yirabeth said:
I'm curious about the second set of numbers -- where you pair numbers up to get a third set of meanings from the cards. I'm curious how those would be read differently than their original meanings. For instance, 1 + 2 = Initial attraction. Say, for 1 you got the Empress and for 2 you got the King of Pentacles. "General" meanings would say, he likes your mothering him, she likes your income! (just generalizing, I know a real reading isn't gonna be that standard..lol) How would that be combined to make a third meaning? Or is it merely a matter of going deeper into the card and not using bog-standard meanings...(Intuition factor)Maybe it says, he'll keep you in diamonds as long as you coddle him and stroke his ego on a daily basis! hehe
Hi yirabeth! Glad to see you here.
So looking at positions 1 & 2, you have Querent's attraction to Partner and Partner's attraction to Querent. You're looking at each attraction in a vacuum when you look at the cards singly. But by comparing them together as 1 & 2, you get a better sense of the start of the relationship. If one person's attracted to the other based on love and the other person's attraction is based on sex or money, then that will tell you something about the start of the relationship that you might not have gotten from looking at the cards individually.
So in your example of Empress for his attraction and King Pentacles as her attraction, you have him attracted to her mothering/nurturing/maternal qualities and she's attracted to his ability to provide for their family. As a combined interpretation, I would see them as beginning on the same page or having a similar basis for their attraction to one another.
In this particular spread, looking at the pairs of cards provides an overview of the progression of the relationship, from what drew them to each other to the building up of the relationship through the good and bad times to what may happen in the future of the relationship.
yirabeth said:
Is this something that is commonly done with tarot spreads? Something I should focus on learning how to do?
Other than interpreting the cards, I don't think there's much that's "common" with tarot or with spreads!
I love multi-layered spreads that allow you to interpret the cards individually and then in groupings for further insight.
yirabeth said:
Or is there a thread elsewhere that discusses this aspect of spreads?
~Yira
Hmmm.... I honestly don't know if such a thread exists. This particular spread was built with the multi-layering in mind. Not every spread is built that way. But you can find some of this multi-layering in spreads that weren't intended for it by looking for predominant numbers or a predominance of a particular suit or a predominance of Court cards. I did a reading for someone here that was 10 cards in a pyramid shape. There were only Water and Fire cards in the reading. In looking deeper at the cards after interpreting them individually, I noticed that the Water cards formed the lambda symbol. I didn't know what that meant, but it was relevant to the person the Querent was interested in. I did another reading for a non-AT friend about their love life and there were a lot of Court cards in the reading. As an overall impression, I took that to mean that there were lots of folks involved in this person's love life (and probably more folks than needed to be involved)....
Does any of the above help you understand this better?
Rodney