This easy-to-read four-card layout is one of the most useful of all the spreads. The first card is the significator, and the last shows the outcome, provided that the advice given is followed. The advice is broken down into two cards which can easily be compared and contrasted. Card #2 suggests what to avoid, while #3 shows the path to take.
This spread can also be used to ask about the meaning of a card from a previously executed spread that may have been unclear. In this usage, Card #2 shows what it did not mean, while #3 clarifies the meaning.
DO This Queen of Pentacles |
||
It Deals with This Ace of Pentacles |
Do NOT Do This 10 of Cups |
|
It Leads to This 6 of Cups |
It Deals with This
A hand reaching out from a cloud holds up a pentacle.
Upright Meaning:
Perfect contentment, felicity, ecstasy, sharpness, intelligence, a quick wit, gold.
Appearance of Cups in a rainbow; it is contemplated in wonder and ecstasy by a man and woman below, evidently husband and wife. His right arm is about her; his left is raised upward; she raises her right arm. The two children dancing near them have not observed the prodigy but are happy after their own manner. There is a home-scene beyond.
Reversed Meaning:
False heart, indignation, violence, deception, in-satiety.
The face suggests that of a dark, intelligent woman, who has the quality of greatness. She contemplates her pentacle, using it as a tool of skrying and divination.
Reversed Meaning:
Evil, suspicion, suspense, fear, mistrust, apprehension, perplexity, hesitation, uncertainty, scepticism, doubt.
Children in an old garden, their cups filled with flowers.
Upright Meaning:
Remembrances, looking back, as on childhood; happiness, enjoyment, but coming rather from the past; things that have vanished. Another reading reverses this, giving new relations, new knowledge, new environment, and then the children are disporting in an unfamiliar precinct.