lesson 4: noticing, ego, stagnation, and solving the wrong problem

LESSON FOUR
A row of five:
Ace of Pentacles (5), King of Wands (2), King of Cups (1), King of Pentacles (3), 5 of Swords (4)
Deck used: The Silver Acorn Tarot by Stephanie Buscema 

From the dense and esoteric, to the charming. I’m not one for “whimsy,” but there are a handful of “cute” decks that I find really charming and useable. This is one. And what’s equally interesting is the arrival of three of our four kings! This is the type of reading that might have sent me into the depths when I was starting out. Three kings! And no context! How are we ever to make sense of that? The question of the courts always freaks out new readers and I think it’s because we keep saying reading the courts is difficult. Once we get it in our heads that the court cards are tough, we agree. But if no one had told us they’re difficult, they would never have been. 

As always, let’s start by doing some noticing. Other than noticing the three kings, we notice that the only king left out is the King of Swords. The suit of swords is represented by the five. There are no major cards. The Ace of Pentacles completes the quintet. This gives pentacles a (tiny) edge in this spread. In this deck, the King of Wands looks away from the other two kings and towards the ace. The King of Cups looks at the King of Pentacles, who would be looking at the Five of Swords if his eyes were open. The Five of Swords, featuring a bird, looks the King of Pentacles. Because the deck is fairly consistent with Waite-Smith other Waite-Smith decks, I won’t dwell too much on the artwork (though it is incredibly cute while also being incredibly useful—I love this deck). 

What do we know about kings? Let’s start there, since they have shown themselves so forcefully here. It’s almost as though they’re pissed we spent two readings working with decks that eliminated them for the sexier knight. “Hey! We’re still here, jerkwad!” Kings are of course monarchs, hereditary rulers who believe (generally) that they are appointed by “god” to rule their land. There is a whole history of kingship and colonialism, and though kings predate the christo-colonial, many of us tend now to think of these guys in terms of the toxicity of unilateral rulership, among other poisonous things. Rightfully so. But of course, nothing is all one thing. There are plenty of times when kings represent oppression in readings. That said, I’ve also seen The Empress and the queens play that role, too—they are, after all, part of the self-same system. Because this blog is about lessons and advice, chances are we’re not being asked to imitate the nastier elements of kings in our readings. If anything, there’s a warning here. But let’s go deeper. 

Let’s assume for a second that it’s not kingship that makes a leader a colonizer. Let’s say that evil tendency comes instead from society and from the poisonous ways in which we’ve trained men in this colonial world. Instead, let’s remove gender from the equation. In fact, let’s—at least for the time being—remove monarchy from the equation. Let’s also do something increasingly common in modern life: let’s not jump to any conclusions based on our associations with an idea or concept. Let’s take the king’s point of view for a hot second. Here we find someone doing exactly what they were placed on this earth to do. Whatever deck I’m reading with and however that deck styles the equivalent card, I tend to begin from the neutral gaze that the king represents someone doing what (they think, at least) they were put on this earth to do. (For context, let’s contrast with the queen. Queens, in this same mythology, are put on this earth to make more kings. Who the hell wants that job, other than social media trad wives? If we take the queen as a ruler, her job is the same as the king’s. In many royalist systems, queens weren’t put on this earth to do that job. This means a queen is someone who has to do a job despite the fact that they didn’t want it or are forced to do it in the face of a system not designed to support them.)

Bringing in the elemental factors, the King of Cups, then, is a person working with the emotions, senses, feelings, religion, mediation—watery things—and is doing exactly what they should be doing. (The Queen of Cups would be someone working in that field unexpectedly or who was not to the manor born and is doing that work despite the odds. I tend to find, then, the queens cleverer, more active, and more resourceful. Struggle makes us more active.) A reading with three kings tells us about a person who is equally at home in the practical, the spiritual, and the creative—and/or someone who is at home with selling sex and sexuality (pentacles + [cups + wands]). I share that last part just to point out how we might consider these cards, not because it’s contextually relevant. But, actually, I think the reading is in part about selling ourselves. More on that presently. 

