Interactions Between
and Among Cards
The next type of interaction we’re going to explore is, for me, one of the most rewarding, and often the one I spend the most time on when doing a reading. This is how the cards interact with one another.
We saw the beginnings of this concept in chapter 4. Interacting with layout happens, in part, one card at a time. But we also saw how pairs of cards can interact through an intersection of meaning: cards are read in sequence, so that two cards in the same, shared position can shift meaning depending upon the order in which they appear, and depending upon whether that position places them side by side, above and below, or fanned. Now we’re going beyond that.
It’s possible to experience the cards as active and alive, as if you are watching a scene laid out before you, with people, landscapes, and action. The people look at or away from each other; they move toward each other or in opposite directions.
Two-Card Interactions
A single line in Mastering the Tarot had an enormous influence on me. Eden Gray said that two queens “facing each other” indicates gossip. The whole notion that it mattered whether or not these cards faced each other was interesting. But then something happened that made a light go on.
The first deck I bought as a young reader, after working with the Waite-Smith, was called the Sacred Rose Tarot. It’s a beautiful deck that I used happily for years, but after a personal tragedy, I stopped reading the cards entirely for a period of time. When I picked up tarot again, I felt I could no longer read with the Sacred Rose, the deck I’d been using when tragedy struck, so I went back to the Waite-Smith.
In addition to the remarkable art and vibrant colors in the Sacred Rose, one distinction of this deck is that almost every figure is in full portrait. Very few cards are in profile or even three-quarter face; the figures all face forward. When I switched decks, it was like an explosion of angles and connections. I remembered that line from Eden Gray, and I was blown away by how much I could now see. It was like the tarot doubled or tripled in potential meaning.
Any two cards in a layout, whether next to each other or not, have some kind of relationship with each other—some kind of interaction. They look at each other, or away from each other. They are back to back, or both facing the same thing (perhaps a third card), or they ignore each other (absence is as significant as presence, remember). Every pair of cards has some sort of connection. In a simple five-card layout, that’s a total of ten different paired interactions, any or all of which can add meaning to your reading.
More so than almost anything else we learn about tarot, these interactions depend upon the individual deck being used, as my example of the Sacred Rose shows.
Death is one of the rare cards in the Sacred Rose that doesn’t face forward; it looks to the left. Death in the Robin Wood Tarot looks straight ahead. Death in the Waite-Smith deck looks to the right. How Death interacts with other cards depends entirely upon which deck is used; the same layout with different decks will produce different results.
Reading Paired Cards: The Professor
Let’s take another look at the Influences reading from chapter 4 (illustration 20). This was a reading for a professor with career issues. In this five-card reading, the three cards in the middle face straight ahead. The Star (on the right) looks to the left, and the King of Wands (on the left) looks to the right, so that these two cards seem to face each other.
Here I would say that the benefactor (King of Wands) is concerned about, and is paying attention to, the health and well-being (Star) of the querent. Since these two cards look at each other, we can perceive a connection. In the meantime, the other three cards, representing short-sightedness, injustice, and struggle, look straight ahead and do not interact with anything else in the reading. Since we know that absence is as important as presence, we can read this forward-looking posture. It’s like these cards are refusing to interact. Each is saying, “Don’t distract me!” Don’t distract me from my focus on money, says the Four of Pentacles; Don’t distract me from my struggle to get through, says the Chariot—perhaps feeling he won’t get through if distracted; Don’t distract me from my decision by pointing out its unfairness, says Justice in reverse, seemingly indicating that Justice cannot be influenced by a plea for sanity from the Star.
Here we could advise the querent to pay a little more attention to her benefactor, even if it’s a distraction. We could also advise her not to bother trying to plead for justice, since it will fall on deaf ears. We could point out that the benefactor is the only person looking at the querent, including the querent, who is not, in any of the cards about her, looking directly at her health situation.
Now, as long as I’m using this particular deck (Robin Wood), Justice will always face forward. Does that mean pleas for justice are always to be read as useless? Not at all! Here’s where pattern recognition comes into play: the cluster of forward-facing cards underlines this lack of interaction and makes it notable.
