Ten of Coins

For only €80 ($115) a night, your dog can bask in the comforts of Canis Resort, the first full-service luxury hotel for dogs, located just outside of Munich. If your dog prefers to lodge stateside, there's always New York City's DogSpa, where you can often see homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk mere yards from where well-bred hounds await the blow-dryer, reclining on shiny black leather sofas. It seems impossible to enjoy any success in this world without running up against the ethical dilemmas that accompany it.

The Six of Coins showed a beautifully harmonious balance of prosperity and generosity, a marriage of material success and spiritual growth. When that balance becomes tipped, as it does in the Nine of Coins, we can't help but revel in the awesome transformative potential of material gain. Ten takes a longer view, proposing the tempting notion that this kind of success may be more than a fluke -- it could become your new status quo. It's important to remember, however, that staying on top changes the way you see the world; it imposes its own limitations and perpetuates its own interests. It exchanges the flexibility of the generous mind for wealth's ability to bend all obstacles to the side. I always recall the Alchemical deck's Ten of Coins whenever I see this card in a reading -- whether success is inherently corrupting is up to each of us to decide, but it certainly helps one turn a blind eye. It's a compromise many are willing to make, because they usually don't have to sense themselves making it.

For some, this card will be the ultimate assurance of stability, security, influence, responsibility, and fulfillment -- a wonderfully assuring influence, perhaps hard-earned. It can also portend a stifling or corrupt state, however, forcing one to do battle with corruption, greed, and other forms of resistance to change. In a world where there is only so much to go around, this is only natural; I'm not here to make value judgments. Having personally known little of wealth, I'd be in a pretty pathetic place to do so! Just try to remain mindful of your humanity as you go for the gold, and hopefully you'll avoid some of the harder lessons that accomplishment teaches. At the end of the day, your dog won't care how much your portfolio is worth. [Via]