The kings are bracketed by the Ace of Pentacles and the Five of Swords. They “contain” the kings. These all-powerful rulers are being hemmed in by these two cards. And so we get a sense of restriction. Let’s see what is restricting us and why, so that we can tell whether this is good news or bad news. I recognize the Five of Swords is typically considered a negative card, but by now you know I don’t work that way. 

What we’re seeing right now is the way context shapes a reading. I don’t know what any of it means yet, but the relationships between the cards help me understand what potential meanings are relevant. If the Ace of Pentacles and Five of Swords are serving as restrictors, boundaries, or containers, then I have to read them accordingly. How does each of these cards “contain”? The Ace of Pentacles is practicality in its least developed state. It is the idea of the practical, the notion of the banal (or financial, but I’m not really seeing that as relevant--yet). There’s a naivety with the aces. Because they contain the fullness of the suit they have great potential, but because they’re “just” potential, they don’t really know what it is they’re doing, what they’re “for.” This is telling because we have three cards in the middle that fully know what they’re for. The ace knows its for something, but not yet what. It is possibility but not development. 

The Five of Swords, on the other hand, is developed. And it doesn’t like what it has become. If we think backwards from five, we deal with all the explosive potential of ace, two, and three—all of which comes to a dramatic halt with the four, which stops everything in its tracks. Four’s stability and stoicism gets stuck. It is so stable that it can no longer see what it could become. In a way, it’s the way we humans realize that we’re finite and that leaving this life means we will cease to be. Our egos hate that and so do what they can to hold on to these ideas of ourselves as hard as they can. We worry that if we change at all we will lose what we worked so hard to gain. The five comes along and says, “fuck that noise.” 

The Five of Swords (I think) is the lynchpin of this reading. What I start to see are kings who think they’ve reached the height of their abilities after only a little bit of work (the ace). The five—the only swords card—sees what they’ve become: arrogant, self-centered, self-impressed, and the worst versions of themselves. I don’t talk much about the swords representing “seeing,” but it’s a natural fit for them to play that role. There is something sharp and clear about swords/air; no other suit really “sees” quite as well. Not only does this card see that, it hates it. It wants to go to war with it. But how can it? It’s a lowly five, up against three kings and their outsized sense of potential (ace again). 

Note that I originally felt that the five and the ace bracketed or enclosed the kings. I don’t feel that way now that I’m looking closer. The five is the only card that’s doing anything and so it’s the main actor in the play. The kings have all reached a level of immobility because they think they have nowhere to go. And they’re “protected” by the ace. It stops them from moving. It roots them them, grounds them (pentacles/earth). But there’s a lumberjack coming to knock this forest down (five). Because the thing about fives? They’re inevitable. No matter how secure we think something is, there is always going to be a five moment. The mighty old oak will one day die and rot and fall. That is a four to five experience. It may take years, generations, millennia--but everything will experience a five moment sooner or later. Of course, like Death, the five doesn’t mean the end. More follows. 

(I read this morning in a book about the Thoth tarot by Lon Milo Duquette that the esotericists believed that there was a minor arcana for each of the majors. Not an individual card; an entire set of minors, one for each major. Each of the trump cards has fifty-six minor cards to go with it. The cards of course are always the same, but they may be influenced by a ruler in the way that astrological signs are “ruled” by planets. In the case above we’re seeing the five as though it’s part of Death’s minor arcana—and by that same logic, we’re seeing the Hanged Man’s version of the Ace of Pentacles. I enjoy this concept even if I’m only just sitting with whether or not it makes sense.)

