The Knight of Cups tarot card usually shows a young man in shining white armor atop a white horse, holding up a cup. He is on a quest for love—the quest of the cups, the suit of emotion, connection, and love. He can also be a bit of a bad boyfriend.

The Knight of Cups is the archetype of the “knight in shining armor.” He is a fairytale figure, someone who will come and rescue us from whatever distress we happen to be in. His cup echoes the Holy Grail, the magical cup that can solve anyone’s problem but might not actually exist. He offers the promise of escape, of rescue, of the joy and pleasure of love and romance outside of the painful realities we may be dealing with at the time. In some cases, this can be a really wonderful thing. But there are also times when we need to watch out for the Knight of Cups because he is not everything he seems.

The Ten of Pentacles is a tarot card that generally represents legacy and the experience of coming to the end of a satisfying journey. And yet there’s something a little off about this card too. It has chaos and dissatisfaction sitting in its shadow. The classical Rider-Waite-Smith version of this card generally shows an older man with his back to the viewer. He is looking toward a couple and their child, and he has two dogs at his feet. The scene is overlain with an image of the Tree of Life made of pentacles. So, what is the spiritual meaning of the Ten of Pentacles?

The Ten of Swords can be a scary card to pull in a reading. But there’s more to this card than meets the eye. What is the spiritual meaning of the Ten of Swords tarot card?

The Ten of Swords tarot card is one of the most disturbing images in the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith deck. It depicts someone lying on the ground, probably dead, pierced with ten giant swords. There is a storm brewing in the dark sky, but there is a light rising in the distance. In the Modern Witch tarot deck by Lisa Sterle, the woman in the image is lying on the ground, pierced with the ten swords, but she is so busy looking at her phone she doesn’t notice.

This can be an intense and somewhat scary card to pull in a reading. But there’s more to this card than meets the eye. Let’s talk about the spiritual meaning of the Ten of Swords tarot card.

The Emperor represents traditional masculine energy in both its positive and negative aspects. Learn more about what it means to pull the Emperor tarot card.

The Emperor tarot card generally shows a very masculine figure sitting on a throne, holding a scepter and wearing a crown. A bright red robe covers a suit of armor. The Emperor’s throne is decorated with two rams’ heads, associating this card with the energy of Aries, the first of the astrological signs, whose great power kicks off the spring season (March 21-April 19).

The Eight of Swords may look like a challenging tarot card, but it offers us a way out of our current distress. Learn more about the spiritual meaning of the Eight of Swords tarot card.

The Eight of Swords can be a disturbing card to pull. The traditional Rider-Waite-Smith version of this card shows someone tied up and blindfolded standing in a puddle, surrounded by eight swords arranged like a cage. This card looks cold and scary. But the cage of swords is fairly open. The blindfold is loose, and the person doesn’t look particularly distressed.

The Four of Swords tarot card usually shows someone lying on a bed (or something that looks like a coffin) with three swords hanging above their head and another lying beneath them. In the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, the person’s hands are pressed together in prayer, and a stained-glass window is depicted on the wall, representing a sort of spiritual sanctuary. The person looks as peaceful as can be, considering they are lying on a coffin with three swords hanging over their head.

Swords cards tend to be the most difficult cards the tarot to sit with. They often depict scenes of heartbreak, struggle, and loss. This is because Swords represent intellectual energy, which is truly like a double-edged sword: Clear thinking can help us discern between reality and illusion, while muddled thought can make us believe terrible untruths about ourselves and the world.

When the Queen of Wands presents herself in a tarot reading, she brings lessons about personal power, sovereignty, and the power of being a lion in cat’s clothing.

The Queen of Wands is generally depicted in the tarot as a beautiful woman, comfortable on her throne, holding a staff (or wand) and a sunflower. Lions adorn her throne and a black cat sits at her feet. This queen seems confident, independent, and intuitive, but what is the spiritual meaning of the Queen of Wands?

The Tower tarot card is one of the least-loved cards in the deck, but it offers powerful wisdom about big life changes. What’s the spiritual meaning of the Tower tarot card?

The Tower tarot card can be a little scary—maybe even scarier than the notorious Death card. It usually shows some version of a burning tower, with people jumping out of it to get away from the flames. It symbolizes something like the Tower of Babel, a story from the Bible about a time when humans were building a tower high enough to reach into the sky. God didn’t like this, so he scrambled the human’s languages and dispersed them across the earth, making it impossible for them to communicate well enough to continue building the tower.

How are you breaking your own heart? The Three of Swords tarot card asks us to look into what is causing us pain.

The Three of Swords tarot card is somewhat dreaded—perhaps even more so than the heavy-hitting major arcana cards of Death or the Tower. It’s often called the Heartbreak Card, and it shows three swords piercing a bleeding heart—ouch.

Look at its placement in your reading, however: If it sits in your past or present position, it may represent shifting out of a phase of heartbreak. It may also be asking you to look at how a previous heartbreak is informing your current situation.

What is holding you in chains? The Devil card may appear scary at first, but it has deep lessons for those who will listen.

