The Tarot of Eli 2, LLC: Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot- Three of Swords & The Animal Totem Tarot- 3 of Swords.

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Again, the Rider-Waite-Smith Three of Swords card chooses to represent a more mundane approach than Qabalistic Tarot as Waite didn't wish to expose arcane lodge secrets. The cloudy and crying sky, (Air is the element of this card) supports a Heart (Psyche/Soul) pierced by Three Swords. This implies the sorrow is deeply felt in the three states of mind: The Psyche the unconscious and the consciousness. 3 is also the number of the ternary goddess of Maid, Mother and Crone. When considering the 3 of Swords, we understand that this is the Crone.

In past blogs about the Qabalistic Binah- the Great Mother Womb of consciousness, you may remember that Binah is the Third Sephiroth who is the intelligence behind the 3's and is called: Understanding. She is also named the Sanctifying Intelligence and the Parent of Faith. Here is the implication that no religion or any sect could have a "church" without this underlying structure of Sanctifying Intelligence. As Mary is the Church, in Catholic doctrine, so is Binah the Parent of Faith...not the faith itself, but its intelligent parental creatrix in the Universal Collective Unconscious, that is the foundation of organization, structure and sanctity.

Hence, Sorrow is the parent of Faith.

However, this "Sorrow" (heart break) although deeply felt personally it is known as the "Universal Melancholy"; a deep sorrow from understanding that all beauty that is created must be destroyed, as a Self-Awareness progresses it must destroy what it was and rebuild what it is "now". A loving mother, who not only creates but also must destroy her children's manifestation as a Crone breeds a great sorrow...greater than we experience when "losing" a loved one for we are not the perpetrator of their destruction.

The maid begins, the mother conceives, the crone ends.

The Animal Totem Tarot- 3 of Winter illustrates an Elephant standing before the bones of a fallen comrade. Elephants are known for their elephant graveyards and for their grieving over the death of each other, even if unknown to each other. Elephants know that it is absolutely necessary to grieve. This honoring of life and death is what the grief cycle is all about for in order to proceed from where you were to where you want to go, first you must grieve the fallen. The elephant knows that the lost pieces of self will be missed, but they are no longer needed as they are no way helpful to what you are becoming.

The Elephant holds profound symbolism and spiritual significance across various cultures and traditions. As a spirit guide, totem animal, and power animal, the Elephant embodies strength, wisdom, loyalty, and deep emotional intelligence. Each role offers unique insights and lessons for personal and spiritual growth.

🐘 Elephant as a Spirit Guide

When the Elephant appears as a spirit guide, it often signals the need to embrace patience, loyalty, and long-term thinking. Spiritually, Elephants are seen as wise elders, guiding individuals through emotional healing, ancestral connections, and grounding energies.

Key Characteristics:

• Wisdom & Knowledge: Elephants are symbols of ancient wisdom and memory, helping you access deep inner knowledge and past life lessons.
• Emotional Intelligence: Known for their deep emotional bonds, they guide in understanding empathy, compassion, and emotional healing.
• Connection to Ancestors: Elephants remind us to honor our lineage and seek guidance from ancestral spirits.
• Grounding & Stability: As massive creatures connected to the earth, they help ground your energy during emotional turbulence.

When the Elephant Appears as a Spirit Guide:
You might be entering a phase of deep emotional healing, or it's time to honor your family legacy and create stability in your life.

🐾 Elephant as a Totem Animal

If the Elephant is your totem animal, it reflects your core essence and spiritual identity. People with the Elephant as their totem often embody natural leadership, strength, and a profound sense of loyalty.

Traits of People with the Elephant Totem:

• Loyalty & Family-Oriented: Strong protectors of their family and community, often acting as caretakers or leaders.
• Strength & Determination: Known for their endurance and ability to overcome obstacles with patience and resilience.
• Gentle Giants: While powerful, they carry a calm, nurturing nature and a deep sense of compassion.
• Wisdom Seekers: Always learning, growing, and sharing knowledge with others.

Life Path with the Elephant Totem:
Your journey often involves protecting others, nurturing strong community ties, and upholding traditions while leading with wisdom and grace.

