important sense of moving forward to new shores and leaving past trauma behind. The King of Cups at the beginning is interesting to me, because as I mentioned above, the bulk of the shadow work I’m doing now has to do with daddy issues, and neither of my fathers resembles the King of Cups in any way whatsoever. I think the King of Cups here is more about my relationship with myself than about either of them. It’s about having compassion and giving myself permission to feel hurt and angry about certain aspects of my parental relationships, without judging myself for that or trying to shut that emotional response down.
All told, the arc of this section of the reading speaks to an ability to set aside past burdens, transform, and find a new perspective on things, but the run of inversions tells me there’s still quite a ways to go.
Fire (Wands/Candles):
Here, we’re dealing primarily with themes of willpower—the grit to face unpleasant truths and push through hard times. The suit of Wands can, of course, also cover sex, ambition, creativity, spirituality, and health, but here I’m zeroing in on the will aspect. I have the Ace of Tomes [Ace of Pentacles], Dreamer of Vials [Page of Cups], Mystic of Tomes [King of Pentacles] rx, and Mystic of Candles [King of Wands] rx.
The two Kings are unquestionably my biological father and my stepfather. My stepfather has always been a very King of Wands sort of figure, and while I used to conceive of my biological father much more as a King of Swords type,** he definitely exhibits the King of Pentacles’s need for security. Both of these figures are reversed—no surprises there. These are the main relationships I’m working on healing, and they are not healed as of yet, but I’m encouraged by their placement at the end of this reading.
Building up to them, we have two cards that help in the process of healing those relationships: The Ace of Pentacles and the Page of Cups. The Ace of Pentacles is interesting to me; it captures a sense of financial independence and stability that (given my fathers and their respective complicated relationships with money) I need in order to do the work I’m doing now. I am now financially self-supporting, and I wouldn’t have been able to confront my parental relationships (nor the issues therewith) until that was the case. It enables my fathers to see me as more of an equal, and it gives me the opportunity to approach them not just as their son, but as a fellow man who requires a certain amount of respect and equal treatment.
The Page of Cups is also interesting, and here I connect it back to the King of Cups in the Air reading. The Page of Cups is an emotional self-awareness on my part, an increasing understanding of who I am and how I have been—positively and negatively—shaped by my fathers. Without that insight, I wouldn’t be able to have the (hard) honest conversations that have defined a lot of this work so far, and that will probably continue to define it.
Water (Cups/Vials):
Um, wow. Was not expecting this to be the shortest and most straightforward of these readings. The suit of Cups deals with emotion, and all the shadow work I’m doing right now is heavily emotional, but it looks like I have reached a solid starting point. The larger project of The Work remains to be finished, but everything I’ve done so far has brought me to a point where I really do understand my own emotions, the past experiences they’re rooted in, and what I need out of the work I’m currently doing. (This is reflected in the Cups cards that start out the readings for Air and Fire. Emotional self-awareness is my starting point.)
The message of the Seven of Vials [Seven of Cups] inverted is simple: No more bullshit. No lies, no deception, no tiptoeing around unsaid things. I need to be honest and direct, and I need the same thing from the people in my life.
Earth (Pentacles/Tomes):
This is where I have the most work to be done. This is the nitty-gritty, the details, the solid daily grind of having ongoing relationships with people who (for complicated reasons and in complicated ways) have caused me a great deal of pain in the past, even though they never intended to. It’s the real work of the work. (Yeah, yeah, that’s a kind of empty sentence, but you know what I mean.)
We start with the Hanged One [the Hanged Man] inverted. Welp. Enough said. Then we work through the inverted Five of Candles [Five of Wands] and the upright Ace of Vials [Ace of Cups]. We’re working through feelings of unfairness, of being undercut, put down, or not supported, and trying to find the font of genuine paternal (and, for that matter, filial) love that’s behind all the bullshit. Then we go through the Eight of Bells [Eight of Swords] reversed—cutting away self-imposed limitations and giving myself the freedom to move past the way these relationships have been defined and restricted for me in the past.
Finally, we get the Mystic of Bells [King of Swords] and the inverted Nine of Tomes [Nine of Pentacles]. The inversion of the Nine here tells me that success will be hard won. It ain’t an easy road. But it will come, and the Nine of Pentacles promises happiness and prosperity somewhere down the line.
With the appearance of the King of Swords, we have all four kings present in the overall reading (which only contains 13 cards total). That’s striking, although not surprising in a reading that deals primarily with my relationship with my fathers. Interestingly, this is the only one of the Kings that appears upright. It is only here, after doing all of the earthy work, that the relationship with my father (and perhaps, more deeply, with the Inner Father***) is finally put to rights.
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*It’s always daddy issues.
**One of the main sources of strain in our relationship as a child was that I perceived him, rightly or not, as cold, unemotional, and manipulative.
***Or the archetype of fatherhood, or the divine masculine, or whatever kind of spin you want to put on it.
Jack Chanek 