On slow lazy days, I often find myself seated at a small table musing on images from the Rider-Waite tarot. The design is my favourite because A E Waite was a good friend of the Welsh mystic and writer Arthur Machen, whose work I like very much. All roads seem to lead to Wales in my cosmology!
The card that coms up for me today is the Queen of Pentangles and something resonates with my deepening intuitions and problem with trust. Divinatory powers, luck, earthly connections and a certain wariness and reluctance, a solitariness…
Waite’s loose Celtic interpretation of the tarot images and his transformation of the Coins into Pentangles appeals to me. He himself commented in 1911 on the Queen of Pentangles:
‘The face suggests that of a dark woman, whose qualities might be summed up in the idea of greatness of soul; she has also the serious cast of intelligence; she contemplates her symbol and may see worlds therein. Divinatory Meanings: Opulence, generosity, magnificence, security, liberty. Reversed: Evil, suspicion, suspense, fear, mistrust’
Looking closely at the illustration I see a woman with averted face, a seated fgure framed by a climbing rose, as in a bower. Crowned and dressed in scarlet and a gathered white undershirt. Her carved throne seems almost tipping forward on the slope and in the distance there are valleys, lakes or rivers, and mountain ranges.
On her lap the Queen of Pentangles holds a large yellow disc or coin, engraved with an upright pentangle. The sign of magick. She holds it firmly in place and I wonder if it is a burden to her as well as a sacred charge. She is sitting in formal state but surrounded by nature, in a mythical landscape, keeper of the sign.
A star within a golden circle. One of my friends on the Welsh Borders sent me a festive card with a pentangle entwined with holly berries, red as blood, and I kept it on my secret altar amidst the candles and ivy. ‘The holly and the ivy/when they are both full-grown.’ The five-pointed star represents Spirit, Earth, Air, Fire and Water.
At university, I spent a semester studying the Tale of Gawain and the Green Knight, in which the pentangle on the knight’s shield is examined in detail: ’showed forth the shield, that shone all red / With the pentangle portrayed in purest gold’. What the pentangle stands for here is the truth to be found only in nature and mythology. The five points represent not only the five wounds of the suffering Christ but the five joys that the Queen of Heaven took in her child, and the five courtly virtues, including loyalty, pure mind and compassion, that Gawain personifies. The lovely and haunting old English folk song Green Grow the Rushes O has a line that sings : ‘Five is the symbol at your door’. In the perfect configuration of the pentangle, all these symbols are linked and locked in what is known as the Endless Knot.
The symbol of the pentangle derives of course from the pentagram, long associated with the planet Venus, who rules heaven as the Sumerian godess Ishtar. The pentagram is often involved in the Wiccan practice of summoning the elemental spirits of the four directions at the beginning of a ritual.
In very old grave yards found near Catholic churches or Cathar sites around the Mediterranean, the tombstones of the Knights Templar are engraved with the pentagram, which signifies the Key or Seal of Solomon, a sign of wisdom and summoning. And the pentagram is bound up through history with the five-petalled Rosicrucian rose as well as links to the Star of David. It is a mysterious and embedded symbol that gathers meaning within the contemplative traditions.
As I sit and look at the tarot card lying on my table, the figure of the Queen in her ritual robes of red and white, her eyes downcast, stays with me as a sad but wise aspect of myself, knowing but somehow powerless to effect change or find comfort. A woman holding mystery in her hands but alone. Very much the image of a hedgewitch on a rainy afternoon in a distant continent.
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