⚡ Elephant as a Power Animal

Calling upon the Elephant as a power animal invokes strength, stability, and protection. This energy is particularly helpful when you need to overcome challenges, find grounding, or strengthen emotional resilience.

When to Call on the Elephant Power Animal:

• In Times of Emotional Overwhelm: Elephants help process deep emotions and foster emotional strength.
• To Cultivate Patience & Endurance: Their slow, deliberate movements teach the power of persistence and steady progress.
• For Protection: The Elephant offers energetic protection, particularly in matters involving family and close relationships.
• To Enhance Leadership Abilities: Invoke Elephant energy when stepping into leadership roles or when community guidance is needed.

🌿 Symbolic Meanings Across Cultures:

• Hinduism: The Elephant-headed god Ganesha is the remover of obstacles and symbolizes wisdom, luck, and new beginnings.
• African Traditions: Elephants represent power, royalty, and the strength of family bonds.
• Buddhism: White Elephants are sacred, symbolizing spiritual purity and enlightenment.

🧭 In Essence:

The Elephant as a spirit guide, totem, or power animal offers lessons in strength through compassion, wisdom through experience, and power through patience. It invites you to honor your roots, protect your community, and walk through life with both strength and grace.

When the Elephant appears in your spiritual practice, it asks:
“Are you walking your path with wisdom, compassion, and grounded strength?” 🐘✨

Therefore, this card represents the courage to help yourself and others by releasing past hurts and forgiving. Hence, we grow stronger from challenging situations.

In Tarot, this card is assigned the planet Saturn in the House of Libra.

In astrology, when Saturn is in the house of Libra, it influences the individual's approach to relationships, partnerships, and the pursuit of balance and harmony in their life. Here are some characteristics associated with Saturn in the house of Libra:

1. Serious Approach to Relationships: Saturn brings a sense of responsibility and seriousness to the realm of partnerships. Individuals with this placement tend to take their commitments seriously and may feel a powerful sense of duty within their relationships.

2. Focus on Fairness and Justice: Libra is associated with fairness and justice, and Saturn's influence emphasizes these qualities. People with Saturn in Libra may have a strong desire for fairness in their relationships and may be drawn to social justice causes.

3. Challenges in Balancing Relationships: Saturn's energy can sometimes create challenges in finding a balance within relationships. There may be a need to work on maintaining equilibrium and avoiding extremes in the give-and-take dynamic.

4. Structured Social Interactions: Individuals with this placement may approach social interactions with a sense of structure and order. They might be cautious about forming new connections and may prefer quality over quantity in their relationships.

5. Commitment to Self-Development: Saturn encourages personal growth and self-discipline. In the house of Libra, this commitment to self-development may extend to improving social skills, communication, and understanding the dynamics of relationships.

6. Long-Lasting Partnerships: Saturn's influence can contribute to the formation of enduring and stable partnerships. These individuals may be willing to invest time and effort into building a solid foundation for their relationships.

It's important to note that the overall astrological profile, including the positions of other planets and aspects, also plays a significant role in shaping an individual's personality and experiences.

It's best to grieve over loss and then move on rather than wait for time to heal the wound, the wounding of loss will heal best when you are moving forward. it is a signal that a new motion can now be built as your "life" journey.

It behooves us to remember we are Life and not seeking it. We are the breath of the body; Therefore, it's life, and the body's journey is to build a Hero/Heroine personality, which can meet all challenges and still stand in the face of all tragedy. If this were "easy" none of us would need to do it. Often "tough love" must be needed, to get us up out of the mud of our own sorrow and move on. Therefore, when "down," I say to my brain:

" Get over yourself, and get on with you, for impeccability is what we do"! And I often invoke the Great Creatrix and say, "Burn away from me all that I think I am and leave only what you Know I AM!

Dr. Paul Foster Case, the founder of the Builders of The Adytum (B.O.T.A.) named the 3 of Swords, the Sanctifying Intelligence. This ideology of the Sanctifying power of Sorrow is also shown by the Great Sufi 12th Century poet, Mustafa Jelaluddin Rumi, who stated: "Sorrow prepares you for joy, it violently sweeps everything out of your house, so new joy can find a space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place."

