Tarot and the Nine of Wands
Kitchen table Tarot, musings on the maelstrom that is 2024
“Happiness we can only find in ourselves, it is a waste of time to seek for it from others, few have any to spare. Sorrow we have to bear alone as best we can, it is not fair to try to shift it on others, men or women. We have to fight our own battles and strike as hard as we can, born fighters as we are.” - Axel Munthe, The Story of San Michele.
BORN FIGHTERS as we are.
The Tarot card that embodies this message is the Nine of Wands.
We weather the battle. But yes, it is a long haul. We pause, rest, regroup and then "once more unto the fray." The Nine of Wands correlates with the second decan of Sagittarius the Hunter, the Archer, the Scholar, Philosopher and Visionary.
No one fires an arrow farther or sees farther or sends the mind farther than Sagittarius, the constellation that bridges The Milky Way. The Archer is a psychopomp, bridging life and death, offering safe escort to the souls of the newly dead. Sagittarius is the sign of foreign travel, foreign affairs. We see and hear the news. We pause. We send our thoughts afar.
No journey farther than death. But Sagittarius, ruler of the Ninth House of the farthest vision is the Archer and the Hunter. The sign of the winter solstice where Sagittarius segues into Capricorn. When the days grew short it was time to go hunting, to lay in food against the coming months of hardship. He does not hunt for fun. He does not hunt for trophies. Sometimes he too is hunted.
Sagittarius is the rising soul in search of new knowledge and new worlds. But he attends to the provisioning of life’s necessities. If there is no life without death, there is no death without life.
Robert Ardrey wrote African Genesis in which he (controversially) argued that the modern human, Homo Sapiens, was born out of Africa, and not Asia and the Indus.
“But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”
―Robert Ardrey, African Genesis: A Personal Investigation Into the Animal Origins and nature of Man
The load of the Nine of Wands, the burdens and sorrows of the world, weigh heavy, and these are especially troubled times. But it is reckoned we, every last person who has ever lived, had to beat odds of 1 in 400 trillion just to get born at all, descending to Earth through the constellation of Cancer and the Gates of Man said the Neo Platonists. The odds may be as great as 1 in 400 quadrillion.
How hard then, did we fight just to get born?
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
―Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
Well, Mr Dawkins, you are right, but you can’t blame folk for worrying. They don’t like losing loved ones, and they don’t generally remember, and for good reasons, where they came from before. And it is more the getting out of the gate that worries them, than the re-ascending from the moment of death through Sagittarius and the Gates of the Gods.
But it is true to say the Nine of Wands does not “whine”. He, or of course she, stands ready, stands stalwart, stands to. He has fortitude, patience, resilience and above all, stamina and stoicism.
I ain’t whining. Well, I will try not to. When we can’t fix the things we wish we could fix, then we raise our eyes unto the hills. Or the stars.
The Star Child, 2001, Stanley Kubrick
Thank you for reading.
Till next time.
Thanks for this! A much needed boost for all of us now.
One of my favourite Wands.