Tarot of Origins
by Lo Scarabeo
10 of Blood
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- Description
- The 10 of Blood shows a spherical hunk of meat skewered by a stick, apparently cooking over a fire. Behind it, the sky is red. Below the hunk of cooking meat is a hairy man with a young face and white teeth smiling braoudly, his eyes almost invisible. He is without any kind of decoration and apparently very satisfied; in good spirits.
- Interpretation
- The 10 of Blood is a card of both reward and satisfaction, seemingly out of place in the suit full of violence, starvation, near-death and death. Having made it through the journey of the Blood suit to the card of its completion there is satisfaction and reward. It is the culmination of the options that are a part of the Blood suit: survival, perparedness, action, sustenance, death, confrontation, conflict and ingenuity. There is something surprising about the simplicity of this card, given the amount of things that have to go right for it ti come together. The man in this card, on the brink of passing into the realm of the archetypal with his entrance into the Trump cards, has learned the lessons of the suit and practiced them until they were integrated fully into his life and is reaping the rewards of those lessons.
- Application
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For me today this card was about reward. It was important for me to reward myself for a lot of the hard work that I've been doing over the past few weeks. It was the kind of day where I wouldn't have been able to stay focused on the work that I was doing if I hadn't been rewarded for the work I'd already done. I am definitely the kind of person who wants recognition for the work I do. I want the gold star, sometimes very badly. When I don't get it I don't feel that the work I've done has been validated or recognized. In school this attitude worked very well. Outside of academia it's a really poor engine for success. It's something that I am in the process of unlearning, but one that is still central to the way that my fetch operates, and therefore a large part of what motivates me. It's something I'm definitely ashamed of, since it's a childish way of moving in the world, but it's where I am, and where I must move from if I'm to learn anything more. So today I gave myself a reward for all the hard work I've done.
Thinking through the card again, I think that to ignore the importance of reward after hard work would really be detrimental to me. The card really fleshes out the way I think of reward, and adds depth to an otherwise simplistic view of reward. The 10 of Blood could have appeared in order to complicate my understanding of reward. This wasn't the empty gold star of a small child doing well for the teacher, but a well-earned treat for myself. I'm not an animal performing for a snack, but a human being who wants recognition from himself for the work that he's doing. I think this card has been a reminder of how important it is for me to recognize the work I'm doing and reward myself for it, and not forgo that reward by demeaning it into something childish or immature. Though I don't work with reversals, I can see that if this card was reversed it might intimate that there was something superficial or twisted about the work-reward relationship. I don't get that sense at all today about this card.
Thinking through a third time, there is something important about the reward itself. The reward isn't something useless, it's food. It's sustaining. It will become energy that is folded back into the work. It is both satisfying and sustaining in a way that helps the man continue what he was doing, and doesn't distract from it.
- Traditional Meanings
- Aeclectic Tarot - 10 of Swords
- ATA Tarot - 10 of Swords
