The Tens
Major arcana: The Shaman. Position on wheel: centre right.
Ten of Wands: Responsibility
A person struggles across the ice, carrying logs home. A feeling of being burdened, weighed down by the responsibility of work or caring for others. Try to delegate and lay down some of the load.
   
Ten of Arrows: Instruction
A woman teaches a child to fire a bow. The passing of skills from one generation to another. The figures are African, as that is where the human race originated.
   
Ten of Cups: Happiness
In a verdant landscape, water pours down a waterfall, filling the cups to overflowing. A couple open their hearts to the power of love. Be careful not to get swept away by it.
   
Ten of Stones: Home
A stone archway is protected by two ancestral guardians. Beyond a thatched stone round house the tree of life grows radiant and abundant. All generations are represented in the garden, from a baby to the elderly; and the community is in harmony. Coming home to oneself, an abundant home life, feeling spiritually and financially happy, loving one’s immediate environment.
   
The Moon
Position on wheel: Winter/Lowerworld. Chakra: womb.
The Moon in a tarot pack is really concerned with the dark moon, not the waning moon, but the true last phase of the moon, when it cannot be seen at all. Obviously I have had to draw a moon in the card, but made it deliberately eerie and unnatural. The Moon card is concerned with a fertile yet fallow state, latent life that grows within the amniotic fluid of the womb; molecules of carbon that lay within the swamps of our distant past and from which the first life form emerged.
The Moon card shows the watery winter flood plain of Avalon and one of the narrow wooden trackways that criss-crossed the marshes from island to island. On one of these sacred islands stand stark winter trees, inhabited only by crows and a heron.

An aurochs or horned cow or bull is the totemic animal of this card. The connection between horned cattle, islands and the moon is very ancient. (cf. the Welsh name for Anglesey is Ynys Mon-Isle of Cattle). The association between cattle horns and the horns of the waxing and waning moon is obvious. Also the similarity in shape between the horned head of a cow and the uterus, made cattle extremely sacred. This card is partially to do with the mysteries of conception and fertility, psychologically and physically. The egg depicted is a heron’s egg; a heron is the primal bird of creation, at home on this marshland. The heron replaces the now rare stork as the bird that brings babies, i.e., new life into the world.

A shifting time of seething darkness in which new life and ideas can be conceived.

   
The Sun
Position on wheel: Summer/ Upperworld Chakra: heart.
A figure stands arms wide, heart open, to receive the abundance of the universe. The Sun card traditionally refers to the sun at midsummer; the life-giving sun, radiant, potent, energised. The Sun differs from The Greenman or Greenwoman (the cards for midsummer) in that the solar figure has traversed the wheel and completed a life cycle. The Sun is the wise and grounded Fool, able to surrender to a higher spiritual power of love, without burn out or the interference of the ego. Summer leaves, a fern, sweet honeysuckle and the briar rose are blessed by the white hot summer sun. The person is joyful, radiant with life energy.
The Sun card is placed in the shamanic Upperworld, or sky, where spiritual teachers can be encountered, but access is only possible through a generous open heart. The Sun card follows that of the Shaman and is a spiritual aspect of shamanism. Solarisation or total shamanic identification with the heart of the sun is a world-wide practice. This is often achieved by sacred drumming, which sends one into trance, then journeying on a white horse into the sun. Many shamans consider the drum itself to be the sacred horse-the vehicle for their spiritual transformation. In the Sun card the figure has entered the sun through the sacred site of Uffington white horse, or mare, whose eye represents the sun. (see Ace of Arrows). Uffington still has a tradition that says if you stand in the eye of the white horse and wish, whilst turning clockwise three times with your arms open wide, your wish will come true. This damages the chalk eye, and would once have been a rare act of sacredness, where the shaman would have ‘flown’ into the spiritual heart of the sun in trance, and returned bringing its healing power both to the land and tribe.

A union with the wonder of life. Bliss. Health and happiness. Spiritual teaching. A rare heart. Transcendent joy. Access to the divine.

Re-energised from the flight of the heart, you return to earth to illumine The World Tree.

   
The World Tree
Position on wheel: centre, encompasses all worlds.
A strong and healthy tree, with the foliage of all four seasons, winter, spring, summer and autumn, stands on the earth, branches reaching the sky, roots deep in the earth. The labyrinth, a stellar vision in The Fool, is here grounded on the land; you stand at the centre as the Tree, your journey complete. You are able to draw on all the qualities from the other cards in the wheel, you are in balance, a whole person. You are at one with yourself, your immediate universe, your own path and a greater destiny.
   
The Storyteller (back of the cards)
This androgynous figure is at one with the Greenwood. They wear a hat of reindeer skin with ochred reindeer antlers. Heron, owl and raven feathers hang from it. They are clothed in moss and woodpecker feathers, a foliate face at their heart as they speak with the voice of the Greenwood. Their skin is weathered and tattooed. The frame drum is painted with the horse with which they traverse the shamanic worlds, and the emblems of the four elements, and intertwined serpent energies of the land. Horse hair and a kingfisher feather hang from the drum stick.

As you walk into the Greenwood may your journey be blessed and your heart full.