Earlier we discovered that the kings represent those doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. But we didn’t say how. We didn’t describe the methods the kings were using, so we never figured out whether they were doing what they’re supposed to be doing correctly. The Five of Swords, becoming a powerful card indeed, indicates they have to be doing something wrong. One of the things I mean when I say context is important is what we’re working with right now. The cards limit each other. If the Five of Swords, which is “looking” at the other cards, represents something that needs to be shaken up, then the other cards are those things. So I need to interpret those other things in the corresponding way. I didn’t know the ace was going to represent a sort of arrested development until the Five of Swords “told” me so. I didn’t know the five was going to say that until I “listened” to it. The listening is what you’ve read to this point—my mental monologue about what the cards mean. 

Recall, two of the kings (cups and pentacles) “look” to the Five of Swords (though the pentacles’ king closes his eyes). They know this is coming. The open-eyed King of Cups for sure does. He may not be able to see it (in this deck, the king has a skull’s head; he has no eyes, but those non-eyes are “open”), but he can feel (cups) it. That said, he’s still not doing things right. Who is the King of Cups when misbehaving? Someone wishy-washy, indirect, indecisive, temperamental, moody; someone prone to tantrums and attention-seeking; someone whose self-esteem is tied entirely to what other people think of him. In essence, he goes from being an intuitive master to a petulant, selfish baby. The baby part comes from the fact that kings are typically thought to represent older people and when we “reverse” that, we’re getting someone really young. I don’t read reversals, but having just used that word you can see why I don’t—even though we’re turning out to read these kings the way one might read them reversed. 

A little digression on reversals: The reason I don’t use reversals is because the card combinations tell me whether I’m seeing each as “upright” or “reversed” without having to put the cards physically in that direction. How do I do that? Let’s do a quick summary of how I’ve read these cards so far:

• I scanned the cards without making judgments about them. I considered the number of “types” (kings, suits, numbers) I had and what that might suggest;
• I thought about who a king was by taking the metaphor of a king and de-contextualizing from the monarchy, then re-contextualized it in terms of being a human on Earth today;
• I noticed the lack of the King of Swords, the presence of swords in the five, and the lack of majors;
• I noticed the way the ace and the five seemed to bracket the reading;
• I explored the nature of aces in the context of how they might serve as a container. This is the first time I began to make any value judgments. 
• I explored the Five of Swords and where it was “looking” (where the main figure on the card faced), what fives mean, what the implied four means, and then a story began forming about stasis and shakeups:
• In doing that, I discovered that the five wasn’t containing anything; it was going to war with something it sees as having gone on too long. Here is where I began to understand the point of view of the reading. I’m seeing the reading, now, through the POV of the five. It might have made sense to think of one of the kings as the main player, but because there’s three of them their rank is actually diminished. The five was the only one “doing” anything; it has to be the lead role. 
• Having done all that, I know that the kings are misbehaving. They’re doing something that’s making the five unhappy. I begin reading them not as icons of inner purpose, but as bad little kids who need a spanking. (Metaphorically. Don’t hit children.) This means I have to read them (and the ace) in “shadow” or as “reversed.”

In this way, I let the cards tell me how they’re behaving, rather than manipulating them to do show up in a certain arrangement. There’s nothing wrong with either version, but I often found using literal reversals frustrating. Once I discovered the three-card method, where each position in a spread is filled with three cards rather than one, I discovered I didn’t need to reverse the cards because they told me how they were behaving more clearly this way. Thanks to Robert M. Place for that life-changing revelation. (See his book Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination.)

Back to the reading: Having read the King of Cups in this badly-behaving way, let’s begin contextualizing it in terms of this lesson. The only question I ask the cards at the start of each blog is “What is Lesson X?” In this case, “What is lesson four?” So I don’t have any thematic context, but this is a blog about reading tarot. Each post is a lesson on reading. So I need to begin to think about what I know so far in terms of a lesson about reading. Thinking of the King of Cups alone, we’re beginning to form the story of someone arrogant, thoughtless (remember the lack of a King of Swords in this spread—he can’t misbehave because he didn’t even show up to the party); someone judgmental rather than intuitive, someone who acts off irrational impulses rather than deep feeling. Here we have a smug-ass reader, is what we have—and one who’s stinking up the joint to boot.

