Arousal

Keywords: Powerful (overdue) awakening

Arousal is a female bear. She is rearing up, half-standing. She stands before a dead tree: this is, however, a white, elegant and perfectly formed tree, with every bare twig and branch complete. The white is that startling silver-white that we see occasionally on highly weathered wood, as if the tree has been in the deep sea for a long period of time but now stands again on land. The bear may rest one paw upon the tree trunk.

From one main branch hangs a circular shield. This shows the constellation of the Bear or Artos in stylized silver stars upon a deep black-green ground. The Bear looks at the shield, which is within her reach. Alternatively, the shield and stars could be naturalistic rather than heraldic, as if the shield were a hole into the deep starlit sky, revealing the constellation. The upper part of the card has a dark sky, but the lower part brightens, as if light comes out of the land and flowers.

Around the foot of the tree grows a profusion of wild flowers and plants filled with brilliant spring colours, bursting with life and vitality. Around the trunk of the tree are coiled two torcs (such as the vast ritual torcs found in ancient Celtic graves, not neck torcs). They are made from twisted wires and would each be five or six feet long or more. One is of gold and the other of silver. They intertwine around the trunk in a double-helix. Thus we have a spiral of spirals. The torcs reach up out of the profusion of growth, as if rising from within the earth.

Arousal is the threshold-crossing Trump associated with The Sleeper and The Opener, just as Division is the crossing Trump associated with The Choir and The Tangle It embodies the power of awakening, often an explosive or overdue awakening, and in a personal reading shows the individual coming into a new level of his or her own power. As a crossing Trump, it moves freely between the Stone and Pearl Realms, in either direction, and has qualities and powers of both.

The bear is the aroused power, the hibernating strength within The Sleeper which now comes awake. In this Trump there are a number of Underworld and mythic associations with legends of awakening mythic associations with legends of awakening sleepers. One of the major myths of a sleeper in the northern hemisphere is the one of the sacred kingship, associated with the legend of King Arthur. The constellation of the Bear is Artos, and a connection is often made between this star pattern and the theme of a spiritual and even planetary awakening. This level of Arousal represents a movement from the depths or Pearl Realm to the surface, through the Stone Realm. It is found in the idea that a resurrected Arthur will transform the land and bring justice. The Great Bear and Little Bear are northern constellations, and the Little Bear seems to whirl around the Pole Star, a spiraling movement that resonates with the deepest Trump of The Whirlpool.

On a deeper level, representing movement from the Stone to Pearl Realms of consciousness and energy, the card implies the ancestral Bear Goddess, to whom the sacred king is a son and lover. The power of Artemis, chaste virgin and ravening she-bear, is embodied by the Trump of Arousal. This card also has connections to the deeper Trumps of Maiden and Raptor, for it brings through to the surface their deeper Underworld powers, and fuses them within ourselves, whatever our own physical gender.

The Tree and the Torcs

Both tree and torcs represent power out of the sacred land. The tree is a skeletal mystery, the essential core of a living being, revealed after long concealment. The flowering ground around it implies that the white tree may also regenerate. The torcs are emblems of power, and coiling around the sacred tree remind us of the dragon power within the earth. This dragon power is the polarized energy of all existence, ceaselessly interacting. In humanity the genetic double-helix is our most complex modern discovery of polarity in life, and this is simply another way of describing the ancestral branches and dragon power.

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