Three Great Mysteries

 

Three Great Mysteries

Divination Meeting

When this card appears, it indicates a life passage related to birth, life, or death. Some significant event is unfolding, which will create profound changes in your life and your relationships with others.

Keywords - Cycles, Exploration, Culmination.

Teaching

The Three Great Mysteries are birth, life, and death. In essence these ask the questions: where did we come from, what are we doing here, and what happens to us when we die? In ancient times the Fates were believed to rule over life, and were depicted as three women: a young woman, a mature woman, and an elderly woman. In art they are portrayed at a weaving loom, working with the threads of life.
Ar the end, the elderly woman cuts the thread, which ends the life of the person whose life-pattern was woven.

The Three Great Mysteries are sometimes referred to as the Wheel of Life, which is a teaching connected to reincarnation. In this view the soul enters into a new physical body, through which it learns valuable lessons as it works toward spiritual evolution. After many lives the soul obtains release from having to return to the material world. At this point it enters into life within the spiritual realms that exist beyond the world of mortal kind.

One associated teaching portrays souls as traveling through time and space together, bound by karmic energies that reunite various souls in a variety of relationships.

In this scenario, parents and children may trade places in various lives. This also hold true for gender roles in love relationships. One very old teaching maintains that magical ties bring souls back into the same family lines. Such teachings indicate hereditary families of magical or witchcraft lineage.
The Three Great Mysteries card depicts a Book of Shadows opened to a page. On this page are the three symbols of the mysteries: the seed, a ripened plant, and the harvest sickle. These represent the agricultural mysteries wherein the seed is the struggle for survival, the plant is the fullness of life experience, and the sickle is the return of seed, and life, back into the soil. This is associated with the old belief that from the womb of the goddess all life issues forth, and to her must all life return.

The Shadow's Edge

The Three Great Mysteries card takes up the idea of rein-carnation; the process and the portals through which the soul enters, experiences, and then leaves material existence. The message of this card is that our lives have purpose and meaning, but that this lies in something greater than ourselves. The clues are veiled from the soul by material birth; where did we come from? They are bypassed by the distractions of material existence; why are we here? The final clue is diverted by the thoughts of eventual death; where do we go from here? The answer resides not in what is the meaning of life, but in what is the purpose of existence itself.

For inner connections, see these cards: The Fates; Ostara; Litha; Mabon

 - The Hidden Path