This easy-to-read four-card layout is one of the most useful of all the spreads. The first card is the significator, and the last shows the outcome, provided that the advice given is followed. The advice is broken down into two cards which can easily be compared and contrasted. Card #2 suggests what to avoid, while #3 shows the path to take.
This spread can also be used to ask about the meaning of a card from a previously executed spread that may have been unclear. In this usage, Card #2 shows what it did not mean, while #3 clarifies the meaning.
DO This The Tower |
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It Deals with This The Fool |
Do NOT Do This 6 of Cups |
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It Leads to This Ace of Cups |
It Deals with This
A watchdog warns a foolish youth that he is about to carelessly walk off a cliff. The Fool seems totally ignorant of his surrounding and the danger he is in.
Reversed Meaning:
Negligence, inertia, carelessness, apathy, mistake, trespass, transgression, blunder, failure, bungle.
Children in an old garden, their cups filled with flowers.
Upright Meaning:
Remembrances, looking back, as on childhood; happiness, enjoyment, but coming rather from the past; things that have vanished. Another reading reverses this, giving new relations, new knowledge, new environment, and then the children are disporting in an unfamiliar precinct.
Lightning strikes the top of a Tower, knocking the crown off the top. Reminiscent of the Tower of Babel, two figures fall from grace.
Reversed Meaning:
Oppression, imprisonment, trap, tyranny, hardship, torment, persecution, coercion.
Atop the waters are water-lilies; the hand reaches out from the cloud, holding in its palm the cup, from which four streams are pouring; a dove, bearing in its bill a cross-marked Host, descends to place the Wafer in the Cup; the dew of water is falling on all sides.
Reversed Meaning:
House of the false heart, mutation, instability, revolution.