“You Can’t Get There from Here:” Targeted Spreads and the Prepared Deck
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I was recently involved in an online discussion about the uncommon practices that readers employ on a regular basis. I took this to mean those techniques I’ve developed over the years that are outside the mainstream as defined by standard teaching methods and the tarot literature. The following is just a snapshot of what comes immediately to mind and not an exhaustive presentation of my individual approach. (If you’re persistent and a bit masochistic, you can find that scattered throughout the rest of my ~1,600 essays.)
As an avid designer of positional spreads with around 300 layouts in my library, I often create topic-specific patterns with position meanings that focus on the details of a particular area of life: decision-making, problem-solving, crisis-management, conflict-resolution, relationships, health-and-happiness, career, etc, with separate categories for general life-reading and miscellaneous subjects. Most of these are straightforward affairs, using a normal deck and a conventional shuffle, cut and deal, frequently with reversals and occasionally without. These days I generally aim for pragmatic answers rather than psychological import (having already done the latter for the better part of four decades), with an emphasis on action-and-event-oriented (aka “fortune-telling”) results involving situational awareness and developmental insight.
But once in a while I will break a spread down into what I consider to be “targeted” arrays. The most common of these have two or more individual rows or columns, one for each party to a situation or each decision path (for example, the “should I stay or should I go?” scenario or the “best of several options” multiple-choice inquiry). I will almost always use a different deck for each party or path so all cards are available to each one, thereby allowing for the fullest expression of all options. There is no reason why the Sun or the Tower shouldn’t appear in more than one perspective, offering clear pointers of a “best-case/worst-case” kind.
Another wrinkle that I sometimes bring to bear on these “guided” spreads is the “prepared” deck. Rather than shuffling all 78 cards together for the reading, I will shape the deck according to my divinatory purpose. This could mean stripping out the cards of a specific “rank” that have little relevance to the context of the question. I might remove the Major Arcana cards for a purely mundane topic that is not expected to have any “big-picture” implications, or segregate the deck into three tiers (trumps, courts and minors), applying a different sub-set to each of the various focus areas. For some spreads I will use only the minor or “pip” cards or, more rarely, just the trump cards; due to their nature, there is little value in a courts-only predictive reading.
This practice is based on the premise that the three ranks speak to different levels of a situation. The Major Arcana I now believe to reflect “environmental conditions” or “background themes” for the more prosaic action described by the rest of the cards, so I might set them apart in their own “high-level overview” row or column. The court cards most often identify other people with an interest in the matter or personal attitudes and behaviors the querent should contemplate adopting or avoiding, and usually benefit from having their own discrete interpretive chain. The minor cards are mainly about day-to-day factors affecting the querent’s circumstances that arise on a more-or-less automatic basis (the assumption that routine “stuff” happens without a lot of forethought or active intervention).
The goal in all of this is to avoid mingling cards of widely divergent significance in the same developmental sequence such that it is difficult to fashion a coherent, smoothly-flowing narrative: one second you’re watering the lawn and the next you’re wrestling with a universal archetype. I often say these largely irreconcilable observations don’t “pass the giggle test” in any real-world sense, so I set out to avoid them in my spread designs. They remind me of the old piece of navigational advice from Maine folklore: “You can’t get there from here.”
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on December 26, 2022.