Imagine a grouping of cards facing Justice (reversed or upright). In this case, we’d perceive an interaction, even though Justice doesn’t look back at any of the other cards.
Reading Paired Cards: The Dancer
Refer back to the Vitruvian Man reading in chapter 4 (illustration 29). In fact, bookmark this reading, as we’ll refer back to it again. Here, I read the cards for a former dance student who had recently moved into his own apartment.
About the head cards (Strength and the Star reversed), I said: “Because Strength literally overlays the Star reversed, we have reason to suspect that the querent is trying to overlay underlying fears with outward behavior; he’s trying to stuff the fears away by being loving and kind and so on.”
Now we can add to that interpretation using our understanding of how a pair of cards can interact. Strength and the Star, in this configuration, are looking at each other and are nested together, almost like a yin and yang. This reinforces the earlier interpretation: Strength is looking at the Star and responding to her. We see she’s looking compassionately at the inner darkness (Star reversed) and treating it with her characteristic compassion and kindness. Perhaps this means the querent is trying to be gentle with himself; his Strength is looking with kindness upon his dark feelings. In fact, the right-hand cards in this reading advise the querent to do exactly that: be gentle with himself, since the Eight of Swords in reverse is a card of fragility.
Whole Layout Interactions
When we look at pairs of cards interacting with one another, we’re seeing them as part of the same picture or living tableau. In fact, we can see the entire layout as a single piece of art or a single scene. We can start by understanding that each individual card is the reproduction of a piece of art—a painting, drawing, collage, or photograph. You might think about “art” only when you consider something like the Dali Tarot, which was created by a world-famous artist, but it’s not fame that makes someone an artist. Every card was created by an artist, whether Pamela Colman Smith, Robin Wood, Mary Hanson-Roberts, or any other illustrator. So when we’re looking at a tarot card, we’re looking at something that follows the principles of artistic creation, and understanding art can help us understand tarot.
Furthermore, a five-card layout isn’t merely five pieces of art or ten interactive pairs; it’s a whole, a single picture with five sections. It’s easy to liken a tarot layout to a comic-book page because the division between panels strongly resembles the division between cards. On a comic page, each panel is whole—its own moment, thought, or action, with a breath or a pause in the “gutter” (the space between panels), followed by another moment, thought, or action.
But we can also liken a tarot layout to a work of fine art, and understand its flow by looking at art.
Consider Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (illustration 33). Most of us recall “Venus on the half-shell,” the goddess rising from the sea on an enormous shell, clad only in her flowing red hair. The goddess is the central image.
But Venus is surrounded by three other figures in the painting, and part of what makes her image so central and primary is that the other figures look at and move toward her. Every line we see supports Venus as embraced, encompassed, supported, and focal. A figure to her left (our right) moves to clothe her, and the trees above that figure echo the line and angle of the cloth. The figure on our right looks up and at Venus, while the figures on our left look down and at her.
If we imagined for a moment that this painting were a three-card reading, it would be easy to see that the center card was supported left and right, and that the other two cards were aligned in purpose, looking toward each other and focused on the same thing.
With Birth of Venus, the grouping flows toward the center, but there are lots of other possibilities.
Illustration 34: Rendition of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges-Pierre Seurat
In George-Pierre Seurat’s famous A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (sometimes known as Sunday in the Park, after the musical Sunday in the Park with George), we can immediately observe two things about the overall flow of movement (illustration 34). First, the painting is very still. People are at rest, relaxed. Second, almost everyone is facing to the left (toward the river Seine). Again, we could easily imagine a configuration of several cards in which most face to the left. In chapter 4, we learned that the left can be the side of the unconscious or the side of the past, depending upon the layout. So cards laid out so that they are all facing left could indicate a trend toward the past—but not, in the case of this painting, a rapid movement in that direction. It’s all rather languid.
