Experimenting with how I read TOA Cards

No, I will not always be writing about these cards. I'm spending time getting familiar with them, and it's been a slow few days with other projects right now because of some physical obstacles. When those two situations are put together...lots of fascination with the cards!

As I've said before, the easy thing to do is lay out three cards, read across the tips, then read across the bottoms. The art makes sort of eldritch Rorschach inkblots, so finding out what I see in them each time is interesting. I haven't been doing anything to assign the positions of the cards to specific things. With tarot, I've got lists of things three cards can be for. Past, Present, Future is an obvious one. That's what I'm intending to try with these cards, but I haven't done it yet.

Today, I was playing with how I read the written phrases.

Doing the "read the tops, read the bottoms" thing here gives me:

A dance of strange attraction

Some half-imaginary dim essence

A trail of sailing stars

Cosmic word-pictures

A primitive looking churchyard

An aura by the rim

The idea occurred to me to top-bottom-top, and then bottom-top-bottom. The result of that is:

A dance of strange attraction

A primitive looking churchyard

A trail of sailing stars

Cosmic word-pictures

Some half-imaginary dim essence

An aura by the rim

Tops and then bottoms has a flow to it that the second method is missing, though. The words are good, but going back-and-forth between top and bottom suddenly made it feel like the flow was interrupted when I went back to the first card for it's bottom words. So then I tried going backwards from the third card. Still doing the back-and-forth with tops and bottoms thing, but the card order, instead of 1-2-3-1-2-3, becoming 1-2-3-3-2-1.

A dance of strange attraction

A primitive looking churchyard

A trail of sailing stars

An aura by the rim

Some half-imaginary dim essence

Cosmic word-pictures

All three results have this very poetic feel, but it's the third result that really resonates with me. I think it's because it changed where "An aura by the rim" sits in the message. Something about that just wasn't speaking to me when it was at the end.  I really like that back-and-forth flow instead of the parallel rows. And when I look at it that way, I can see the cards hinting at how I was to read them.

My mind working as my mind works, part of me is nearly yelling, "You can't do it that way! You can't just go mixing up the order because you think 'roses are blue, violets are red' has an interesting aesthetic!" That part of me likes to believe I'll win if I follow rules, and also have plans already mapped out for what to do if that won't be the case. That's the part of me that thinks Organization and Responsibility are natural partners.

Another part of me says I'm not just making things up on a whim, and the Organization and Responsibility part of me needs to shut up and let this process flow. I'm trying new things. I'm figuring out what works, what doesn't, and how to put a system in place. Stability, but not stagnation. (That's been a repeating message in some of my other divination work recently. I'm working on applying it.) I like having a system so that I can trust results. There can be a very fine line of inconsistent weight between Intuition and Imagination at times. That's part of why we have divination systems. Otherwise, you could just pull a lavender crayon out of a bag and say, "This clearly means I should do the thing I already wanted to do."

Of course, even as a type that, I can hear the little voice in my head that says, "Well, it might... What does the lavender crayon mean? Is this all based on color? Is everything else is the bag crayons, too?" So there we are, right back to my need for systems.

Systems can be really rigid and limiting, or they can be flexible and provide just enough limitation that no more than the necessary line is drawn. Okay, those are the extremes. Systems can also be a lot of things that fit between those two options. For the kind of work I'm doing here, I want just enough limitation that I can trust the results. The details of how that works can change over time. Since I'm still getting familiar with this cards, I'll probably be happier with a few more rules now than I will be down the road.

My only real concern about playing with the order I read things in is what happens when it's not just about gaining familiarity anymore. When I'm doing a serious reading, that's not the time to decide I want to switch the order around because I didn't get a message that I wanted. Luckily, that's also easy to work around. I just have to decide how they will be read before I lay the cards out. If I'm not feeling drawn to a particular method, I can roll dice for it. Part of what can make that line between Intuition and Imagination such a tricky thing is that it needs to be just a line, not a wall. They need to be able to hold hands and talk to each other.