Path Spread #1
The Path #1 is laid out in a grid utilizing 2 columns and 3 rows.
The first of the 3 rows shows your rational or intellectual thoughts concerning your question. The second row is concerned with your emotional attitudes, meaning your feelings. The bottom row represents your posture or stance, meaning how you project yourself outwardly, to the world.
The left column shows how you currently think, feel, and act regarding your concern. The right column gives advice on how you would be better served if you changed your attitudes on these 3 levels. The trick is to compare and contrast the 2 columns, which will give you hints as to what the cards mean and how you should make certain changes, small or large.
Spread Positions
- Significator
- Your current attitude
- Your current feelings
- Your current posture
- Suggested posture
- Suggested feelings
- Suggested attitude
Your Path #1 Reading
| Current | The Significator The World |
Suggested | |
| Thought |  2 of Pentacles |
 7 of Swords |
|
| Emotion |  4 of Swords |
 6 of Cups |
|
| Posture |  The Emperor |
 Page of Pentacles |
The Significator
The World
As this final message of the Major Trumps is unchanged – and indeed unchangeable – in respect of its design, it has been partly described already regarding its deeper sense. It represents also the perfection and end of the Cosmos, the secret which is within it, the rapture of the universe when it understands itself in God. It is further the state of the soul in the consciousness of Divine Vision, reflected from the self-knowing spirit. But these meanings are without prejudice to that which I have said concerning it on the material side.
It has more than one message on the macrocosmic side and is, for example, the state of the restored world when the law of manifestation shall have been carried to the highest degree of natural perfection. But it is perhaps more especially a story of the past, referring to that day when all was declared to be good, when the morning stars sang together and all the Sons of God shouted for joy. One of the worst explanations concerning it is that the figure symbolises the Magus when he has reached the highest degree of initiation; another account says that it represents the absolute, which is ridiculous. The figure has been said to stand for Truth, which is, however, more properly allocated to the seventeenth card. Lastly, it has been called the Crown of the Magi.
Reversed Meaning:
Inertia, fixity, stagnation, permanence.
2 of Pentacles
A young man, in the act of dancing, has a pentacle in either hand, and they are joined by that endless cord which is like the number 8 reversed.
Reversed Meaning:
Enforced gaiety, simulated enjoyment, literal sense, handwriting, composition, letters of exchange.
7 of Swords
A man in the act of carrying away five swords rapidly; the two others of the card remain stuck in the ground. A camp is close at hand.
Divinatory Meaning:
Design, attempt, wish, hope, confidence; also quarrelling, a plan that may fail, annoyance. The design is uncertain in its import, because the significations are widely at variance with each other.
4 of Swords
The effigy of a knight in the attitude of prayer, at full length upon his tomb.
Reversed Meaning:
Wise administration, circumspection, economy, avarice, precaution, testament.
6 of Cups
Children in an old garden, their cups filled with flowers.
Reversed Meaning:
The future, renewal, that which will come to pass presently.
The Emperor
He has a form of the Crux ansata for his sceptre and a globe in his left hand. He is a crowned monarch – commanding, stately, seated on a throne, the arms of which axe fronted by ram heads. He is executive and realisation, the power of this world, here clothed with the highest of its natural attributes. He is occasionally represented as seated on a cubic stone, which, however, confuses some of the issues. He is the virile power, to which the Empress responds, and in this sense is he who seeks to remove the Veil of Isis; yet she remains virgo intacta.
It should be understood that this card and that of the Empress do not precisely represent the condition of married life, though this state is implied. On the surface, as I have indicated, they stand for mundane royalty, uplifted on the seats of the mighty; but above this there is the suggestion of another presence. They signify also – and the male figure especially – the higher kingship, occupying the intellectual throne. Hereof is the lordship of thought rather than of the animal world. Both personalities, after their own manner, are full of strange experience, but theirs is not consciously the wisdom which draws from a higher world. The Emperor has been described as (a) will in its embodied form, but this is only one of its applications, and (b) as an expression of virtualities contained in the Absolute Being – but this is fantasy.
Divinatory Meaning:
Stability, power, protection, realisation; a great person; aid, reason, conviction; also, authority and will.
Page of Pentacles
A youthful figure, looking intently at the pentacle which hovers over his raised hands. He moves slowly, insensible of that which is about him.
Reversed Meaning:
Prodigality, dissipation, liberality, luxury; unfavourable news.