Whole Layout: The Dancer
Let’s continue looking at the reading that I’ve named “The Dancer” (illustration 29), from chapter 4.
The Knight of Cups (in the left-hand position) looks to the right, while his horse angles up and right. This means he rides directly toward the head position, where Strength looks down and left, directly at him. I see these cards as connected, sharing a single message. In fact, the Hermit reversed (also in the left-hand position) seems to be looking in that direction as well.
This reinforces the ideas I already had about this reading: that the choice between dark gloominess and being in the world in a loving way was a choice seen in both the head and left-hand positions. This will happen often—you’ll see things throughout your reading that will continue to deliver the same message over and over. This is a sign you’re doing well! Sure, there’s more information to discern the more you look at the cards, but it’s also true that if your message is accurate, you’d expect it to be consistent. It would be downright odd if a pattern in a layout contradicted an interaction between cards, for example. Everything in the layout is reading the same querent asking the same question, so there should be a motif you can discern. Readings will say move forward or look back; something good is coming or it isn’t; speed up or slow down. By the time an “outcome” or a “what to do” card is dropped at the end of a reading, that card rarely comes as a surprise. (If it does, revisit the entire reading, looking for anything that points to it.)
I wondered previously if dance could be a key to the querent feeling better about himself. As I look at the layout, it seems more and more that other cards move toward the Page of Swords (in the right-hand position). The Knight of Cups seems headed his way, even as he’s looking at Strength. The Sun seems to be making a beeline diagonally across the reading, suggesting that leaving the garden (in the card) is a physical activity that the Page can support. The Sun also shows an infant, while pages represent young people, further connecting these two cards.
I’m intrigued by the two foot pairings: the Sun/Seven of Wands reversed and the Six of Swords/Seven of Cups reversed. The first card of each pair shows a journey, and the second of each is a reversed seven—life’s journey stalled by a lack of willpower. When you look at the angles and lines of these four cards together, they don’t seem to go anywhere. The Sun moves diagonally toward the Page of Swords, but movement across the bottom of this layout is minimal. The Sevens appear to be blocking momentum and progress. With the Seven of Wands, the diagonal line of the wand in the hands of the warrior moves down, out of the bottom of the layout, into nothing. The Seven of Cups is a static card that seems to look nowhere. Even with two journey cards in this section of the layout, the overall impression is of things going nowhere. This gives us some insight into our problem cards, and is in strong contrast to the leaping movement in the “should do” area.
Illustration 35 shows the flow of movement in the Dancer reading. There’s the small back-and-forth at the head position, a larger arrow at the same angle from the Knight of Cups to Strength, a straight line from the Knight of Cups to the Page of Swords, and a diagonal line from the Sun to the Page of Swords. The line across the bottom (from foot to foot) is straight, matching the straight line from hand to hand, but has no arrowheads, as the bottom seems static.
There is, you’ll see, an aesthetic quality that makes these twelve cards a single picture. Look at the center cards, in the spirit position. The World has a round frame mimicked by the visible part of the Ten of Pentacles. There’s a stillness to this center, as if it says Here I am, while all the motion swirls about it, almost as if the wisdom that Spirit has to offer the querent is just waiting for him to notice.
Let’s continue exploring interactions among cards with a brand-new reading.
Whole Layout: House of Sorrows
The following reading brings up an interesting problem for a tarot reader: What happens when the cards seem to be addressing two different issues? What if there are two patterns that don’t seem to intersect? Here, the flow of movement can help us discern the story being told.
The pattern in the House of Sorrows reading is almost staggering: fully half the cards are pentacles! There are no majors at all, so we know the issue isn’t life-altering in a larger or more spiritual sense, but there are two fives, so there are plenty of changes afoot. Of the remaining cards, three are cups, which is a notable number (see the Distribution of Cards chart at the beginning of chapter 3). There are no wands. Interestingly, when I was giving the reading to the querent, I determined that he wouldn’t be able to build anything permanent, but I failed to note that, without wands, nothing can be built. I found the information from the other cards!
