The Astrological Spread
Difficulty: Complicated
The Astrological Tarot Spread is based upon houses of astrology. This complicated spread takes several steps to understand.
The first step is to interpret the tarot card for each individual position in the spread.
The second step involves further examination of the main axes. Positions 1 & 7 show the relationship theme, #1 representing the reader, #7 their partner. Positions 4 & 10 indicate motion. #4 indicates where the reader is now, and #10 suggests what they are moving towards.
The third step involves breaking down the chart into triads according to their house elements.
Positions 1, 5, & 9 represent the Fire triad, symbolising temperament and personal development.
Positions 2, 6, & 10 represent the Earth triad, concerned with materialism, money, and work.
Positions 3, 7, & 11 represent the Air triad, which has to do with thoughts, ideas, and connections with other people.
Positions 4, 8, & 12 represent the Water triad, the realm of emotions, moods, intuition, and yearnings.
Further, other patterns and correlations between certain numbers can be noted. Certain numbers such as the set of 5, 7, & 8 often speak about a particular theme.
Your Astrological Reading
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1: Basic Mood
The tree of life doesn't play out flawlessly like it does in the diagrams. It's actually far more distorted than that. Don't mistake the map for the territory and follow books blindly.
2: Finance
This artist loves Thai food. Tom Yum soup and fried rice mostly. To be honest though I'm very poor at chopsticks.
3: Mundane Life
1:00 – Card 8
AKA The Hierophant in traditional Tarot. Male, Fire, Taurus.
The master, the controller, the employer. To force one's will upon others and make them work for your own benefits. Not always a cruel thing if it's done right. But it's so rarely done right.
4: Home
A portrait of Anton LaVey, (1930–1997), founder of the Church of Satan and author of The Satanic Bible. Anyone else would be Blasphemy.
You choose who you look up to. If you look up to a musician who does every drug in the book and dies at 25 your results may vary, from admiring the lives of men and women who have changed the world, lived happy and died old.
5: Fun Things
Things grow from other dead things. Don't overlook them for their dark origins, and don't dismiss the dead as a total erasure of what was.
6: Work
AKA The Star in traditional Tarot.
In this case it's Perseus slaying Medusa, a homage to Marqueste's sculpture.
Crowley explained every man and woman is a star. Astrologically, we all effect the fates with our rises and falls. We also congregate into bodies which are no mere illusion, but powerful forces in time. Other people have power over you, but you too have power over them.
7: Partners
An homage to Arthur Edward Waite, Aleister Crowley and George Sprague, the three revolutionary authors of Tarot systems that inspired this deck. Also, a very bad pun, apologies.
Life demands study, not worship. Study your problems, don't just pray for them to go away.
8: Hidden Aspects
The means may be grotesque, but if they get you what you want you'd do well to use them.
9: Higher Views
The guillotine is the most effective method of killing ever invented. You can poison or shock or stab or shoot people but nothing is so certain to cause death as severing their head. Amazing how fast the world forgot that.
10: Reputation
An homage to Bosch and Bruegel, and a card symbolic of victory to the well-armed and pain to the unprepared or unwilling to defend.
11: Friends
AKA Justice in traditional Tarot.
Not the scales of a common religious moralist and no longer a cardinal virtue, but the raw, heartless justice of nature.
12: Hopes and Fears
'At the east of the garden of Eden he placed the Angel and a flaming sword that turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life'. –Genesis 3:24