You may ask what a sanctifying intelligence has to do with sorrow? To make this simple, she is the Crone in this card, whose symbol is traditionally an Owl and the season of Winter. The Crone represents Wisdom and is the death of the false you that you think you are. She is the Crone who is all sorrowful for the destruction she must make on those creations she Loves into being as All Mother.

As Mother, the Trinity Goddess Knows/Understands you into Manifestation, and after mankind has programed you, what you think you are, is all words and confusion, i.e., falsehood. created by "the few who wish to rule the many," i.e., those who rule definition by controlling the media. Also, not unlike the Crone, in your bright and beautiful celestial soul resides this great sorrow of having to be both the life and death of the physical body. To have, to take or lose the life of one you experience, and love is a deeply sorrowful experience; for even the evilest and/or perverted of us Loves our body companion. Therefore, all that Creates is full of sorrow as well as love. The shadow image of love is sorrow. In the universe of things and entities, you can't have one without the other.

Let me explain how many of us think that "freedom of choice" is happiness, but we forget that to have "freedom of choice", we must have a beginning and an end, for form requires measurement; Life must have a Lifetime. As Spirit, we just Are and/or infinite willed energy that must have measurement! In the One Energy there is not up, not down, no in and not out; We just are as timeless frequency, everywhere and nowhere at the same time. But as a Celestial Spiritual Soul who runs a material body as "self-awareness", we are both Transmitter (Spirit-I), the Transmitted (Mind-Am) and the Receiver of transmitting (Body-Me) giving us the freedom to choose up, down, in or out and/or our own identity. And since we are the Celestial Persona of the One Energy that cannot be created nor destroyed, as immortality we must transform and to transform means to deconstruct what was measured into reconstruction of what is now measured. A sense of loss, and/or sorrow is merely taking the time to say goodbye to what was and then move on to what is.

Freedom of choice carries with it the potential for both profound sorrow and boundless joy. As embodied beings, we possess the "wetware"—the biological framework—necessary to develop the "software" of consciousness: a discriminating, operational personality we call "Me." This "Me" serves as the personal representative of the Living Measurement of I AM.

Through the process of choice and experience, we often act with the belief that we are "doing the right thing," only to later realize we were in error. Instead of embracing these moments as opportunities for growth, we frequently fall into the traps of self-blame, shame, or the projection of blame onto others. Yet, this cycle of trial and error is the essence of learning. In truth, 50% of all wisdom comes from making mistakes, while the remaining 50% arises from understanding those mistakes and correcting them.

Freedom, therefore, is not simply the ability to choose but the responsibility to grow through both success and failure, forging a deeper understanding of the Self in the process.

Spirit is Willed Energy, and it doesn't discriminate as all is of it, in it and as it and what is experienced through "in- form- action" becomes Knowledge which is neither good nor bad. Hence, Spirit's Self- Measurement begins as I AM, which denotes existence, but as what "I AM" (Me), hasn't been decided yet. Therefore, all "Me's" are an assumption. Only after much Wisdom (Chokmah) and Understanding (Binah) can a truly functionable "I Am Me" be decided. No one else can identify you.

Then there is the fact that Chesed, the 4th Sephiroth-Mercy, is the architect who designs the measurement for "what is form" and Geburah, the 5th Sephiroth-Severity - who is ruling planet is Saturn, adds "Time" that Chesed must design in/with, and therefore, the severity of Time's boundary challenges, which are the movement behind progress are applied to "being alive". To gain intimacy with all creation, the Soul must have a physical form as a self-expression, and since form begins, it must also have an end.

It's okay to have cleansing tears running down your face over tragedy but don't let it keep you from taking new action, for being a progressive identity is your destiny, and loss is not a "punishment". Hence this card's message is that when others decide to progress differently than you, let them go, for above all things, you must know yourself!

When thrown in divination, the 3 of Swords implies:

• Removal.
• Absence.
• Delay.
• Division.
• Rupture.
• Dispersion.
• Heart break.

If reversed:

• Mental alienation.
• Error.
• Loss.
• Distraction.
• Disorder.
• Confusion. 

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