When the reading began, before any cards were laid out, the querent told me he was having a lot of problems with his house. Heavy snow had burdened a roof already in need of repair, and when the weather warmed and the snow melted, he ended up with a flood in his living room. Under the circumstances, I could only laugh when I turned the first card and saw the Nine of Pentacles reversed, which means minor disasters in the home, such as theft, intrusion, physical issues with the house, or other disruptions such as legal issues. It was easy to see that this card pertained to his current predicament.
As all the cards were laid out, finances took a large role, and with the pentacle pattern, that made sense. The King of Pentacles struck me as a money person withholding repair funds—I asked the querent if he’d been denied a home improvement loan and he said no, but he’d just met with the insurance adjuster and the news wasn’t good. The Seven of Pentacles reversed suggested to me that there had been problems with the house for a while; that the querent’s unhappiness with his living situation had been growing for some time, as the results of his hard work were no longer worth it. He acknowledged that he’d put a lot of effort into the roof already.
As we read the cards, the pentacle pattern kept us focused on the home, including the disappointing outcome: that any improvements would be temporary and anything fixed would need fixing again (the Five of Pentacles reversed means temporary shelter; based on home-repair issues being so prevalent in the other cards, this was an obvious interpretation). But another pattern emerged.
The cups in this reading are sorrowful; the Eight and the Five both express different kinds of dissatisfaction. The Eight of Cups has to do with the wisdom to know that one’s material possessions are not what’s important in life. These “things,” the Eight says, don’t satisfy me. I will walk away from them and seek something true to myself. The Five of Cups is different, and it is unwise. I am bereft. I’ve lost everything, the Five says, weeping over the three spilled cups, never seeing the full cups behind him. With the Five of Cups, the normal interpretation is that the querent hasn’t lost everything; he just thinks he has.
The two cards are different and yet similar. In the deck I’m using, they both depict a cloaked figure in relation to a group of cups on the ground, and they both have mountains of trouble in the background. (But note that the moon in the Eight of Cups provides light and wisdom, while the clouds in the Five prevent the querent from being able to see clearly.)
There is also a visual relationship between the cards in this Celtic Cross layout. I showed the querent how the mountains in the foundation card seemed to be leading him to the mountains in the self-image position. Keeping his distance from the troubles of his home/situation/cups was building into a deeper feeling, turning him into an unhappy person. Instead of the problem being a foundation, a thing, it was becoming how he saw himself. One card was on a path to the other, as shown in illustration 37.
Once we see this, it is natural to look at the third card in this reading that depicts a form of dissatisfaction: the Seven of Pentacles reversed. Its meaning is as different from the Eight and Five of Cups as those two are from each other.
The Seven of Pentacles is a card about the fruits of one’s labor. The upright card shows satisfaction: the person has worked hard and sees the results. Reversed, the picture is the same: a person sees the results of his labor, but now he wonders if it was worth the trouble. The profit is just not commensurate with the effort required to earn it.
Upon examination, we see that the Seven of Pentacles in this reading is, like the Eight of Cups, also looking at the Five of Cups (illustration 38).
Now a story has begun to emerge. The querent is a person with good values, who is able to distance himself appropriately from problems and not take them too seriously. He can walk away when need be. This may mean “emotional distance” in both positive and negative ways, but clearly, with all the house troubles the querent has, it has been helpful (Eight of Cups). In the recent past, though, he’s begun to see that the amount of effort he keeps putting into this house is just not worth it (Seven of Pentacles reversed). Somehow, this frustration has become incorporated into how the querent feels about himself. Instead of being a person with some financial and household struggles, his nature has become doleful. How did this happen?
The key to the sorrowful cards in this reading was the tragedy of the Three of Swords.
The Three of Swords is a card of terrible heartbreak, and here it appears in the environment position. The querent has recently had an awful tragedy in his family. The line from the Three of Swords that drew my eye was the straight line of the central sword. The tragedy was shooting up, through his self-perception, through his hopes and fears, straight into his outcome (illustration 39).