But, wait! There’s more! We’ve got the other funky little kings to deal with. The other card “looking” to the Five of Swords is the King of Pentacles. He serenely and patiently sits upon his throne, holding his little pentacle, foot resting on what looks like a warthog. He’s become complacent, content with stasis, impressed with himself, and lazy; he, once a hard-worker (pentacles are the suit of work), grows sedentary—like the animal at his feet, happily snoozing. All his power means nothing because he’s not doing anything with it. He’s not doing anything with anything. He thinks he’s achieved top form and now there’s nowhere for him to go. He should be able to see the consequence of this, but he closes eyes that shouldn’t even be there! But someone is coming with a knife to harvest him. 

The King of Wands, on the other hand, faces the Ace of Pentacles. He’s still in love with his potential. All his energy goes into shining that brilliant golden coin he’s got his eyes fixed on. “Look how cool I can be!” he says. “Look at how many amazing things I can do! There’s nobody like me! When I get this project off the ground, it’s going to change the world.” Cobwebs grow from this ace, by the way, and a spider dangles from two cut sunflowers that frame the pentacle. This king is so impressed with himself, he’s growing cobwebs! The King of Wands has big Leo energy (Leo’s glyph, partnered with Cancer, are carved into the floor below him). The sunflowers having been snipped cut the life force from Leo’s home “planet.” This king’s ego is so impressed with what he could do, he’s not actually doing it! And he’s draining himself of the main source of his energy: the doing of cool shit!

And it is here that we land on the message of the reading: when you find yourself resting on your (considerable) laurels, that’s the time you’ve stopped doing the real work. You have to mess up that obsession with your potential, with what you could do, with what you have done. That’s the other thing these kings are doing in their passivity: becoming superannuated, obsolete. When we think about how good we are or could be, when we stop moving, stop working, stop growing, we not only stagnate, but we make ourselves somehow redundant. It is the myth that learning and expertise are destinations rather than journeys. The Five of Swords sees all this self-importance, arrogance, all this ego and says, “Not today, Satan.” 

This is a thing that happens as we get “good.” And this is as much a risk for the experienced reader as the new one. The new reader likely gets caught in the idea of potential, not unlike the King of Wands, always admiring what they will be able to do (the ace). They think constantly about how great it will be when they’ve hit all the hurdles, gotten though all the difficulties, and they spend a lot of time fantasizing about the greatness they’ll achieve. And by focusing on this, they actually forget to do the thing that will supposedly bring them all this greatness. Sometimes it’s not arrogance but fear that keeps folks in this potential-filled obsession. We worry we’ll never actually be able to do it so we never take the training wheels off. In that way, our fear takes over and we lose that potential because we’re afraid we won’t live up to the huge goals we’ve set for ourselves. 

This, my friends, is the story of my life. I know it well. I have always set goals too high to reach and downward spiraled when I’ve failed. This is been most true in my life as a writer (and once upon a time as an actor). I always let my ambitions outpace reality. I naively believed being talented would lead to success. But I also based my entire personality on the idea of a particular kind of success.  It wasn’t enough that I was a good writer who once in a while got theatres to produce a play I wrote. I had to be the toast of the theatre; I needed to reach the heights of theatrical stardom (something that is next to impossible to achieve in a very small, very competitive, very nepotistic, often very vicious field). But at the same time, I gave up easily. Rejection left me defeated most of the time. I didn’t have the money or energy to move to a city with a huge theatrical network, and even if I’d had, I don’t have the extroversion to network! But there I was, imagining all the great things I was entitled to once the blockade eventually lifted and I managed to get myself where I should be (with as little effort on my part as possible, and for sure as little discomfort as can be). I became only the imagined idea of potential. And anything I did get that wasn’t that didn’t matter to me. I devalued it. And in a lot of ways, I devalued myself and my work. I felt it was only worth doing if it reached the theatrical Olympus. And when I realized that would never happen, I gave up. Wasted potential. In fact, I’ve been known to whine to friends that I often feel like the sum total of all the potential I had and never lived up to. So I frequently remain in that mode.

