Something New I'm Trying

Barleywine

I was bored so thought I would whip up a new spread that deals with my long-standing aversion to "shadow/base" cards by making them an integral part of the spread, not simply a "quick glance" sort of thing. I also made aggressive use of Elemental Dignities to reveal the level of confidence in the satisfactory progress of developments shown in the spread positions. This spread doesn't have a formal "outcome" card; it is all about positioning to take advantage of an emerging situation. The first card shows what's coming, the seventh card shows how to respond. Cards #2 through #6 are about gaining awareness of the situation. The last two cards are supplemental to Card #4, the "big picture" outlook. I anticipate using this spread in advance of any important but ambiguous occurrence that I know is coming my way.

ETA: See Post #5 for the updated spread.
 

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I did a quick test spread with this. I won't go into all the cards, but I think I got my answer. I'm intending to teach a beginner's tarot class in March-April, so I asked how it would go. The shop-keeper and I agreed that we would need at least 5 students to make a go of it.

In the "What's coming?" position, I got the 4 of Swords. Hmm, looks like a non-starter to me.

In the "How should I respond?" position, I got Death. Hmm again. Dead and buried? Roll over and play dead?

The "big picture" card at the center was 7 of Cups ("Frustration"). Not a chance.

The quint came out the Wheel of Fortune reversed. The shop-keeper just started her advertising campaign for the classes; hopefully she won't spend much money on it. I'm not going to spend any money on class materials until I see how that goes.

My educated guess here is we aren't going to get enough students to get it off the ground. There were three court cards in the reading and they all came up reversed; they will stay away in droves. :) Or they will be the only three to sign up and they will go away disappointed.
 

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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.
 

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Barleywine

There is one additional dignity I want to mention. Elizabeth Hazel covers "dignity by position," in which a numbered card appears in the spread position of the same number, giving a double emphasis for that numerical meaning in the reading. For some time now I've been seeing "just the right card in just the right position" as a kind of "signature" serving as validation of the spread's legitimacy. Hazel's approach adds some formality to this that seems to be useful.

In the sample spread, the 2 of Swords rx appears in the second position, which goes along with the "perfect dignity by element" to elevate the level of confidence in that card's importance to the reading. The more I work with this concept, the more I like the idea that dignities also increase or decrease confidence rather than simply "strengthening" or "weakening" a card's expression; it seems a little more evocative.
 

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Enter the Fool

As I mentioned in my post in Lee's "Cherry Gilchrist" thread, I decided to bring the Fool card into this spread as a "constant" and rename the spread the "Fool's Insight" spread. An updated version is attached.
 

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