Ask the tarot
a reader has an ancestor question for the cards
After the Eight of Wands essay, a reader wrote in with a question for the tarot about ancestor relationships. “How can we separate our peace from their pain while not severing the two completely,” Karen asked over email, later clarifying that by “pain” she meant the pain our ancestors or relatives felt that they never figured out how to process themselves. “Rude!” she added, which made me laugh and which the tarot seemed happy to respond in glib kind, with two reversed cards in a row. Double inversions in a two-card draw always seem kind of gibe-like to me, as if the tarot is saying “joke’s on you, my friend!” if not “wrong question altogether; ask again later!”
I don’t think the inverted Six of Swords and the inverted Ace of Cups mean bad query, go home, though. I read the reversals here, instead, as the tarot raising its eyebrows, a gentle nudge: If you have to ask about separating out ancestral pain from present peace, then neither the ancestral pain nor the present peace may actually be as it appears.
Pamela Colman Smith’s depiction of the Six of Swords shows a trio of figures, faces turned away from the viewer, two together sitting in the boat, one standing to punt them across a body of water. The trio has often been interpreted throughout its divinatory history as a family, and I think that works for the question at hand. Upright, the card usually represents the family moving on from strife, represented by the churning waters in the right-hand corner of the card, to peace, as signalled by the calmer waters ahead. Swords are a suit of knowledge, and six is a number of victory and success; right-side-up, we’d maybe say this card signifies the start of a successful transformation for the family line through self-knowledge or active awareness on the part of the querent.
But the reversal points us to a prickly truth: There is a difference between knowing a dead relative’s issues and a true felt sense that such pain is no longer yours to bear. In fact, as the reversed Ace of Cups indicates, many of us arrive at understanding and then tip it back over again, without that knowledge actually creating the kind of healing change in ourselves that we thought it would. The problem is in the grip, or in the state of manifestation the Buddha would call grasping. You can’t hold onto water. You can’t pin it down with a sword. Ancestral healing is something fluid, deeper and more mystical than human intellect or action by itself. It requires the paradoxes of water: formless yet there, constant yet changing, always cycling through and running forth. Doubling back. With the Six and the Ace, you’ve got a boat and a cup upside down—there’s no forward movement, after all, certainly no drinking. The vessels aren’t performing their functions. There’s no need for separation here, it seems, only connection, only being with. The dead can’t really hurt us anymore, Perdita Finn says in Take Back The Magic, that’s what the living do.
There’s a trope in therapy (and on social media memes) that awareness of a problem can only take you so far if you’re not actually going to do anything about it. But framing psychological inheritance or intergenerational trauma in this way misses the mark because it presupposes that family baggage is dealt with by doing rather than being. It’s true that we can go a long way to detach ourselves from pain that isn’t ours—a scarcity mindset around money, for example, or hatred of a group of people that our past relatives identified as “other”—by doing things differently in our daily lives. New habits can absolutely create new minds and new hearts capable of creating new ways of relating to objects, people, and world.
But peace comes from an experience of truth that occurs not through our participating in life differently than our ancestors but instead through our ability to communicate the meaning of such participation to ourselves as well as to our disheveled dead. The poet Alice Oswald tells a story of swimming in a river near her home, head above water, body moving in slow strokes beneath, feeling the brush of plants or small fish against her legs and torso. The sunlight on the water’s surface makes it too bright for her to see her own form and the forms of the creatures around her; the light on the top of the water in a sense decapitates her, reinforcing the feeling of a mind-body split. “Perhaps, my poems do feel a need to convey that continued separation of the head remaining human and the body becoming animal, or plant, or mineral, or whatever it can be,” Oswald said, reflecting upon her experience in a conversation with David Naimon, “In some way, I suppose I’m trying to find rhythms that will heal that divide.” To think of individual peace as separate from ancestral pain is kind of like Oswald’s description of swimming with her head above water, but in our formulation the individual is the head trying believe it can bask in the sun without paying too much attention to body, the family, in whatever depths below. But look—all of the individuals on the Six of Swords are on the same plane. They can talk with each, be with each other, and this is part of the rhythm that’s leading them—collectively and as individuals—towards peace.
It may seem odd to speak of communication—talking, writing, poetry— as a way of being rather than doing, but human existence is a symbolic existence as much as it is anything else. Even asleep, even doing nothing, we’re in language. We heal the divide between the dead and the living by being in symbolism with them, by offering the dead our reflections on their lives, which also changes our understanding of our own.
I hope you’ll forgive me an example from my own life, but I think it might be helpful, to bring us out of abstraction for a moment. I recently learned the circumstances of my great-grandfather’s death: He had stopped at a favorite produce stand to buy food for dinner, and when he attempted to cross the road to the stand, he was hit by a drunk driver careening too fast down the lane. After being rushed to the hospital, doctors reassured my family that my great-grandfather would be just fine. They sent him home; a day later he was dead—a blood clot, careless physicians.
Now, I have spent my adult life trying to avoid the personal, sentimental stories of my paternal family, preferring instead to build my personal and work lives in opposition to my ancestors’ participation in the systemic inequities that comprise life in the United States. As as result, there is a sense of purpose in my life, and a lot of love. But refraining from symbolic communication with my personal dead has kept me from experiencing the truth about the origins of strife in my life that I thought was mine and mine alone. Being with the story of my great-grandfather’s death has allowed a new understanding of my life’s struggles and dramas fall into place. It’s all there in the way he died—my traumatic experiences with food, bad doctors, and sudden, mortal health issues seem less mine to bear, even though, on a habit level, I divested from bearing them a while ago. It’s important for me to continue to engage with these themes as endemic to life under late capitalism in the U.S., of course, but I guess what I’m learning is that I’m not going to experience peace on a personal level by flinching away from being symbolically with my dead. My eating disorder recovery feels a helluva lot more permanent and successful—peaceful—these days because I now understand that pain didn’t actually begin with me, or with my sisters, or with U.S. beauty culture, but with my great-granddad’s death.
We don’t have to help our dead process anything; we have to help ourselves cross the abyss of our own lives. And we do this every time we communicate to them what we see now, what we know now, what meaning we make of what we see and what we know. To put our heads under the water for a little while, before we come back up again for sun. The esoteric name for the Ace of Cups is the “root of the power of waters.” In the tarot, all Aces connect to spirit, a world we cannot know through mind or form and yet a world that we can nevertheless communicate with if we can be with mind and form both or, in the words of Oswald, communicate not with language but “with what happens to language when it gets impossible.”
What feels impossible about the pain of your dead? And why? How is it intrinsically tied to the peace you say you feel? What symbols or symbolic rituals help you be with the intimacy of this paradox?
It is impossible to say that you deserved to die in the way you did, though that’s sometimes how I feel, is what I want to say to my great-grandfather. I want to talk to him, to understand his death in my body, now that I know it’s there. I never feel like I have the right words, but I’m telling him stories about my life, trying to change him, in the process, from bad blood into water I can drink, or pour out, or punt a boat through, or, when I’m feeling a little crazy, a little brave, simply be in, in the hopes of being transformed by.
Thank you for your question, Karen, sending care for the holidays.