A companion to the Equilibrium cards
Not a reference manual — a way to walk through the world with the cards, one at a time.
Tarot is not fortune telling. It's not about predicting the future. The Tarot is a language of change. It shows us how any living thing moves through a natural process of beginning, maturing, ending… and beginning again. Being able to read the patterns in change might be just as supernatural as reading these very words to someone illiterate.
Tarot is not about answers. (Although, perhaps this is just a "political" position.) Reading the Tarot should not be done in a way to avoid facing life's challenges, it should not be used as an escape or a way to surrender free will. Tarot is a guide to asking better questions. It points us to blind spots, tells us where we might be fooling ourselves, pushes us to learn.
The cards are pictures for a reason. They are questions, ways of seeing, patterns that can be recognised. The moment we turn the cards into words, we lock them down to a particular moment, a specific context, and limit them. These patterns exist in every context, so any use of words is temporary, any name is just a pointer — the real meaning is not in the words.
But images come with their own baggage. The Tarot has accumulated symbols from particular cultures and times too. And we have to deal with all sorts of issues around Death and The Devil. So the Equilibrium Deck points to something underneath the symbols — to the position the cards hold in the cycle of life.
The Equilibrium cards are a teaching tool: they ground the traditional tarot in the natural world. In this course you work with both decks side by side. The Equilibrium card gives you a natural anchor, a way to link the card to something you already know deep in your very bones, while the traditional card gives you the rich symbolism that makes the Tarot so powerful.
A Rider-Waite-Smith deck (the original, or any faithful reproduction). The Equilibrium cards. Three days per card.
The physical practice: put the current card somewhere you'll see it, like a bedside table. Look at it in the morning. Carry the question into your day. Post thoughts and observations through your day if you want to, or just keep your own notes. Try to write things down. It keeps the enquiry present.
Don't wait to understand before you start. You already know this pattern — you've lived through seasons. We're just developing your ability to read.
The cycle of life is undivided — a natural flow from beginning to end — but in order to understand it we need to partition it. If we divide it into two parts or ten parts, the cycle is still the same; we just end up with different lenses on the same thing.
One cycle, divided and divided again — into two, into four, into ten — and still the same cycle. The light keeps flowing; only our lenses change.
Two
Divide the cycle in two and the first half is the outward movement, from beginning to the zenith; the second half is the return home. In the Equilibrium Deck these are the Solar arc (outwards) and the Lunar arc (return) — but really that's just to make them sound cool. They are just out and in. These correspond directly to Yang and Yin in Chinese, Daoist thinking.
Four
Divide the cycle into four and we get the seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter. I'm sure you can work out how these fit into the Solar and Lunar arcs. We can also see the four divisions as the four elements — fire, earth, air and water.
Ten
Dividing the cycle into ten parts just gives us ten parts; it doesn't change the cycle in any way. In the Equilibrium deck we've given them names to better communicate them, but don't get distracted by the names — they are just words. To show that these ten stages are also not mystical concepts, we've named them after systems and the way different systems interact.
Combinations
The Tarot has two main parts: the Major Arcana — the famous picture cards — and the Minor Arcana, essentially standard playing cards. The Minor cards split again into the number cards and the royals. Three separate sets of cards in practice.
The Major Arcana meanings combine the cycle split into ten with the cycle split in two: each of the ten stages is divided into an outward-facing card and an inward-facing card.
The ten stages unroll from circle to line; each stage opens into an outward (Solar) and an inward (Lunar) card — the twenty cards of the Major Arcana.
The number cards take the ten stages and combine them with the four — forty number cards. The Royal cards offer sixteen anthropomorphised characters for the seasons.
The same ten stages, fanned across the four seasons — forty number cards.
As we move through the cards we'll work with these stages bit by bit.
| Stage | Principle | Solar (1–10) | Lunar (11–20) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Boundary | Seed / Magician | Harvest / Hanged Man |
| 2 | Foundation | Root / High Priestess | Falling Leaves / Death |
| 3 | Emergence | Sprout / Empress | Preparation / Temperance |
| 4 | Structure | Blossom / Emperor | Reflection / Devil |
| 5 | Permeability | Pollination / Hierophant | Transition / Tower |
| 6 | Achievement | Fruit / Lovers | Hibernation / Star |
| 7 | Navigation | Bounty / Chariot | Night / Moon |
| 8 | Integration | Heat / Strength | Stillness / Sun |
| 9 | Understanding | Union / Hermit | Solitude / Judgement |
| 10 | Completion | Light / Wheel of Fortune | End / World |
There are, however, 22 cards in the Major Arcana — so the description above is a little too simple. The two extra cards represent the moments when our arc changes direction: points outside of time, where the pendulum swinging back and forth doesn't move, just hangs in space. In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck these are The Fool and Justice. They are not positions in the cycle — they are what hold the cycle in place.
The pendulum: ten stages out, ten stages back. The Fool waits at one extreme, Justice at the other — the still points where there is no motion, only potential.
The Fool (0/1) sits before the first card — undifferentiated potential, everything possible, nothing committed to. "To whomever emptiness is possible, all things are possible. To whomever emptiness is not possible, nothing is possible." That's the Fool. Zero and infinity in the same card.
Justice (1/0) sits between card 10 and card 11, at the apex of the arc. Not a stage to inhabit but a threshold to cross. "Justice is that moment at the top of the jump… the fraction of a second where we are still, not going up or down, not able to do anything about our situation except adjust our internal balance. And the Fool is the opposite — the trampoline tight all around us, everything about what happens next depending on how we move, about to be flung into reality."
Two still points. Between them, the twenty cards.
Don't believe any of this. It's all made up. But that doesn't mean it's not useful — or even, perhaps, a fragment of a "truth".
The relationships between cards taught in this course are not drawn from books. They are drawn from working with the cards themselves — from laying them out and seeing how they connect, tracing patterns, watching how their meanings relate to and influence each other.
There are no books recommended in this course, just your own observation and the cards themselves. The goal is to give you a solid grounding that lets you trust your intuition. The intuition this course seeks to cultivate is not the ability to make up random stuff, but to sense real patterns with as little prejudice as possible.
You don't need to believe in the Tarot. But use the Tarot to test what you believe. What is The Devil? Why does Death fit where it does? None of these cards are arbitrary; each has its place. The card meanings don't come from the symbols — they come from the position in the cycle. There are no bad cards. No card sits on its own.
Let's plant the seeds.