This obsession with potential can dog new readers to the point that we never get past the foundational. Worse, because we’re so obsessed with how good we could be, we never let anyone see us in our messy modes. We need messy modes. Messy mode is where we begin. I recently rewatched an old episode of Drag Race All Stars, and the fabulous Yvie Oddly, a favorite of mine, did a whole number on how we should go out and fail. “Do,” she said, “fuck it up.” Of course, Yvie isn’t the first person to make this point, but because she’s the most recent place I was reminded of it, I’m getting her all the credit. We have to mess up. We can’t figure out what we’re doing wrong, or rather what we could do better, unless we do. It’s insidious. Our egos hate the idea of us messing up, but we cannot reach the full measure of our potential unless we do. We are required to fuck up. And to fuck up often. I’m not saying you want to go out there and give bad readings; I just mean, you have to go and make mistakes and then you have to figure out why, rather than getting down on yourself. 

This is true, too, for the old hats. And it may be even more important for those of us who’ve been around the block once or twice to keep our skills sharp and to keep learning. Experimentation is so important so that we don’t get stale, tired, lame; we need to keep our work fresh, we need to mix things up. We need five moments. We need them, and if we don’t get them, then we become the collective embodiment of those three kings above in their most negative manifestations. We get arrogant, lazy, soporific, and stagnant. In lesson one we did a number about what happens to stagnant water. Similarly, stagnant earth is dead earth—like a farmer’s field that has gone fallow. Stagnant fire doesn’t even exist. It goes out, like a candle flame at the end of its wick and fuel. This can happen to us as readers if we don’t keep challenging ourselves. You might recall I used Thoth decks in the last two lessons because I’ve decided to dedicate the summer to working with this system. I’m reading books about it, working with Harris’s stunning deck as well as two others, and just allowing myself to experience this kind of deck generally. It’s not a detriment to the client, because I have all my other tools to call on if I get too in the weeds with the esoteric—but I also still find so much of the esotericism a distraction from divination. So there’s little risk I’ll get too into it. 
 
Instead of embodying these immature kings, we should return to the beginning of the courts and embody the pages. They’re immature in different and important ways. The immature king knows better but refuses to act like an adult. The tantrums are all ego-driven and mostly for attention. There’s an entitlement, like a spoiled child, which is petty and easily ignited. Pages, meanwhile, actually are children. They’re curious and they want to know what’s going on. They’re immature because they’re still growing, not because they’re grown and just behaving badly. Pages are less likely to throw tantrums because they’re curious; that means their egos are harder to trigger.  They don’t think they know anything, so they don’t worry about what anyone else thinks about them. And, best of all, they’re actively interested in everything (of course, they’re primarily interested in their own suit, but we have two of the three here). 

It’s worth spending a little time exploring the absence of the King of Swords. Earlier, I said he didn’t know up to the party. I think that’s actually a good sign. He sent his soldier, the five, because he’s not staying still the way the other kings are. It’s actually really difficult for the King of Swords to stand still because the swords are so relentless—much like the mind of an over-thinker. In this case, the King of Swords is technically our knight in shining armor—or at least his rep, the five, is. Now, it’s partly a trick of math that the King of Swords didn’t appear here—there were only five cards, so the already-slim possibility of all four kings decreased with each new card. But when I look at the rest of the deck, the King of Swords is nowhere near the others—at least a good ten or fifteen cards away. There, he was flanked by the Eight of Pentacles (practical work!) and the High Priestess (she’s often considered the diviner of the majors—the knower of the secrets). He’s doing the work. Because the Priestess can sometimes be nebulous in readings, I also looked at the card that follows her: the Three of Cups. So there’s more expansiveness and the cups of course amp up her intuitive nature. This king is really connected to the real work. He’s not navel-gazing his own potential; he’s out in the field doing the thing. And he’d be better supported if the rest of the kings joined in. 
 
