Celtic Cross - Step Two: Levels of Consciousness
Position Three - What Grounds You: Placed beneath the center cross. This is the foundation or root cause of the situation. Position Four - What Crowns You: Placed above the center cross. Your ideal outcome, what you’re working towards, your best-case scenario.
All right, on to step two! Now we’re looking at the different levels of consciousness around this situation.
Starting with card 3*, What Grounds You. This card is placed beneath the center cross and is, fittingly, the “roots” or “foundation” of the situation (cards 1 + 2). Followed by card 4, What Crowns You, which is above the center cross. This card represents your ideal outcome or best-case scenario. Another way to look at this is as the levels of consciousness around the situation. What grounds you are the unconscious factors. What lies (sometimes hidden) underneath it all. What crowns you is your goals, what you’re consciously working towards.
*Note that in Arthur Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot, positions 3+4 are reversed to what I have here. So Position 3 is What Lies Above, and 4 is What Lies Below. I don’t think it particularly matters which you read first as long as you read it all together. I’ve adapted this spread in the way that works best for me, and I recommend you all do the same as well.
So onto our examples: In my personal reading, cards 3+4 were the 8 of Swords and the Queen of Pentacles, respectively. So the unconscious factors, or basis of the situation is a feeling of being trapped. Holding myself back. Consciously, what crowns me is the Queen of Pentacles. My desire to be her. Grounded, nurturing, down to earth, providing safety and security to her family. Sidenote: the QP has never been the card I resonate with the most, but has always been who I most aspire to be.
So now we’re going to look back at the spread as a whole. What we’re looking at is how these two cards relate to the center cross. For my reading, my over-thinking and grasping on the worst-case scenarios has got me feeling paranoid and unable to move, causing me to be more like the Page of Cups and cling on to nostalgia and how things used to be, instead of facing my responsibilities. Despite these problems, I do long to embody the Queen of Pentacles and ultimately my goal is to provide that sort of comfort, familiarity, and security to my family.
In the other example, my friends reading, the 9 of Swords was at the base of his reading, suggesting that maybe anxiety and negativity were causing him to hold back in his creative endeavors. What crowns him, or what he was working towards was the 4 of Pentacles, suggesting financial stability and certainty - something he can hold on to.
So again, the next thing we’re looking at in the Celtic Cross are the Foundation of the matter in What Grounds You, and the ideal outcome in What Crowns You.
What factors are at play at the different levels of consciousness for your reading?
Spread | Step 1 | Step 3 | Step 4 | Step 5
💗Blossoms🌱