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) 2 of Pentacles |
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The Future Outcome (To be read in tandem with the card to the left) 7 of Swords |
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Challenges Which May Arise for You The Tower |
Challenges Which May Arise for Your Lover The Devil |
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Desires in Relation to Your Question King of Cups |
Your Lover's Desires 4 of Pentacles |
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Nature of Your Issue 4 of Cups |
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Your Lover's Current Position 7 of Cups |
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The Current State of Things 3 of Wands |
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The Current State of Things
A calm, stately personage, with his back turned, looking from a cliff's edge at ships passing over the sea. Three staves are planted in the ground, and he leans slightly on one of them.
Upright Meaning:
He symbolises established strength, enterprise, effort, trade, commerce, discovery; those are his ships, bearing his merchandise, which are sailing over the sea. The card also signifies able co-operation in business, as if the successful merchant prince were looking from his side towards yours with a view to help you.
Strange chalices of vision, but the images are more especially those of the fantastic spirit.
Reversed Meaning:
Desire, will, determination, project, ambition.
A young man is seated under a tree and contemplates three cups set on the grass before him; an arm reaching out from a cloud offers him another cup. His expression notwithstanding is one of discontent with his surroundings.
Reversed Meaning:
Novelty, presage, new instruction, new relations.
He holds a short sceptre in his left hand and a great cup in his right; his throne is set upon the sea; on one side a ship is riding and on the other a dolphin is leaping.
Upright Meaning:
Fair man, man of business, law, or divinity; responsible, disposed to oblige the Querent; also equity, art and science, including those who profess science, law and art; creative intelligence.
A crowned figure, having a pentacle over his crown, clasps another with hands and arms; two pentacles are under his feet. He clings to what he has.
Reversed Meaning:
Suspense, delay, opposition, bad economy, repression, stubbornness, penny wise – pound foolish.
Lightning strikes the top of a Tower, knocking the crown off the top. Reminiscent of the Tower of Babel, two figures fall from grace.
Upright Meaning:
Misery, calamity, deception, ruin, catastrophe, distress, adversity, disaster, discord, falling apart, going all to pieces, injury.
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 young man, in the act of dancing, has a pentacle in either hand, and they are joined by the lemniscate, the sign of eternity.
Upright Meaning:
On the one hand it is represented as a card of gaiety, recreation and its connections, which is the subject of the design; but it is read also as news and messages in writing, as obstacles, agitation, trouble, embroilment.
A man in the act of carrying away five swords hastily; missing two which remain stuck in the ground. He is a thief. A camp is close at hand.
Reversed Meaning:
A dangerous plan that may fail, quarrelling, annoyance, disturbance, thievery, crime, slander, babbling.