I’ve found myself saying over and over lately that curiosity is the cure for so many of the world’s ills. The word “cure” is right there in it. This reading talks about the consequences of denying our curiosity. All those kings, so impressed with themselves, sitting on their thrones, expecting to be lauded—and, in fact, probably being lauded—and yet they have no idea that all their power has been given away. To who? No one. It’s being squandered. They have the one thing so many people want and they’re letting it go to waste because they think they’ve done all there is to do. People are so afraid of being thought of as students. But the student isn’t the shameful role; the teacher who stops learning is. 

A read of one’s own
This is a spread designed to discover where we’re letting ourselves get stagnated, why, and how to overcome it. 

1. Shuffle your deck and then cut and put it back together. 
2. Look for the King of Cups and take the card following it out and place it on the table. 
3. Repeat for the King of Pentacles and the King of Wands. You don’t need the kings, just the card that follows them. These three card show you an area where you may be squandering your power with a lack of curiosity. 
4. Locate the Ace of Pentacles and take out the card following it. This card represents something that’s keeping you too rooted to your own ego.
5. Locate the Five of Swords and take out the card following it. Do the same with the King of Swords. These two cards represent the solution. 

A (not very) quick example: The three cards that followed the Kings of Cups, Pentacles, and Wands were: Death, The Devil, the Page of Cups. (It’s potentially interesting to know that all three of these kings wound up near the very end of the pack, sometimes with only one or two cards between them.) It’s not a combo that immediately jumps to life for me. The Devil is one of my favorite cards, and that makes me think of the term Kill your darlings. Actually, the fact that Death precedes The Devil enhances the connection there. But what does that mean? These three cards represent an area where I may be squandering my power with lack of curiosity. Because these two cards aren’t jumping to life (ironic, eh?), the Page of Cups is hopefully going to unlock the other two. I’ve been extolling the virtue of the pages, so I’m not surprised to see one in the reading. I am surprised to see it as an area where I’m not being curious, though. 

When I think this way, I think it suggests my cursory sense of curiosity. Thinking back to the misbehaving qualities of the king, we get the more negative aspects of cups/water. Those same qualities now apply to the page, who is actually being childish. It suggests a certain amount of naivety. Not something I usually consider myself, but of course we don’t tend to notice places where we’re not at our best. What am I being naive about? Death and The Devil. What do they have to do with anything? I normally interpret The Devil representing our real core, our essential selves, that part of us that we have to hide or shape to fit the needs of “civilization.” Or, it represents being drawn to those more “primal” aspects of life because we’re starting to understand how being cut off from them has made us less. Death, of course, is an ending or a stopping. It can be inevitability, too. 

I can’t help but laugh at the fact that I’m doing this work with the Thoth decks and Aleister Crowley’s infatuation with being called The Beast 666—something, apparently, his mother called him when he misbehaved. One could say I’m being naive about his work and that’s stopping me (Death) from something. Like, my attitude about his work could be getting in the way of something inevitable. Which, who knows? Might be true. It could also be saying that I’m being naive about working with this deck, and that it’ll kill me. But that’s probably not true, since I’ve read with the deck before. 

More generally, there’s a naivety about something deep, primal, core to me and it appears to be stopping me from growing. It could be an exploration of darker themes, but that’s not something I typically shy away from. It may also be telling me that my perception of the card, or the entirety of my work, is naive. Again, that doesn’t seem likely, but it’s not impossible. 

Because I’m reading backwards from the Page of Cups, Death seems to put a punctuation mark on the reading. But if I take a different track, and I start with that card, it might yield something else. The spread could be saying it’s inevitable (Death) that the deeper I go into myself or into darker work (Devil) the more naive I’ll find myself to be (page). Interesting, but none of this makes much sense given anything that’s going on in my life. So I’m probably going to reject all of these interpretations soon. This is where a lot of us get frustrated and give up. 

