But how would one translate all that into a reading?
The card will of course mean different things each time, but some would say the basic idea of alchemy is that you mix A with B, delicately, carefully, adjusting as you go. And you get a completely different third thing, C. In fact, A and B might be considered opposites, like Fire and Ice. And the mixture will be something once thought impossible.
Random relationship example: Your lover annoys you, and you can barely keep your irritation contained. The situation stagnates like that, but then your lover has to leave for a year. You spend that year yearning, pining, bursting into tears with desperate loneliness. When your lover returns, you have "burned away" all the irritation, and now you see your lover's quirks as adorable, endearing -- the very thing you missed while they were gone.
My other tough card is the Moon. The Moon has so many negative meanings...
Fundamentally, Moon = mother's womb, where you lived for 9 months, floating in darkness, dreaming away without experience of air or light, literally "sub-conscious" (not awake) and then when you awakened, were you a completely different person? No, even now, you are still that same hidden potential developing, a seed into a seedling, into a flower, into a vine, into a garden, into seeds for the next year.
At each stage, the flower says, "At last, this is what I really am." But then another stage emerges from the dark moist hidden depths. This is Yin, blurred boundaries. Yang is Sun, father, the fiery, bright un-hidden, sharp distinctions.. One is "real," the other the dream, but we should question which is which, and who is where, and when.