The querent was beginning to perceive his house troubles as deeply painful, because the tragedy was coloring his perceptions. He was losing perspective because of the influence of this line of pain running up through all ideas and feelings about the situation. It is as if all the inconvenience and struggle was, itself, becoming tragic and awful. But all of this is the influence of the Three of Swords.
The lines of movement show us how these two separate patterns interact (the pentacle/money/house pattern and the cups/sorrow/tragedy pattern). On the surface, they seem to be two separate issues. Only when we look at the movement do we see the cards touching one another.
Cards Determining Other Cards
Cards interact with each other in many ways. We’ve just explored how they can look at each other, away from each other, or mutually toward a third card. There’s much more.
Sometimes a sequence or pattern can lead you to a card interaction, just as visual information can. After all, when you lay out a reading, you’re seeing the entirety of it at once: cards, layout, patterns, sequences, and visual flow are all laid out before you. The idea isn’t to go through a checklist of interactions in your head, but to see the reading as an organic whole, a living intercommunication.
Consider court cards. Often confusing to readers, the meaning of a court card can frequently be determined by its interactions with other cards. A pattern of court cards, we’ve learned, is a social situation; lots of court cards means lots of people around.
In the House of Sorrows reading (illustration 36), we find two court cards. This is exactly average for a ten-card reading, so we can’t call it a pattern. Yet the fact that both cards are pentacles, one in the crossing position and one in the ahead position, suggests that they might interact with each other. They aren’t looking at each other particularly, but they seem connected.
In this reading, I told the querent to expect more bad news, similar to what he’d heard from the insurance adjuster. “More of the same,” I told him. The Page of Pentacles here looks like the child of the King of Pentacles, or a repetition of the King. My instinct was to completely throw away a standard interpretation of the Page of Pentacles and see the card interaction as an echo—after all, there aren’t two Kings of Pentacles in the deck, so if the situation is going to recur, or something similar is going to happen (a different assessment by a different person with the same sort of outcome), a second card must serve to indicate that.
I read an echo when two cards seem to be serving identical purposes; they are near each other, but are not actually looking at each other.
Another way you might see an echo or repetition is when two cards are so similar that they seem to underline the inevitability or importance of a concept.
If one card is an outcome of another (separate, that is, from an “outcome” position in a layout), there will be something in the position of the cards or the lines in the art to indicate the directionality—one card must look like it comes from the other.
If one card is an avoidance of another, the two cards will look away from each other, often in a back-to-back position. This could be denial in a psychological sense, or an attempt by the querent to get away from an unwanted situation.
One card might be a reflection of another. This is similar to an echo, but it’s the same sort of situation showing up in multiple parts of a querent’s life—ripples in a pool. Ripples are all outcomes of a stone being thrown or a frog jumping or something like that—they share a common cause. When two cards appear to be reflections, a third card is apparent as the cause.
An Echo, a Change of Direction
This example shows a rather remarkable echo, and it also addresses ways in which a reader can make a mistake and still course-correct to the benefit of the querent.
My querent was a regular client, someone I have worked with every few months for several years. Our most frequent subject for readings has been her career. I knew the reading was about a decision, so I used a Vitruvian Man layout. Illustration 40 shows the left-hand (“what I’m doing”) position.
The Six of Wands is a card that often shows up in regard to career questions, as it indicates acknowledgment of success, rewards, and praise, as well as a potential journey. The Sun, read by itself, can also indicate a successful journey, although in this case, it is an adventure into the unknown. The child/Sun leaves the flower garden and ventures into the wide world. The bright sunlight follows him, indicating hope and blessings.
We might read these two cards together as emphasizing the inevitability of a positive journey into new opportunity, since the meaning of the two cards overlaps on these points. But here is where a visual reading is vital.
