Ace of Blood
Ace of Blood
-
- Description
-
A young warrior's face dominates the card. His profile, looking left through his slitted eyes is intense. His short cropped hair is decorated with bone jewelry and his face is painted with two red line that go over his nose and under his eyes. Beneath him is a primitive painting of an animal pierced by arrows, obviously the victim of some previous hunt. In the background an empty sky and the silhouette of two mesas.
- Interpretation
-
I don't have much experience with the aces, but my understanding of their meaning is that they are the Platonic ideal of what the suit can or is. Unlike the ten of any suit, which is the fullness of that suit, the ace represents something else, some essence that is not realized but informs the whole suit as an idea. That said, this card is not the conflict that we see so often in many of the Blood suit, either before, during or after, but it is the promise of and preparation for conflict. The young warrior looks out across the world in anticipation of his first kill, as embodied in the painting below him. This kind of violence is yet unknown to him, but as he makes his journey through the suit, from the Ace of Blood to the Man of Blood, he will learn about the varying types of violence and what they have to teach him. That said, this is a card of beginnings, of mental preparation, of knowing what I know, what I don't know, and what I don't know I don't know. It is a card of both humility and ambition, as well as a card of potential, that beautiful moment before when anything is possible because nothing yet has happened.
- Application
-
This is always the hard part for me, and the most difficult part of using the tarot without a specific layout like, say, the Celtic Cross, which gives each card a specific context. The way that I'm doing it gives the card no real context, so it's up to my metaphysical sleuthing abilities to apply it. I'm going to apply this to my job situation, as this feels appropriate. I am at the beginning of a long career, from what I can tell, and blood I think in this deck most easily equates to the daily struggle of survival. I could, I suppose, broaden that a bit and merely say that this card is the first day of the rest of my life, but it doesn't feel specific enough. The Blood suit, more than Soul or Jewels, but perhaps the same as Nature, is about going into the world and finding a way to take what I want. And that's what I'm learning to do, albeit with as little violence as possible. So perhaps a certain amount of preparation (and face paint) is in order.
- Traditional Meanings
- Aeclectic Tarot
- ATA Tarot
