Author’s Note: In her book Tarot and the Tree of Life, Isabel Kliegman spent some time describing the implications of accidental ennoblement as symbolized by common suit, element, number, polarity or rank displayed by several cards in a reading. This commonality (known as “dignity”) gave the affected cards an edge in effectiveness over their unaffiliated peers.

As I see it, she wasn’t talking about classical elemental dignity, the Golden Dawn’s tripartite approach that assessed the compatibility between a “principal” card and two adjacent “modifiers,” one on each side. The possible relationships were “friendliness, unfriendliness or neutrality” of the modifiers toward one another, thereby regulating the potency of the middle card’s expression for better or worse. A friendly pair strengthened it; an unfriendly pair weakened it; and a neutral pair had no impact on it. This combination rendered the principal card variously “well-dignified,” “ill-dignified” or unaffected by the association.

Instead, Kliegman was addressing preponderance by quantity – and by extension, predominance of power – exhibited by any quality (or qualities) among the cards of a spread, elevating the status of the highlighted group. This is a utilitarian way to look at it, but it is only half the story as I’ve explained in previous posts on the subject of elemental dignity.

Similarly, in Holistic Tarot Benebell Wen took a shallow swipe at elemental dignity by handling it in the same way, mainly as an abundance of sympathetic or antipathetic suits or elements (e.g. Wands/Fire and Swords/Air or Cups/Water) that she considered to markedly increase or decrease their aggregate importance “for good or ill.” Again, it’s useful as far as it goes but I take issue with some of her parameters for establishing the range of interplay. To be fair, I had an email conversation with Benebell several years ago in which she distanced herself somewhat from the book by saying it was twelve years old at that time, implying that she had advanced in her thinking.

However, that isn’t my purpose here. I’m going to focus on the idea of “accentuated rank” in a reading as identifying the extent to which a wealth of pip, court or trump cards can hold sway over the events and circumstances they describe as a function of their concentrated “reach” in the matter at the local/personal, regional/social or global/impersonal level. Conversely, I will cover the lack of any such influence and the consequences of its absence for the querent’s situation when experienced locally, regionally or farther afield.

When Minor Arcana (aka “pip”) cards dominate a spread, I’m inclined to view the matter as a private concern in which the querent’s actions will have a largely local effect, with no intentional impact on nearby people or society-at-large (unless they meddle uninvited in the affair). If none of these cards are present, the advice would be to consider what the conscious deflection of any muted emphasis could mean for the individual’s day-to-day life and how other cards on the table that are of a similar nature might fill the void, either by choice or chance. (As the maxim popularized by Carl Sagan goes, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”)

If there is a large population of court cards in the pull, the result could be to invest (infect?) the seeker with a conflicting array of personality traits that will be obvious to anyone with whom they come in contact, or it could spill over into physical interaction with other individuals who embody those traits. I envision this as a “regional” or general-area impingement that goes beyond the seeker’s front door. Once again, if there are no court cards in play the querent will most likely be “flying solo” in the situation and will not anticipate nor appreciate random, unannounced exposure to social intervention.

With several trump cards in the mix, the sitter may feel like a pawn in someone else’s chess-game. They could be exploited without mercy by impersonal forces beyond their control, or at least the environment would be conducive to such manipulation. The assumption that “big things are afoot” on a broader scale is always present even if only in theory. If trump-card influences are completely missing, the impression might be of “a quiet life in the country” in which the seeker can go about his or her business with little thought for external entanglement or archetypal visitation (aka “Acts of God”).

The most intriguing aspect of this analysis is trying to figure out what a shortfall of any quality means since there is nothing to get our head around except hunches based on its normal significance. (The Zen koan comes to mind: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”) For example, if we consider a well-balanced state of being to include equal measures of Fire, Water, Air and Earth and one of those elements is foregone, we could wind up with the equivalent of an unbalanced flywheel or, more prosaically, a wobbly top that will eventually spin out of control. Where the situation is likely to fetch up is therefore a matter of conjecture and we as diviners must do our best to fill in the blanks before that degree of speculation becomes unavoidable.

A nudge might suffice to set things straight where later it would require a desperate shove accompanied by long faces and anxious hand-wringing. In my own work I invoke the nominal kind of dignity espoused by Kliegman and Wen as part of my “gestalt” overview of a spread’s landscape prior to doing the card-by-card analysis. I’m looking for “big-picture” themes that will give me a head start on the reading (I see it as akin to scanning a topographical map for peaks and valleys), and if I acquire a solid idea of what I’m looking at right out of the gate, the rest will be easy.

In practice, I don’t use the Golden Dawn’s technique much primarily because I forget to apply it, not because I don’t like its structure but because I find it a bit too abstract. For those who are interested, Jim Eshelman’s Thoth-based Liber Theta offers a more lucid explanation of its ins-and-outs than the Golden Dawn’s seminal Liber T, Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth or Israel Regardie’s Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic. I believe it’s still free to download from the College of Thelema.