These two cards, in the Robin Wood deck that I used for the reading, simply look alike. Both depict a figure on a white horse, carrying a banner. They move in similar directions: the Six of Wands to the right, the Sun forward and to the right. The banner and tabard of the Six of Wands depict the Sun, while the red of the Sun’s banner is the color of the Six’s leggings. The rays emanating from the wand the Six carries are like the rays of the Sun, and occupy the same part of the sky. It is clear that the Six of Wands was designed to echo the appearance of the Sun card, although Robin Wood doesn’t say so in her book, leaving readers to discover this for themselves. (You will find many such secrets embedded in well-designed tarot decks.)
The Sun, in the reading, overlays the Six of Wands, giving it predominance. In addition, the minor arcana card rather naturally is “less than” the major. The Six literally wears the Sun; he is reflecting the Sun’s glory so that we can see his movement toward the Sun (he moves right and the Sun card is to his right) as indicating that he is fundamentally about the Sun. So instead of just reading the “meanings” of the cards, we know that the journey, the success, the praise, is taking the querent toward the Sun—the echo, here, indicates a larger meaning.
But here’s the twist. At this point, the querent interrupted me to say that this time, the reading wasn’t about her career. She was concerned about having children and fertility (another very common question that every professional reader hears regularly). A doctor had suggested that she was probably not fertile and shouldn’t try to conceive.
This happens from time to time in a reading: sometimes there’s a disconnect between the querent, the cards, and the reader. Once, I was the querent who received such a reading. I asked for a reading because my relationship was in flux, but the cards made no sense when applied to my relationship. Suddenly I realized that the cards made perfect sense when applied to my writing! In fact, I attribute my first book to that reading. The cards answered a question I wasn’t asking. Here, instead of refocusing the querent, I refocused the interpretation.
My first view of this reading was that it was career-oriented. The Six of Wands and Eight of Pentacles both suggested this, and I began to talk to the querent about her career. There was nothing wrong with what I was reading; in fact, the querent confirmed that the career information was accurate—it was just not what she was asking about. The first, career-based reading was still accurate, but was not important to the querent at that moment.
There are no cards here (illustration 41) that are obvious fertility indicators. (In a reading, the Empress or the Queen of Pentacles might promise pregnancy in the near future, and the Star might be a health-related blessing.) The Queen of Swords reversed can indicate infertility, but that card is in the head position in this spread, indicating that’s what’s on the querent’s mind.
On closer examination, though, I found a pattern. Children are the dominant image in three of the twelve cards: the Sun, the Page of Cups, and the Eight of Pentacles. (Children are also visible in the background of the Six of Wands.)
The other pattern is sixes—there are two—so we know the querent is on a journey. At first that’s not helpful; it’s like, of course she is! But then we look at the Six of Wands again and can ask ourselves, Is she journeying toward a child? Toward the Sun-child?
More and more, the Sun-child is looking like a central card. The Page of Cups seems to be looking at it, as though the glowing idea that emerges from the Page’s cup is the Sun (illustration 42).
My tarot teacher always called the Nine of Cups the “wish card.” Upright, you get your wish; reversed, you do not. Here, the card is in the position of the right hand (“what you should do”) and is paired with the Eight of Pentacles. The Eight is another card often associated with career; it is the student who is improving his craft. Once focused on the question of fertility, I saw that the wish was paired with another child.
The Vitruvian Man layout doesn’t have an outcome card; instead, the right-hand position is what the querent should do. Go for it, I told her. If your wish is for a child, pursue that and ignore any naysayers. Her doctor makes an appearance in this reading; he is the Knight of Swords, whose news causes upheaval. He is paired with the Chariot reversed and is moving swiftly toward Temperance reversed. It’s clear his news has upset the querent’s inner balance (Temperance) and self-control (Chariot).
In this reading, an echo opened my eyes to the direction and flow of the reading, and the querent redirected my idea of the subject matter. The cards continued to tell the truth through the change of subject.
Homework: Studying Movement in Art
Homework Questions
Look up the following fine art paintings (they’re all famous and easily found on the Internet), and see if you can determine the flow of movement in each.
