Further Thoughts on Elemental Dignities
I realized that there is a way to create a visually satisfying arrangement of the cards in a line spread that emphasizes "good" and "bad" Elemental Dignity. It involves simply shifting a "strengthened" card above the horizontal center-line and dropping a "weakened" card below it, leaving neutral cards centrally aligned. (See the attached photo.) This creates a kind of pictorial "line graph" showing rising and falling emphasis in the reading. In this particular spread, it would show how much confidence there is is in the potency and validity of the positional meaning for each ED focus card.
The sample 7-card line for this thread had 4 of Swords, 2 of Swords rx, 6 of Swords, 7 of Cups, King of Disks rx, Queen of Disks rx and Death.
The first ED focus card, 2 of Swords rx, is strongly dignified (three Swords in a row, a case of "perfect dignity by element"), so I shifted it up. The reversal tells me that not enough may be known yet to create a state of "perfect confidence."
The second ED focus card, 6 of Swords, is neutral because the adjacent cards (2 of Swords rx and 7 of Cups) are neutral to one another; however, in a reading I would probably give the 6 of Swords a bit more favor because the 2 of Swords is friendly to it and the 7 of Cups is not actively antagonistic.
The third ED focus card is poorly dignified according to the "rules" since the 6 of Swords and the King of Disks rx are elementally unfriendly, but I left the 7 of Cups in a neutral alignment because the 6 of Swords is neutral to it, while the King of Disks is strongly supportive and also of higher rank than the other two cards.
The fourth ED focus card, the King of Disks rx, is well-dignified because the 7 of Cups and the Queen of Disks are elementally friendly to one another, and it is further enhanced by the fact that both are friendly to the King of Disks. But the King's reversal suggests that he is withholding his approval to some extent.
The fifth ED focus card, the Queen of Disks, is well-dignified for the same reasons: two mutually friendly cards on either side, and both friendly to the Queen. She garners additional emphasis by the same means, but she is also reversed, withdrawing somewhat from commitment.
This isn't a strict application of Elemental Dignities as formulated by the Golden Dawn. I follow Elizabeth Hazel's idea that ". . . in practice, elements are much more subtle and prone to more intermingling than the above (that is, Golden Dawn/Agrippa) outline permits. Elemental dignities should be regarded as a flexible dynamic between neighbors rather than a set of iron-clad rules." This is how I've treated them since I first started using them, well before reading Hazel. There are other dignities here by number, rank and astrological correspondence that I didn't discuss above and that will further shade the outlook. But Elemental Dignity is the most common one, and seems to offer the most benefit to interpretation.
As mentioned in the previous post, I took all of this to mean that my first impression of failure (with the strongly dignified 2 of Swords rx increasing confidence in that impression) to get beginner classes going was pretty much on-target because prospective students either won't appear or won't want to pay the price (reversed King and Queen of Disks). Maybe they will go along with a lower rate than $25 per 2-hour class over a six-class session, but that rate didn't seem unreasonable to us.