The Dreamer

For the April 'poem a day' challenge this year, I'm writing haibun to explore and reflect on my new Tarot deck, Forests of Enchantment. 

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The Weaver of Visions is more usually called Queen of Cups. This is the card I would use as my Significator in a reading – if I were to use one at all.

The Significator represents the person for whom the reading is being done – an identifier, if you like. It’s not necessary to use one, and I rarely do. The Powers That Be are quite capable of identifying the querent (the enquirer, the subject of the reading) without that. But it’s traditional to use one to start a Celtic Cross reading – once upon a time the classic layout, the only one that many people knew, and still an excellent all-purpose spread. Tapping into such an old tradition feels magical!

The Significator is always taken from the Court cards, which stand for people. (Major Arcana cards might represent people very well, but are so important when they turn up in a reading that one doesn’t take them out of action in this way.) 

It used to be said that Wands represented redheads, Cups blondes … and I forget whether Swords were supposed to have black hair and Pentacles brown or the other way around. This categorisation would obviously be silly if one were in China or Haiti, say, or any country without an exclusively white-skinned population. So nowadays Significators are assigned on the basis of Zodiac signs. As a water sign woman (Scorpio) I get Queen of Cups – or, here, Weaver of Visions, which is rather lovely.

She’s ‘a shapeshifting enchantress’ says the text, either woman or ‘leaping salmon’. I prefer to see the hint of a fish tail in the illustration as suggesting a mermaid.

In any deck this woman is described as emotional, dreamy, sensitive, intuitive, psychic.... This book even says, ‘She is poetry.’ As a poet, I do like that!

[Note: All the court cards can represent their qualities rather than specific people, when they appear in a reading – as distinct from being chosen as Significator.] 

laying out

the Celtic Cross –

connecting