1. Guernica by Pablo Picasso
2. The Girl with a Wine Glass by Johannes Vermeer
3. The Dancing Class by Edgar Degas
4. The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo (from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel)
Homework Answers
These answers are my own perceptions. If you see something different, that’s fine.
1. The overall flow is from right to left, with several figures looking up. The upward-facing figures appear to be looking for a heavenly response, but they are actually gazing at a light bulb. The sense of movement is rapid and chaotic.
2. In this painting, the three figures are looking in three different directions. The girl looks away from the gentleman (a suitor?) and toward us, while the gentleman is focused entirely on her. Based on posture and flow of movement, it seems he is interested in her and she is not interested in him, even though she smiles. The figure in the background is disinterested, looking away from them both. His stillness is mirrored by the stillness of the painting on the wall. The mood is somber, and movement is slow and stately.
3. The student in front of the mirror is the focal point. The grouping to the left is paying attention to her, and the musician appears to be playing for her. The three students behind and to her right are definitely not paying attention to her, looking purposely away or lost in their own practice. The overall flow, though, is around the central figure, just as in the Birth of Venus.
4. In this depiction of Creation, neither God nor Adam is central; rather, the empty space where they meet is the focal point (hence the many reproductions of just that central space: their hands). The landscape on which Adam rests serves to further divide the entire space into Adam’s side and God’s side. They look toward each other, with the angels mostly mirroring God’s movement toward Adam.
Exercise: Reading Card Interactions
In this exercise, I’m going to walk you through a real reading that I did for a paying client (for this reading, and all others in the book, I obtained permission from the querent to photograph and write about the readings). We’ll return to this reading in the next chapter, to see what stories it tells.
If you have the Robin Wood Tarot deck, you might find a better sense of connection by laying out the actual cards before you, rather than working with illustration 43. Although some specific details of the reading are illuminated by Robin Wood’s artwork, you could also lay out the Waite-Smith or a similar deck, while referring back to the illustration.
1. As always, take a few deep, cleansing breaths before you begin.
2. The querent said: “I am recently divorced, and I am wondering about my love life.”
3. Start reading the cards, writing down or recording your interpretations. Then answer the following questions, and read my thoughts and the querent’s.
Questions
• What patterns do you see?
• What do you think the patterns mean to the querent?
• What interactions exist in pairs in the same position (head, hands, etc.)?
My Thoughts
In this twelve-card Vitruvian Man reading (see illustration 28), I see the following patterns: There are two threes and two aces. There are five wands and zero cups. All of these are unusual.
The querent is asking about love, but there are no cups. However, we know that the question is about love. There’s a desire for love, so shouldn’t there be cups at least in her head? I interpreted the suit patterns to mean that the querent’s desire for love was not for romance (cups) but for someone with whom to build a life—because wands are about building things.
Threes are outcomes, and both threes are in the head position: she’s wondering what will become of her. This reinforces the interpretation I have for the wands: she both wants to know her outcome (what will become of her) and wants to know about the life she will build. These are related concepts.
The left-hand position shows a card of rebirth (Judgment) and a card walking away from rebirth (Ten of Wands). It’s as if it’s saying, “Okay, I’m reborn. Now where am I going?” I interpret Judgment to mean that the querent’s divorce was positive for her; she’s reborn, but the interaction in that position seems to say that she can’t stay with a positive interpretation. The Ten of Wands walks away from Judgment: her burden is too great to enjoy the powerful change in her life.
The left foot is the position of where she’s recently been. There’s an ace there, so there was a recent new beginning. It overlays and covers a reversed Queen of Wands. Because of the wands pattern and because of the position, I decided the Queen was the querent; these are her wands, so this is her. The Ace of Wands in this particular deck is exceptionally phallic. The beginning seemed therefore to be sexual (a new man) but negative (the Queen is reversed). Perhaps it began and ended? The life-affirming qualities of the Ace seem to cover the negativity of the reversed Queen, so I suggested that she’d had an affair that ended badly but was in some ways validating: She felt sexy and desirable, and her doubts about “Can anyone want me?” were erased.
