The “High/Low/Middle” Situational Outcome Spread
AUTHOR’S NOTE: As I did with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Way of Tarot, I will continue posting selected insights that I pick up from my re-reading of Isabel Kliegman’s Tarot and the Tree of Life. Yesterday I rediscovered her Jungian take on the 8 of Cups with its image of a man who, having failed to find objective excellence in the eight chalices, is seeking it subjectively by “climbing the mountain of his shadow side” in a quest for such perfection. In her words: “We cannot go high without going deep. We cannot skip the painful stages of confronting our own shadow and use the ‘spiritual’ to mask work left undone, truths left masked. As the mountain reveals, the elevation and the darkness are inextricably bound.” In other words, we can’t run away from the dark and expect to find ourselves in the light; ascending the heights to grasp the elusive fulfillment symbolized by the “gap” in the row of cups is a rite of passage, not a divine right that is ours for the asking.
I decided to create (yet another) simple spread that uses the “best-case/worst-case” paradigm and reconciles the two in a “middle way” of quintessence cards suggesting an “adjusted” resolution to the matter. We might also consider the three “summary” cards as revealing the “Querent’s Stake” in the outcome (what he or she has to win or lose), or the “Reality of the Situation” that offers a compromise scenario in contrast to the optimistic and pessimistic extremes. Use whatever mathematical calculation method you prefer.
Going a step further, it would be conceivable to mold the three “quint” cards into a one-card “Grand Quintessence” to put a single point on the projected conclusion. But I decided not to recommend it since what I’m after is an “actionable” forecast that displays the potential for change and growth, not an abstract, exalted state of being that we may either admire or despise but can’t really relate to our mundane circumstances. In short, it would imply “being done to” by the Universe rather than proactively “doing something” on our own behalf.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on May 2, 2023.
