The Shadow Seer Tarot Spread

      

By Maja D’Aoust

We are inundated with conflict, polarizing rhetoric, and retaliatory behaviors. The news is a hotbed of doom, reinforcing a negativity bias in how we perceive current events and eroding our discernment of context and history. Armed aggression is affecting populations across myriad continents, with no end in sight. When we add the burden of natural disasters and environmental concerns, the weight of negating factors can overwhelm us in daily tidal waves.   Understanding negative energies has never been more important, largely because the internet has brought instant access to and exposure to the dark side into our collective consciousness. If humans are going to be consuming more doom data, it is important to provide tools to help digest and integrate that information. Enter shadow work. The value of shadow integration could be higher than that of cryptocurrency for our collective at these turning points. Watching large-scale, devastating conflicts such as Israel/Gaza, Russia/Ukraine, and US-Israel/Iran is forcing humanity to confront terrible, life-negating realities. To illustrate how we can work to assimilate and understand the negative energies we all face, I would love to offer the following example. I asked a question to the Shadow Seer Tarot deck.   What are the three most important Shadows humanity needs to integrate now? The response was: The Apocalypse (The World tarot card). The damage done by the apocalypse shadow can be seen in detachment and disinterest due to the illusion that the world is ending, so why bother?  Apocalyptic egregores enter the population periodically, introducing doom, fear, and hopelessness of no more tomorrows.  Inspiration and creativity are mired in woe at such times. This results in stealing joy from people's hearts.  As we watch the destruction of whole cities vicariously, with children and vulnerable populations violently dominated in some of the armed conflicts, we can easily fall into the despair of the end of everything that these fellow humans are certainly directly experiencing.  In times when the shadow of the apocalypse surfaces, participating in life-affirming actions, no matter how small and for their own sake, becomes vital for one and all.  Offering assistance to populations experiencing such tragedies may seem useless in the face of the destruction, but it matters very much to those undergoing an apocalypse.  No size of any apocalypse is large enough to negate the power of an action of goodwill to self and others. Though hope may be lost during apocalypse shadows, care need not be.    The Destroyer (The Sun Tarot) darchetype is the inversion of human creative energy.  Everything in duality exists on a dipole, and while the creative instinct in people is celebrated in some ways, we still have not been able to process our equal partner to this energy, destruction.  Each time mass destruction is inflicted by humans, there is outcry, outrage, and helplessness, yet few seem to acknowledge its inevitable, cyclical rise. Examining and confronting the human capacity to destroy, individually, in groups, and as nations, must be digested and integrated. The best place to begin working on this shadow is to acknowledge that we, too, destroy things and contain a destructive urge that is healthy and necessary. Once we accept this part of ourselves, we can explore how to express and use this ability in ways that are helpful and needed.  Perhaps we need to bring something toxic to a completion or close, this is a perfect way to indulge the Destroyer.  Making suggestions to others that they perhaps need a creative, destructive outlet could be very effective at spreading awareness of this lurking saboteur and could result in shifting the tides in the larger oceans of this shadow.     The Hatred shadow (The Ace of Cups tarot card) will certainly be with us till death do us part, haunting our hearts.  While love is the upright meaning of the Ace of Cups, when inverted into a shadow position, our passions are transformed to lower realms that seek to express below rather than above.  Fixation of emotion upon another is a form of intimacy, and perhaps we can begin to see how deep our passions lie with each other, and raise them back up into higher planes, thereby dissipating the hate we carry on our journeys here on Earth.  The need to make our feelings more important than someone else is truly the antithesis of love, which calls upon us to include others, acknowledge differences with compassion, and make room for others.  Take some time to check in on irritation you hold in your heart towards others or self, be it from the past or even just current petty annoyances.  Keeping track of these feelings is important in the gardening of our hearts, to ensure we don’t cultivate a briar patch that becomes increasingly unwieldy over time.