AUTHOR’S NOTE: At its finest, reading the tarot cards is a subtle art full of nuance and inflection that can’t be shoehorned into a formula (or a TikTok algorithm). Ostensibly, I’m going to talk about the nominal influence of the cards in a spread, both individually and in combination, but I will also get into the broader intent of divination. Here is the basic premise:

Primary Meaning: Where a card stands in order of importance regarding the matter.
Secondary Meaning: How a card relates to an adjacent card of greater prominence.
Tertiary Meaning: A poorly-integrated expression that attempts to hijack the reading.

These days I call myself a “fortune-teller,” having played out the more psychological aspects of self-analysis with the cards long ago. This would seem to be about as straightforward as prognostication can get, but the more mystical side still lures me and softens the sharp edges of literal analysis. While we can’t escape the convention of interpreting the cards in the usual way unless we use them only as visual prompts for psychic flights of inspiration, we must still blend them into a seamless narrative. Getting a handle on how to organize our thoughts for this purpose is the focus of this essay.

Unlike Lenormand reading with its “noun-qualifier” sentence structure, prediction with the tarot is a much more fluid and open-ended affair. This can leave the beginner wondering “which end is up.” One way to unpack it is to find the card that seems to stand out from the rest as being most important to the topic of interest. In “line” spreads with an odd number of cards this is often viewed as the middle card of the series that acts as a “hinge,” turning-point or climax in the projected flow of circumstances, while in more complex spreads the last word in prestige is typically ascribed to an “outcome” or “end of the matter” position.

While I might start there, it needn’t end that way; if another card presents itself as the key to the answer, the cards around it should be read as supplemental to its overriding emphasis. This is the essence of a card’s “primary” meaning in a spread. Where does it fit into the spectrum of significance compared to the rest of the cards? (One cautionary note: this won’t necessarily be a function of rank, in which a trump card is always more important than a court card, and both automatically supersede a pip card. Borrowing a page from the playbook of European Tarot de Marseille and Lenormand readers, all cards should be given equal weight at the start of a reading and then adjusted as their contribution to the overall scenario becomes clear.)

By “secondary meaning” I’m referring to the interaction of one card with another. In many cases, a more assertive card will take the lead and its adjacent companion will serve as a “foil” for the principal character much like a supporting actor in a theatrical production. Whether this is the first or second card in the set depends on the spread design and the relative dominance of each card in the pair. Will the “second banana” presage the main event or explain it after the fact? When the secondary card appears as the “outcome” card in a spread it may be only a postscript to the primary theme, while as a subservient member of a group of more prominent cards it could simply “fade into the woodwork.”

The “tertiary meaning” nomenclature is reserved for cards that seem to be complete outliers when compared to the rest of the layout, mavericks that are trying to take the reading in a totally different direction. Roping them into the thrust of the interpretation can be one of the diviner’s most difficult tasks. It may be best to treat them as a “detour” or side-trip in the main story-line that doesn’t change it in any meaningful way, just adds a footnote to the script. Another way is to look at these anomalies as a “step-change” in the flow of events, a temporary shifting-of-gears to either accelerate or decelerate the momentum; the unexpected arrival of a person represented by a court card might signal this divergence. (The only time I would see this as noteworthy is if it occurs in the last position of a spread, in which case an additional “clarifying” card might be in order.)

To complete the picture, I will briefly mention Elemental Dignity. This is an esoteric technique created by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn that examines the cards in any contiguous three-card array for their affinity according to the “friendliness” or “unfriendliness” of their corresponding elements. In this approach the middle card is always the “principal” and the two surrounding it are “modifiers” that either strengthen or weaken its potency. For the most part the pattern is rigidly structured, although in Liber Theta, his Thoth-based rewrite of the Golden Dawn’s tarot curriculum (Liber T), Jim Eshelman of the College of Thelema has opened it up to more liberal application based on the cards’ inherent nature (in other words, another more-commanding card can assume the “principal” position).