The Soul Journey Tarot Reading, from Rachel Pollack, seeks to help you understand, through the Major Arcana, what journey your soul has been undertaking during your dreams, and other trance-like states. It’s a little different to regular dream interpretation as it doesn’t seek to find what your dreams are about, rather it seeks to find out where your soul travels to and what it’s doing while there. As Rachel explains:
Soul Journey Reading
“Many traditions have an idea of the soul, or an aspect of ourselves, journeying to other realms without our conscious knowledge. This spread helps us look at where our soul has gone. Following widespread custom, I refer to the soul as “she”, but you can say “he” or “it” as it makes sense to you. (This can be done with the whole deck, if desired. Alternatively, this might be a good one for several cards per question.)”
- Where has my soul been?
- What has she done?
- What does she bring back?
- How do I welcome her?
I have shared the tarot reading I did with this spread to illustrate how profoundly deep it can permeate through your soul and into your waking life. While you don’t need to read on to successfully carry out this reading yourself, doing so will help you to see what depths, and heights, this tarot spread can take you.
I decided to use the beautiful and deeply spiritual Majors only, Affirmations for the Everyday Goddess, and kept to the single card version of the spread.
While shuffling and reading through Rachel’s intro to the spread, the Death card jumped out. This was a very personal card for me and speaks volumes about where I feel I currently am with my spirituality and my life in general. I put Death to one side as to me, it’s an integral part of this reading.
The cards I drew for the reading were:
- 12 – Hanged One
- 5 – High Priest
- 3 – Empress
- 21 – World
Affirmations for the Everyday Goddess is a deck rich in symbolism but is also a very spiritual deck designed to help you find yourself, your divinity and your connection to the Divine. As you might imagine, the cards contain affirmations on them, relevant to the card and its deeper spiritual message. The affirmations on the cards I drew are:
Death: I surrender my ego and no longer let fear rule my life. I have love, faith and hope.
- Hanged One: My sacrifice will strengthen my devotion to the Divine and deepen my compassion for all beings.
- High Priest: I am transcendent of time and space.
- Empress: I see the sacred in all beings and myself.
- World: I am One with God.
So you can see I have themes of surrender, sacrifice, transcendence, the sacred, divinity, and the relationship between myself and others, and as of late, other beings. There is a stripping away of what is present but outdated, unnecessary & restrictive with the arrival of a new vision of myself, how I live and interact with others.
Reading Notes
See how the Hanged One and the World hold strikingly similar poses? If we transpose either one, they look remarkably like the other. Being the Alpha et Omega of this reading, it’s one of many indicators of the prohphetic nature of this reading. We can also see how the numbers of these two cards are related too. Lay these two cards side by side and you will see how.
If we take the numerology of this reading a little further and employ the techniques of reduction, we will see that the Hanged One and the World are also related through the sum of their numbers: 12/3 and 21/3. The Empress is also a 3, so we have 3 – 3 – 3, which adds to 9.
The High Priest is 5 and if we sum the numbers of the four cards in the reading, they also add up to 5. The High Priest, or Hierophant, has always been a difficult card for me but here in this reading, he, or she, appears to be the way to finding my divinity and transformation.
If we sum 13 from Death (4) and add it to the High Priest (5), we get another 9.
If we add the sum of the numbers of all five cards present in this reading, they also come to 9, a number of completion and preparation for the next stage of life, rebirth and renewal. It’s also the number of the Hermit, the archetypal soul searcher and mystical seeker, and the tarot card associated with Virgo, my sun sign.
Note: Seems the 9’s continue for me today, from Numerology.com:
Your Number of the Day is 9 | Wednesday, June 1, 2011: Today brings with it a grand opportunity for healing your mind and body. Get rest, and treat yourself to a massage or some other rejuvenating ‘time out.’ You may have a conversation later in the day that helps you strengthen your bond with another.
Closing Thoughts
Death is the theme of this reading, my spiritual transformation. As the Hanged One, I am surrending to the process, and as the High Priest I am transcending the ordinary to find my soul’s purpose. The Empress is how I will live in everyday life with this new spirituality and the World is how I will maintain my connection with Divinity. This has indeed been my Soul’s Journey.
Addendum: In one other twist of fate, or perhaps Divine Humour, in creating the header image for this post, apart from overlapping the edges of the four cards of the reading, they fit the exact size required for the header image to fit into its pre-alloted slot at the top of the post, no clipping, no adjusting. That has never happened before on any post. To date, there are over 140 posts on Tarot Elements, with over 20 other pages. Today is a Partial Solar Eclipse and a New Moon in Gemini too – is there a portal open to the heavens that has made this reading so amazing?
Affirmations for the Everyday Goddess by Pamela Wells is available to US readers.
