“Gravity Wells” in Tarot Reading
As an avid reader of science fiction in the mid-60s, I was around when the idea of “black holes” in interstellar space first entered the public consciousness; the premise is that their gravity field is so intense that not even light can escape, and they suck in all nearby matter. In cartomantic terms the concept suggests the Lenormand Grand Tableau with its numerous topic cards scattered around the firmament, each acting as a “well” to receive the influence of the surrounding cards while also potentially creating a web of overlapping meaning between the discrete centers. (In an old post I likened this effect to “ripples on a pond.”*) But how can this be applied to a tarot spread with its typically linear or rectilinear structure?
Recently, Marcus Katz of Tarot Professionals posted an article in which he proposed that the World card appearing in a spread can “pull in” any other significant cards that are present and with them synthesize a single cogent word or thought, implying — at least to my mind — that it acts like a “gravity well” of sorts. This notion is certainly not foreign to the esoteric nature of the World, Earth and Saturn both being “weighty” principles. The approach is one step beyond my own idea that the initial, high-level “gestalt” overview of a layout can identify critical cards that might become the keynote for the whole reading. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that such a card can “link up” with other non-adjacent but nearly as influential cards in a kind of internal or underlying “mini-theme” and thereby provide a secondary tier of interpretation? We might think of it as the “discursive” as opposed to the “direct” story in the reading, the “endoskeleton” to the “exoskeleton” of the main narrative that can serve as the motif or signature for a quick “Cliffs Notes” read of the plot. (Apropos to nothing but the subtitle, I’m reminded of the Gary Larson “Far Side” cartoon where a grizzly bear is busily devouring a hunter head-first, and says to another onlooking bear “I love these things! Soft on the outside, crunchy in the middle.”)
I don’t see them as functioning like “black holes” that overmaster and annihilate their associates (that sounds more like a perverse take on Elemental Dignities) but rather as a distillation of “colluding metaphors” that brings out textures not immediately noticeable in the normal course of the reading. This idea has been percolating in the back of my mind for a while but I never put it into words. I’ve often thought of a populated spread as a kind of “relief map” with high points (“peaks”) and low points (“valleys”) identified by the dominant and recessive qualities of the cards; highly potent cards can stand out like Mount Everest on a clear day, but I hadn’t thought of an entire “Himalaya” of reinforcing emphases that would “build out” the map in compelling ways. By the same token, a coherent pattern of individually neutral or innocuous cards (the “valleys”) might suggest a reservoir of milder sentiments that could offset any locally prominent statements of less benign intent.
I believe it would be instructive to take a second deck and lay out any such “sub-routines” as sidebars to the primary spread, and then refer to them when working the latter into a story-line. I might even read them as parenthetical asides at any point in the reading where their more succinct themes can bolster the account in meaningful ways. It would be helpful to see them displayed in this fashion as a memory-jogger for their submerged presence and veiled significance in the matter without having to mentally extract them at every turn. I wouldn’t necessarily seek them out if their relevance doesn’t announce itself in no uncertain terms, but I would venture to say that it happens often enough to make it worthwhile.
* https://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/ripples-on-a-pond/
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on October 19, 2022.
