A Tarot Pyramid

A few days ago, I was in a coffee house looking at my cards, when a lady came to my table and asked me “why is my relationship with my husband so bad? I don’t know what to do anymore.”

I had with me Pablo Roblero’s superb Tarot de Marseille, and I started by putting three cards on the table. And then, I mounted them into a pyramid to add details.

For these kinds of questions, I really like to use the Tarot. The Petit Lenormand is great for explaining what’s going on in a situation and that’s what is often asked. But for the “why” style questions, the tarot is an excellent tool to find the causes. During consultations, I often mix the two.

Let’s go back to the spread. With Tarot de Marseille, I almost always use only the trumps.

Seeing the three cards at the bottom, I said, “Because you are barking at each other like dogs, and nobody is doing anything to change the situation.”

If we look at this line, the Moon seems to take on all the importance and the spread show a symmetry around it. We have a dog who becomes this hanged man and the other who becomes the fool. So, they discuss without even listening, one remains stuck on his/her positions and the other prefers to leave the discussion. One is stubborn and the other avoids. In short, discussions without any resolution.

So, what’s going on? One, represented by Le Pendu, stays on his stance and plays l’Impératrice, who wants to organize the discussions following their agenda, probably addressing some dark points of the relationship, as shown in La Lune. The other takes the attitude of Temperance and is ready to compromise for a time. And then, he or she prefers not to go on, to do like LE Fou and move out of the talks.

And so between this l’Impératrice and Temperance, we see La Lune turn into La Maison Dieu, all these discomforts create an important crisis! We reach a disaster with all this stubbornness.

The advantage of this kind of spreads is that there can always be several levels in the interpretation. First of all, we give a diagnosis. Then we can turn the pyramid over to transform it into advice we can give to they to to solve the crisis.

La Maison Dieu shows that it is the moment to burst the abscess, the two partners suffocate in this relationship represented by this construction too narrow, and bursts.

To avoid the explosion, it would take the attitude of l’Impératrice and Temperance. Elevate the debate (the empress seems to have wings behind her, just as temperance). Empress and temperance look at each other. One seems to tell the other to feel a little more responsible, and the other to put a little water in her wine. In short, to arrive at a debate between responsible adults, where everyone is ready to compromise.

In front of all these points of contention that the moon shows, we see all these problems of the relationship which must rise to the surface, the hanged man and the fool certainly show that they will have to be a little less rigid. We must move from the current attitude of the Hangman, inflexible, to the attitude of the Fool, agree to move things, agree to move with more flexibility.