🌓♎︎: world as church: the promise and peril of the 3 of pentacles
This month’s slow tarot spread: 7 of Pentacles x by 6 of Cups Rx, 3 of Pentacles (below), King of Swords (left), King of Pentacles (above), 9 of pentacles Rx (right), the 3 of Pentacles is most prominent in this image.
I am writing this on the longest day in the northern hemisphere, as the sun enters Cancer at the peak of the seasonal cycle. The summer solstice is a high point that’s still widely acknowledged in a culture that’s gone mostly linear. It fits nicely into our society’s reliance on growth, forward and outward progression, and light. The solstice is also a turning point on the wheel, the days following it will grow shorter and shorter until the dark overtakes the day. Our collective acknowledgement of these points in the cycle is more rudimentary, focused on maintaining productivity and efficiency despite the shifts occurring around us.
In the linear world mapped out by the King of Swords (reason), and the King of Pentacles (wealth), there is little conscious awareness of the cyclical nature of all things.
We are economically and therefore materially dependent on lines going up, on meanings being clear. Ambiguity, lessening, letting go, decay, death… these are fearsome propositions to linear time, and to our linear kings. This weekend I’ve been listen to a teacher of mine, Josh Schrei of the Emerald podcast, speak of how myths reflect the natural cycles that fractal across the earthly and cosmic planes, from our breath, to the seasons, to the moon, everything rising and falling again, life layering on the death that came before. It is all teaching us, constantly, how to be in alignment and attunement with all that is, if only we could surrender to it.
As I sat with this spread this morning and reconsidered the disconnect between the 7 of Pentacles and the 6 of Cups - something I spoke about in my first reading of this spread - I thought about how so much of this linearity that plagues modernity is an attempt to outrace death and deny its necessary role in supporting the continuation of life. Maybe this fear also lies at the root of the division of mind (swords) and body (pentacles), [hu]man and nature, which was fully integrated through Descartes. The maxim I think, therefore I am fits nicely upon a Swords King who has disconnected himself from nature. Perhaps the disconnected King of Pentacles version is “I extract, therefore I have.”
This split removes us from a consciousness that is connected to all of life, and places our individual consciousness as isolated, supreme, but also under threat of annihilation at any moment. Soul has left the garden and now the crops are simply commodities.
We’ve disrupted the rhythms of nature in effort to dominate her, and therefore disrupted the rhythms of self. In contemplating all of this, I was drawn down to the 3 of Pentacles, underneath the surface of this spread. From this place of disconnection, with the self removed from the larger ecosystem of all that is, organized religion can step in to mediate the relationship with god. It is likely no coincidence that alongside this shift, the iconography of religion shifted too, from the life-giving powers of the female body, paleolithic goddess figurines, to an instrument of torture and death, the cross.
The Saturn-Neptune cycle that began in February tells us, astrologically speaking, that our material relationship to spirituality is evolving.
As I look at this 3 of Discs that falls at the bottom of this spread, I am reminded of how fervent fundamentalism is underlying so much state violence: ethnic cleansing, war, genocide, and genocide enablement. Christian nationalism is rising and being weaponized in a devastating and bumbling effort to create a white ethno-state in America, whose great promise and potential has always been otherwise. Religion can lead us so astray when it is rooted in fear and domination. As the sun enters Cancer today, a sign concerned with protection of the self and group, I am thinking about how all of this is so deeply connected to our culture’s refusal and fear of the cyclic and the soulful. As the moon in Libra squares this Cancer sun 🌓, I am reminded that the tension between self-protection and relational harmony, vulnerability and grace, is written in our stars.
The Three of Pentacles in this spread is not only about the religious fundamentalism of dominator culture, just as the King of Pentacles is not only about wealth. This card invites us to root into the relational dynamics that pattern our lives, and become conscious of their material outcomes. It invites us to see the “greater good” we are building with our lives.
In the context of all of the earth in this spread, this card is a reminder that although our individual bodies are technically separate, we are all deeply interconnected, and all of our actions have material consequences.
So what are we building, together? Through our interactions, our collaborations, our sharing of goods and resources, and our shared stories? How are we re-weaving the cyclical nature of reality and soulful connection into this process of relating and building? How are we making space for not knowing, for ambiguity, for loss and grief? For bodies and minds that are interconnected and therefore sharing in the suffering that is being deployed upon the most vulnerable and least resourced among us? Have we taken a hard stare at our own complicity in these patterns of oppression and dominance? Have we located the oppressor inside of us?
We all know – well, at least most of us know – that our consumptive, extractive culture is living on borrowed time. Our lifestyles cannot hold. Material convenience comes at an existential cost. And this material form of wealth is all many of us have ever known. We fear the changes necessary to maintaining a thriving world, because we’ve been so conditioned in ways of consumption, we cannot really see a way out, or forward.
But what about all we might gain in a world in which spirit and soul are rewoven into place, into community, into social interactions and public rituals and our relationship to meeting our own needs?
A stewardship and partnership culture might be less prone to predation by zealots terrified of the thought of their own demise. Such a culture might redefine wealth as life’s ability to sustain itself through soulful stewardship. Returning to our disconnected Kings, they too would benefit from the reweaving of soul into the world. We can all see that the richest man alive is deeply miserable, and inflicting that misery upon marginalized people in devastating material ways. Our current definition of wealth is empty and hollows out the souls who have the misfortune of acquiring it. This is immediately evident in so many aspects of our current systems collapse.
Systemic collapse presents opportunity for systemic change.
In a re-enchanted worldview, where psyche and soul are not solely confined to the body, we can understand that seemingly small actions can influence the whole. Re-patterning our lives to harmonize with the cycles that hold us, planting soul back into the garden, reconnecting with the world as enchanted, ensouled being, these are invitations for us as individuals, and they reconnect us into a way of being that is collective and interconnect.