In the right-foot position (where she’s going), the interaction is between two major arcana. There isn’t a major (or minor) pattern in this reading, but two majors in the same position suggest that her next decision could be life-altering.
The Querent’s Response
The querent agreed that she wanted to build a life, and the burden of the Ten of Wands was the thought of building that life alone.
Discussing the Ace of Wands/Queen of Wands reversed, she acknowledged that she’d recently had a brief affair with a man that had ended badly. It was indeed exciting and sexy, but she was feeling wounded.
Questions
• Looking at the whole reading, what is the general flow of movement?
• Where is the Five of Swords reversed looking?
• How can the negative Five of Swords reversed, in the position of “what Spirit/God wants of you,” be interpreted in light of where it is looking?
• What do you think is the relationship between the Queen of Wands reversed and the King of Wands reversed?
• What do you think is the relationship between the Ace of Wands and the King of Wands reversed?
• What other interactions do you see among cards across the layout?
My Thoughts
I see a general flow toward the right side of the reading, toward the future. Six (half) of the cards appear to be moving “off stage” toward the right. Three look straight ahead, with only three cards looking elsewhere. I understand the querent to be moving into her future. I don’t think she’s dwelling too much in the past, and if she is, she needs to be discouraged from doing so.
The Five of Swords reversed appears to be looking at the Six of Pentacles. This is interesting, as there is a cheat or deception, possibly a theft (the Five), which is looking at a generous gift (the Six). Could it be that something stolen will be returned? Does that make the King of Wands reversed the thief? There is no particular movement interaction with the Ace of Pentacles, but it is the beginning of a financial venture. Perhaps the theft is related to this new venture. I asked the querent if she’d loaned her ex-lover money.
There’s obviously a connection between the King and Queen of Wands. If her face wasn’t covered by the Ace of Wands, they’d be looking right into each other’s eyes. If the Queen and the Ace of Wands represent an affair, then perhaps the King is her ex-lover. Ex-lover and thief? The connections seem to be telling an unhappy story.
The Ace of Wands isn’t pointing at the King. Instead, it appears to be pointing at the Three of Wands reversed, who is, in turn, looking at the King of Wands reversed. The Three of Wands reversed is waiting and waiting for something that will never arrive. It appears that the querent wants her ex-lover back. The Ace, which is the beginning of their affair (and his phallus) moves toward waiting (the Three), which looks toward the King (her ex). The reversed Three suggests she’s waiting in vain.
The most difficult part of this layout is the center, the position of “what Spirit/God wants you to do.” We’ve already seen how this position seems to be telling a story about the querent’s recent past: the investment in her lover and his betrayal. How can that represent a higher purpose?
Looking again at the way the Five of Swords reversed looks at the Six of Pentacles, we see that he seems to be looking at a response to being deceived. Spirit, here, is showing us that the deception can look at a generous and kind card, a card of charity and goodness. The Ace of Pentacles, representing a financial beginning that was tainted by deception (the Five of Swords reversed), can also represent a new beginning within oneself. I think the message of Spirit here is to forgive the deception and begin again. Forgiveness is a message that makes sense in this position, and we can interpret the Ace as a beginning in response to the deception, a renewal that connects the card to Judgment in the upper left. Thinking about the connection, and looking again at Judgment and the Ace of Pentacles, it’s easy to see the visual similarities: both round and golden, both forward-facing. The Phoenix rising in Judgment seems star-shaped with her arms outstretched (just as the Vitruvian Man himself does). I can suddenly perceive that she is shaped like an Ace of Pentacles, and this reinforces the message that this particular ace represents renewal.
The Querent’s Response
The querent had loaned her ex-lover money, which she never expects to see again. As we spoke, it became clear that she misses him and wonders if she will ever have him back, and she even misses her ex-husband. This surprised me, as I saw Judgment in such a positive light; I underestimated the power that the Ten of Wands had. Otherwise, she found what I had to say accurate.
We will continue this reading in chapter 6, so hold on to your notes and questions!