This is a specified relationship spread that uses nine cards to analyse where a romantic relationship is at and where it is headed. The first card shows where it is at now, and can be considered the significator. The second and third cards determine where your partner stands and how it relates to where you are at personally.
Above the stem, the three-card base of the layout, a cup forms. Cards #4 and #5 show each person's desires, meaning what they want to get out of this coupling. Above this, Cards #6 and #7 show the challenge that this pairing presents to each individual. The final two cards at the top form the rim of the cup, symbolic of the taste of the relationship to each person, which shows how things will turn out on each side.
The Future Outcome (To be read in tandem with the card to the right) Queen of Wands |
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The Future Outcome (To be read in tandem with the card to the left) Knight of Cups |
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Challenges Which May Arise for You 5 of Cups |
Challenges Which May Arise for Your Lover 2 of Cups |
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Desires in Relation to Your Question 6 of Swords |
Your Lover's Desires 4 of Wands |
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Nature of Your Issue The Devil |
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Your Lover's Current Position Ace of Wands |
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The Current State of Things King of Swords |
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The Current State of Things
He sits in judgement, holding the unsheathed sword. He recalls the conventional symbol of justice in the Major Arcana, and he may represent this virtue, but he is rather the power of life and death.
Upright Meaning:
Power, command, authority, militant intelligence, law, defensiveness, security, high office, duty, public service.
A hand reaching out from a cloud grasps a stout wand or club.
Reversed Meaning:
Fall, decadence, ruin, perdition, to perish also a certain clouded joy.
A sign of birth.
The devil holds the lovers, Adam and Eve in chains. This card represents the fall of man.
Reversed Meaning:
Evil, weakness, pettiness, vehemence, betrayal, deception, prison, small-mindedness, trifling.
A ferryman delivering passengers to the further shore. The course is smooth, and seeing that the freight is light, as the workload is not beyond his ability.
Reversed Meaning:
Declaration, confession, publicity; possibly a proposal of love.
From the four great staves planted in the foreground there is a great garland suspended; two female figures uplift nosegays; at their side is a bridge over a moat, leading to an old manorial house.
Reversed Meaning:
Prosperity, increase, felicity, beauty, embellishment.
A dark, cloaked figure, looking sideways at three prone cups two others stand upright behind him; a bridge is in the background, leading to a small keep or holding.
Upright Meaning:
It is a card of loss, but something remains over; three have been taken, but two are left; it is a card of inheritance, patrimony, transmission, but not corresponding to expectations.
A youth and maiden are pledging the love of one another, and above their cups rises the Caduceus of Hermes, between the great wings of which there appears a lion's head. It is a variant of a sign which is found in a few old examples of this card.
Upright Meaning:
Love, passion, friendship, affinity, union, concord, sympathy, the interrelation of the sexes, and – as a suggestion apart from all offices of divination – that desire which Nature is sanctified.
Emotionally and otherwise, the Queen's personality corresponds to that of the King of Wands, though she is more charismatic.
Reversed Meaning:
Good, economical, obliging, serviceable. Also signifies opposition, jealousy, even deceit and infidelity.
Graceful, but not warlike; riding quietly, wearing a winged helmet, referring to those higher graces of the imagination which sometimes characterise this card. He too is a dreamer, but the images of the side of sense haunt him in his vision.
Reversed Meaning:
Trickery, artifice, subtlety, swindling, duplicity, fraud.