The Devil tarot card often shows a classic Devil figure with horns, wings, and the legs of a goat, with two naked figures standing at his feet, held loosely in chains. The image in the traditional Rider Waite Smith deck is a clear inversion of the Lovers card, which depicts two naked figures standing at the feet of an angel who, on that card, is offering a blessing.

The naked figures standing with the Devil are often shown as demons with tails and horns themselves, seemingly unbothered by their tethered reality. It appears that they could remove the chains at any moment, but they do not: One of the classic illusions of the Devil card is that that is the only reality that exists.

The Five of Cups instructs us to explore our relationship to trauma and how we process. Learn more about the spiritual meaning of this tarot card.

The Five of Cups tarot card usually shows a cloaked figure looking down at three cups that have been spilled. Two cups remain upright just behind this person where they can’t be seen. In the distance is a bridge across water, some faraway land that must be crossed.

Who sits between you and God? Learn more about the meaning of this masculine major arcana card.

The Hierophant tarot card generally depicts an imposing masculine figure sitting between two pillars, clad in three robes of different colors with a triple-pointed crown on his head. One hand is held up in a gesture of teaching or speaking, two fingers pointed to the sky, and the other hand holds a scepter. Two people sit below him listening, rapt, to his sermon.

I’ve been in a complex dance with hope over the last couple of years, and I’ve noticed that I have a tendency to expect and plan for the worst. I keep hope very, very close to my heart and certainly don’t engage with it joyfully. This helps me feel safer from a negative outcome. It helps me feel like I’ll avoid the embarrassment of finding out I shouldn’t have hoped. 

The Empress tarot card holds rich symbolism and is connected to two important goddesses. Learn what lessons we can glean from this powerfully feminine tarot card.

The Empress tarot card shows a beautiful woman, usually dressed in a flowing garment, covered with pomegranates (a fruit related to sexuality and fertility) with the symbol of Venus on a heart near her feet. She’s often shown in a lush environment, with wheat growing beneath her. Sometimes she is shown as a pregnant woman.

The major themes of the Empress tarot card include fertility, abundance, and feminine power. The Empress is an appropriate symbol for the springtime, when the world begins to come back to life after the dying time of winter. Mythologically, she relates to two other goddesses of the cycle of life and springtime.

The goddess Brigid—widely celebrated on February 1st—and the Star tarot card have much in common. Explore how these two figures represent resilience after collapse.

The Star tarot card is a beautiful, calm, and hopeful image. In the classic Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, the card shows a naked woman kneeling by a body of water, surrounded by lush green rolling hills, with one large star and several smaller stars shining above her. She is typically holding two jugs of water, pouring one onto the ground and the other back into the water.

When the Death Tarot card appears, the Death Light is upon us. This is the knowing that comes when we face the inevitable aspect of life that is death and endings. A lot of people fear this card, but it need not be taken literally. Its messages, however, are very important to pay attention to.

In traditional images of this tarot card, a skeletal figure in knight’s armor rides his white horse at sunrise. People kneel and drop at his feet, asking to be spared. The mythological figure of Death appears in many ancient traditions, here most recognizable as the Grim Reaper, who carries both a scythe to sever the soul from life and an hourglass to indicate that one’s time has come. As feared as he is, however, the Grim Reaper is not evil. His work is to safely carry the soul from its body to the afterlife. Sometimes Death is interpreted as an angel.

Did you pull the High Priestess card? Learn the meaning of this major arcana card and how it can help us heal the “witch wound.”

In the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, the High Priestess is a robed woman sitting between one black pillar and one white pillar, a moon at her feet, and a veil decorated with pomegranates (a fruit that is associated with femininity, fertility, and death) behind her.

She is the gatekeeper of the Divine Feminine, the subconscious mind, and the secrets that become available only to the initiated who know how to enter this realm. Anyone who enters must understand the duality represented by the black and white pillars: dark and light, masculine and feminine, conscious and subconscious.

The Hanged Man tarot card depicts a figure hanging upside down from one foot, usually by a tree or some sort of wooden cross. Despite the explicitly uncomfortable position, the figure often looks peaceful and at rest, sometimes even with a halo around their head. The general interpretation of this card is to rest within chaos, confusion, or uncertainty. To allow yourself to learn from being stuck somewhere you never wanted to be.

The last card is the Star, which is an energy of hope, especially after a difficult period. It’s the energy of early spring, which is when the first flowers start to break through the melting snow and frozen earth. In this image, this woman is surrounded by chaos but calm, at one with it. One of the students in the class pointed out the bird holding a flower resting on her hand, which calls to mind the myth of Noah’s Ark. After God flooded the earth, everything was gone but Noah’s family and his menagerie of animals, floating in an ark on an ocean of nothing for over a year. Noah sent out a raven who didn’t come back, then a dove, then another, until one finally came back with an olive branch, indicating that their long wandering was finally coming to an end.

The Death Light has been something of a theme for me in the last couple of months. It can be metaphorical or existential—working on a will, thinking about changing our life paths, or considering the legacy we want to leave after we’re gone. But sometimes it’s literal. We witness death, face a serious illness, or someone close to us has died. This last month, one of the ways Death came to my door was for my little orange fox dog Finnegan.