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Seeing the "Slant" of A Tarot Reading At A Glance

Wed, 04/06/2011 - 08:26 am PST by A.T. Mann

My Mandala Astrological Tarot is quite unique, and many people don't recognize this. Traditional Tarot cards are rectangles that can be laid down either upright or upside down, which many take to be either positive when upright, and somehow negative with upside down. This dualism isn't really advisable or necessary, so when I created my deck originally in 1972, I decided to solve the problem.

How? By making the cards square. Because the whole idea of the deck is to synchronize the cards with Astrology's signs, planets and houses, this would mean that instead of only two possible orientations, there could be four: upright, upside down, to the left and to the right. These four orientations are called "the angles" in Astrology, and they have clear and definite significance. The angles are seen as being powerful places in the Astrology chart and correspond to the noon point (MC above and to the South), the sunrise point (to the left and East), the sunset point (to the right and West), and the midnight point (below and behind to the North). When planets pass these points, they trigger realizations or events conducive to their nature and tend to be stronger than usual. Of course, every day the entire circle of signs and houses and planets rotate once, so that all planets in our charts pass the angles continuously.

The cards are square so that you can rotate them to the angles in a reading. When they lean left (toward the ASC) they are self/personal issues; when toward the right (the DSC/7th cusp) they refer to relationships; upside down (toward the IC) they are unconscious or subjective issues; and upright (the MC) they are about consciousness, objectives, goals and ego. For example, if you draw the Fool card in a particular place in the reading and it happens to lean to the right, it associates that card with the Descendant, to the Western setting sun, and the 7th house associated with partnership, marriage, and associations with the outer world. This therefore would mean that either one's attitude to a relationship is naive or foolish, or that one's partner in a relationship is acting that way. Due to its position, you could say that this is a quality that is often "projected" onto the other, meaning that if you feel your partner is acting foolishly, you should check out your own attitudes to make sure that it isn't just your own belief that is creating the situation. In this way, you can learn a lot from what you see in other.

What is useful about this is that you can not only have another parameter with which to evaluate an individual card in a reading (whatever spread you use), but by seeing the overall orientation of the cards in the entire reading, as you can see at a glance the overall "slant" of the reading. If I lay out someone's cards and most of them are upside down, I know that there are issues involved about which the individual is likely to be unaware or unconscious, or that they are tending to act instinctively and seeing things subjectively.

I think you will find that using the Mandala Astrological Tarot, or using the readings in Tarot.com (which accommodate these interpretations of orientation), will make your reading much more accurate, and therefore much more valuable.

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