Spread of the Week 5: The Five Element Star

This week we are focusing our attention on the number five. Five represents a breaking of stasis and the engagement of evolutionary stresses. Fives are “hormetic”, meaning that they are the kind of good hardship that if you apply yourself to them carefully, will make you much stronger. Without the fives in the deck, we would languish and become corrupt. Fives are the key to breaking out of static cycles, and achieving something new.

The Key Question, then, is “how do I achieve a breakthrough in …..?”. You choose the specific area - career, love life, thesis writing, occult wisdom - all these are fair game.

So how do you throw this spread?

Step 1 : Separate the deck into suits and Trumps.

Firstly, you will separate the deck into five piles as above. You will have a pile of Twenty-two Major arcana, plus four piles of Fourteen minor arcana in each suit (all the swords in one pile, all the cups, in another, etc…) Arrange them in the five fold pattern above, which is the traditional assignment of elements to the pentagram.

When we draw cards in the first part of this reading we will start in cups and go in the sequence: cups - pentacles - majors - wands - swords. This is so we can trace a pentagram clockwise (diosil) with spirit in the centre.

Step 2: Decide on the area you would like to make a breakthrough in.

You can pick any area you like - I recommend something that would mean a great deal for you if you were to sort it out. If you have financial troubles, why not look for a breakthrough in money consciousness - if you have a creative block, why not use this spread to crack that open? If you have a hang-up - why not use this to resolve it? Throwing this spread signals a willingness to overcome whatever is holding you back.

Step 3: Shuffle each pile separately while focusing on the desired breakthrough.

Go in the order shown above - cups, pentacles, majors, wands, swords. Shuffle while calming your soul and imagining that the pile is washed, cleansed and healed by light- as if you were magickally restoring a bowl or vessel - imagine that a spark of light, which represents your breakthrough, finds its home in each pile, each vessel, and when you are done, the five piles will each contain a twinkling spark, and be ready to clearly give you the breakthrough wisdom you desire.

Step 4: Lay out one card from each pile in the star pattern.

In this magickal mindstate, again starting at pile 1, cups, and proceeding around the pentagram, turn over the top card (right side up - don’t use reversals here). Take your time and enjoy the dramatic tension of disclosure as the Five-Element Star reveals itself to you.

You will have one card from each suit plus a single Trump - this is a perfectly balanced throw - similar to the balance of spices in a good meal. It has been designed deliberately with this order in mind. Each card represents the state of each element in your current situation. Sometimes the cards will be all “easy”, suggesting that the breakthrough is already underway, at other times they will be all “hard” suggesting that you have some major introspection to do on the five levels of your consciousness: Trumps = Spirituality; Wands = Intentions; Cups = Emotions; Swords = Intellect; and Pentacles = Physical. Usually you will have a mix of easy and hard, suggesting a specific level that needs to be addressed. For example: if your Swords card is the unpleasant-seeming nine of swords, but all the other cards are cards are “friendly”, like the ten of cups, the four of wands, the Empress, and the six of pentacles, then chances are, your blockage has to do with pessimistic overthinking, and negative self criticism. This spread will help you know where exactly in your energy system the problem lies. Look for the blocks.

In this throw, we see a situation of significant, systematic blockage - an overly passive and reflective attitude (Queen of Cups) has allowed  a situation to develop in which material hardship (Five of Pentacles) is compounded by overburden (Ten of Wands) is compounded by a self-defeating pattern  of behavior (Five of Swords). Wisdom is sought in the via negativa (High Priestess) - but it is not directly helping to deal with the manifest circumstances that lack abundance and ease - because it has not engaged in a transformation of the stagnant circumstances - not yet at any rate.

You can stop here if you wish - I call this the Yang phase, because it imposes an order on the cards to achieve its effect. It is possible to address the issues involved solely using these five cards, but, if you would like to expand this reading considerably, then read on…

Step 5: Double the spread.

For several reasons, the five card spread is open to a “doubling”, that will give us way more depth and context. For this, we start by taking all the undealt cards - all five piles- back up and assembling them into one mixed deck again. We leave our Five-Element Star where it has been laid out.

Shuffle the now-amalgamated deck very thoroughly. We will now put one crossing card down on each of the five points of the star. A few word before we start:

• Because the selection of element-for-position is no longer predetermined in this phase, you will see a wide variety of different combinations come up - there may be more Trumps involved, there may be a dominant suit, there may be a crowd of court cards  (suggesting the involvement of others), etc.. The key is to remember - as within the two-card crossroads, that the base card sets the tone, and the crossing card gives context. In fact this is a case of using the one spread-pattern (Crossroads) to enlarge upon the other(Five Element Star).

  
  

• The base star will consist of equal parts fire, water, air, earth, and spirit, and the crossing star will be a mixture of all possibilities. In this way, order and chaos meet in the pentagram.

  
  

• Since this is the Yin phase - where a more chaotic deck interacts with the cards that were previously laid out under the elemental order - you may wish to deal these cards in reverse order from the above pentagram - this helps create a natural polarity between the two phases - you can see the two different layout orders below:

The Yang star is the basic situation - the Yin star is its larger context. They are in fact, one. Lay this out and let the connections proliferate through your conscious and unconscious systems.

You should now be able to distill and discern a course of action that will give you the breakthrough you wish. Once you have determined that course (and it may even appear spontaneously to you after a good night of sleep), write it down, and immediately take the first step towards it. The rest will follow naturally.

You can see that in our example, the situation becomes significantly more open. The Queen who was reflecting in an ungrounded way now takes up the ultimate grounding energy, the Ace of Disks. Now she engages. The situation of poverty swings in the opposite direction - it is important to be grateful for this (Four of Cups) and not to take it for granted. The self-defeatism is overcome by a bright and brilliant confidence (The Sun), and the great burden - successfully discharged, creates momentum and torque and spins the wheel of change (Wheel of Fortune) towards a more expansive and positive direction. We can credit all this with the fact that the introvertive High Priestess has herself stepped out and engaged with the world in an alchemy (Temperance) that includes duality within unity. In this way, without sacrificing the spiritual dimension, prosperity is engaged in as a sacred art. Since this problem was more than likely systemic in nature, the change must also be like this - it proliferates through all levels and results in a new order of functioning for the sitter. This is the breakthrough needed.

Pro Tip - This is a powerful technique that uses what I call the “surgical” strategy. This strategy is basically - if you know the question is about love -  draw from a “cups only” pile. If you know the question is about career, draw from a “pentacles only” pile. If you know the question is about Transformations, draw from a Majors only pile. By separating the suits and the Trumps, you can target very specific questions to very specific areas and expect an “on topic” answer. This degree of control focuses the reading. Can you think of any kinds of situation that you might use this technique for? What about a hybrid technique, like we saw in step five - how else could this be applied?

Remember, as before, to let the images on the cards speak to you like the figures of a dream. Tarot logic and dream logic are, after all, very similar. They key to your situation may just crop up spontaneously a good while after you have forgotten all about the cards.

With the Five-Element-Star spread, you are not just divining - you are enchanting. You are declaring that a certain obstacle be broken through. The act of throwing this spread is therefore an active initiation of change - a “first shot” in the battle of overcoming your blockages. Use it for clearing up “stucknesses” that would make a big difference to you overall if they were removed, and be prepare to commit to the actions needed to back up this spread.

Power to you!