“Hot” Cards
Many of my ideas about Lenormand reading spring from my numerous fertile conversations on the Aeclectic Tarot forum with authors Andy Boroveshengra and Mary K. Greer before they both moved on — and then we all did. This one is no exception. I’ve written on this subject before (links below) but I wanted to sharpen the perspective a little. It’s standard procedure to treat the eight cards immediately surrounding a topic card in the various forms of rectangular spread as more prominent than those farther away (the concept of “proximity”). But some time ago I was thinking that those peripheral cards that proceed “on the diagonal” from the center might be seen as having an alternate kind of “oblique” or secondary significance when used in knighting, intersecting and mirroring since they arrive at a different place in the “knighting array,” at the intersection of converging lines, or at the spread boundaries than assumed by the usual vertical and horizontal progression.
This morning right after awakening I was struck by the notion that these cards “cross-cut” the pattern in a way that might be seen as “edgier” (see what I did there?) and therefore are perhaps a bit “hotter” or bolder in their expression. This is of course entirely theoretical, as it was when I first explored it, although in the past I saw it as different but not dramatically so. Now I’m thinking it might offer an entire “spread within a spread” in much the same way that reversals can do that in tarot reading. The radical idea would be to ignore the vertical columns and horizontal rows for this particular operation and just work with the radiating diagonals. Here are two links showing how I did this in at least a provisional way, and an example reading that exhibits a “funnel” pattern that is quite intriguing:
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on August 7, 2022.
