Elemental Dignity Rules

Now that you are familiar with the Tarot cards, you have some knowledge of the individual cards, and you can see various patterns made by the four elements, and variations in the ratios between the Major, Minor and Court cards. You can make some judgements as to what the cards mean as a whole, and that positions such as Past, Present, Future, Love, are not necessary to understand the picture.

Now that you can see how the cards interact with each other in a general way, it is time to use a simple set of formal rules using the four elements. The advantage of this system is that it does not require detailed knowledge of the divinatory meanings of individual cards, so you will be gradually building up more information as to what is going on. You will already know that an excess of Water cards, for example, shows an emotional picture and that things are generally passive.

The next stage is to start using the rules of Elemental Dignities

The Four Elements interact with each other using simple and easy to learn rules:

1. Fire and Air are friendly and active
2. Water and Earth are friendly and passive
3. Fire and Water are enemies; they weaken each other
4. Air and Earth are enemies; they weaken each other
5. Fire and Earth strengthen each other but are neutral
6. Water and Air strengthen each other but are neutral

Rules 1 and 2 show the strongest combination. Rules 3 and 4 show the weakest combination. Rules 5 and 6 are somewhere in between. The reason is that they combine Active and Passive. If you can remember Rule 1, and you know that Fire and Air are active, while Water and Earth are passive, you can work out all the other rules easily. There is very little to remember!

If your memory is not so good, and you and possess the Thoth Tarot deck, there is a reminder on the back of every card. The horizontal arm shows Fire and Water opposing, while the vertical arm has Air and Earth opposing.

Within the Golden Dawn system, the Sephiroth on the Tree of Life are coloured according to certain rules. Malkuth is divided into four colours corresponding to the four elements, citrine, russet, olive and black.

If you translate the elemental positions in Malkuth to colours you are more familiar with, you see:

Clearly the elements within Malkuth and the Rose Cross are cognate.

Exercise

Deal out cards two at a time. Use the rules of Elemental Dignities to determine if the pair are friendly, enemy or neutral, and whether the combination is active or passive.

The Vision

While reading the Tarot using this system, a shift happens: your awareness is suddenly free to see images and insights that no Tarot book or Tarot card can ever hint at. The truth of your visions will only happen with intimate knowledge of the Four Elements. With time, the Observer is no longer separate - the Witness is no longer a bystander, you are no longer saying "this will happen... that will happen". You, the Tarot Reader, the Observer becomes involved in changing the outcome, influencing events. Your advice becomes, 'going in this direction, or doing this action will change the outcome for the better'. The simple rules of the Elemental Dignities become tools for liberation, such that the individual interpretation of the Tarot cards become an irrelevance - in my own experience (and I have been reading Tarot on a daily basis for years), I remember less and less about the individual interpretation of the Tarot cards. All you need is those simple elemental rules, and you can work out the rest.