Let’s put these three aside for a moment, because I have the card that followed the Ace of Pentacles to tell me where I’m being too rooted in my ego. The Hermit is who followed—our third major card. I typically think of this card as representing the teacher, a thing I do a lot of, as well as an introvert. My introversion may be keeping me too rooted, and given the fact that I really don’t have much interest in doing much of anything lately, that’s a particular possibility. By the same token, it’s not something I’m particularly naive about. I know that I stay in too much. It may suggest that my focus on teaching—I’ve been doing a lot of classes and writing a lot—is also keeping me too rooted in my ego. I guess that’s possible, too. But it’s not really that helpful, frankly. In fact, I’m about to cancel a class due to low enrollment. Still, not much use, this. 

Let’s go to the final two cards—those that followed the King of Swords and the Five of Swords. These happened to be the Seven of Swords and the Queen of Pentacles. These cards tell me how to solve the problem. I’m about to look to the cards to solve a problem I don’t even know exists because the reading hasn’t given me a useful answer, yet. But, what the hell? Let’s find out what they say. The sevens look within, as you’ve likely heard me say by now, and of course the swords are intellectual, cerebral, linguistic, educational—this ties to the Hermit as an educator. The Seven of Swords asks us to spend some time considering what it is we really think. What do we really know to be true? Are we sure that what we thought was true really is? The Queen of Pentacles represents someone not necessarily born to practicality but forced to do it—and doing it really well.  Married, these two cards suggest the solution to the problem is to spend some time re-evaluating what I think about how to do the work I do. In essence, it’s a re-thinking of the whole brand: how we bring our work to life in a practical, useful way. Are the things we think are true really true? Is the way we work really working for us? The Seven of Swords and the Queen of Pentacles are going to find out by doing some work (pentacles) around it. 

Working backwards, I take this to mean that the solution to my problem is that I need to re-examine my work as a reader and spend time with what I really know to be true and how I’m making that come to life in my divinatory work. Weirdly, the reading seems to be saying that my teaching is taking me away from doing that and that I’m somewhat naive to be  avoiding the deep work (the Devil) probably because I’m scared (Death freaks me out, so I take the card to mean that in this case). I’m being naive about how much work I’ve really done on the deeper, darker parts of myself and my teaching work has been a distraction from it. I need to reconsider whether or not that’s really valuable to me and whether or not I’m doing the work as I should be—whether or not it’s bringing to life what I want it to. 

Frankly, that still doesn’t make any sense. But this is what I would say to a client if faced with these cards. More or less. 
    
Now what?
    
I always say that readings can be literal or metaphorical. If I take this reading in a more metaphorical fashion, it tells me, basically, that if I think I can be a good reader while avoiding the world, I’m being naive—and I really need to activate my work in a more worldly way. Which isn’t untrue. But, let’s be honest: I’m probably not going to do anything about it. Not at the moment. I’ve been feeling incredibly unsafe in the world lately, for a variety of reasons, and so going out always feels like pulling my skin off. But recall, I said the ego protects us from things that will help us grow. So I really should be getting out into the world. Actually, I think this has a lot to do with the fact that I should be hustling my wares a better—something I’m never good at. Weirdly, I think The Devil and Death (which in this cute deck are both rather charming) are trying to tell me I’m being naive about my own particularly creepy charm and I should be relying on it a bit more. 

Well. 
We’ll see about that!
    
This also reminds me of something: sometimes, readings aren’t helpful. Especially if you’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, or if we’re trying to solve the wrong problem. I always say, don’t use a spread that doesn’t speak to the issue. In this case, I may have invented a spread that solves I problem I don’t have. Sometimes, if a reading doesn’t make any sense, it’s worth asking ourselves if we’re actually solving the right problem.