Reading Position Rather Than Symbol

The method differs from tarot reading at the root, and treating it as a tarot spread with different pictures produces nonsense. The cards carry short, concrete and fixed meanings rather than layered symbolic ones, there is no esoteric correspondence system attached to them, and in most branches of the tradition they are not read reversed. Meaning is produced by combination: two cards adjacent make a phrase, and the same pair in the other order can say something different. Laying the whole deck at once turns that into a field. Each place in the grid is a house carrying the meaning of the card whose number it shares, so every card is read twice over, for what it is and for where it fell.

Distance from the card standing for the querent is read as nearness in time or in relevance, the direction a figure faces marks what is ahead of them or behind, and cards standing in a straight line through the querent's card are read as a connected statement. The result is a method that rewards system over intuition, and the tradition treats it as the demanding end of the practice. A reader has to hold thirty six positions, their houses and several kinds of relationship between them at once, which is why teaching material usually introduces small layouts first and comes to this one last.