This method of laying the cards combines spreads I and II.
Interpretation
1 The Ego
The first card represents the consciousness of your own self (The Great Spirit). It is the way the subject expresses and perceives itself as such: this is your own conscious identity at this time.
2 The Image of the Ego
The second card shows you the aim of your identity (John Dee); this is the inner intention, which is the basis of the course you are following and leads you to your conscious identity.
3 The Other
The third card describes the challenge created by the encounter with the world (the Horned God): this is what confronts you from the outside as your environment.
4 The Image of the Other
The fourth card symbolizes the part of you that you have distanced from yourself and projected onto the opposite sex (Jane), which is reflected in the image of the partner.
5 The Id
The fifth card describes – in contrast to the conscious ego – the deeper layers of the personality (The Devil): the level of the soul that includes the unconscious, the emotions, feelings, drives, and strivings (“endothymus function”).
6 The Image of the Id
The sixth card shows the circumstances or the person through which evil surfaces in life (Edward Kelley), the clothing in which the Id is manifested.
7 The Superego
This card embodies the superego in the Freudian sense, the controlling authority (the hidden one) placed above the ego, which accepts that the laws of society are valid and binding. It therefore includes the moral regulations and opportunistic aspirations of our spiritual life.
8 The Image of the Superego
In the eighth card you encounter father figure (Rabbi Löw), who is inspired by the endeavor for a better solutions. He breaks through the barriers of perception and grows within the transcendental spaces of limitless levels of consciousness. As an authority that passes judgment according to your conscience, he mainly demands that we renounce the goals for which the id strives (cards 5 and 6) and places himself in opposition to the ego (card 1). In unresolved conflict situations, this can lead to repression of the desires or emotions unacceptable to the superego.
9 The Darkness (The Shadow of the Light)
The ninth card shows us the purposeful currents rising from the endothymus function (card 5); these are often tied to feelings. As motivating forces, they determine the dynamics of experience, desires, and action. On the archetypal level, this is the Great Unknown or the dark archetype (the Green Angel), which attracts you and places you at its whose mercy if you fall into its hands.
10 The Light (The Shadow of the Darkness)
The last card shows the higher understanding through which the human spirit rises above itself and can become aware of its own bicephalous nature (Baphomet) by recognizing itself from both inside and outside of its own ways of thinking. He is the Janus-headed figure who unites an inward view with an outward glance in a dual perspective: “I am the Devil who has overcome polarities by looking God in the eye and only seeing himself.”
IV THE BIG BANG
Questions
Every creative idea, every flash of genius is a miniature repetition of the “big bang” with which our universe began its existence. For beyond the cosmic struggle is also hidden the universal relevance of the same eternal question: What does it mean? That is why this spread is for asking about the basic creative potential in an idea, or about a notion that you have concerning where the basic creative potential lies. How will this matter develop? What is the objective?
Allegory (The Big Bang)
“In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth. And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep...” These are the first lines of the Book of Genesis in the Bible; we could say that receives a certain amount of confirmation by the Big Bang theory of modern physics. According to this theory, the universe began its existence with the primal explosion – the big bang. Prior to this event, the spirit of matter had only been present in something like homeopathic amounts since matter was compressed into an infinitely high density within an infinitely small space. Jahveh’s act of creation, giving birth to being out of nothingness (creatio ex nihilo) developed so incredibly quickly after the big bang that it passed through the chaos, quark, and hadron eras in the first milliseconds; seconds later, it went through the lepton and radiation eras. But it took several million years for the era of matter to begin.
Interpretation
1 Chaos (The Beginning)
Chaos is shapeless primal matter out of which everything emerges. It is the first act of the creative force that “generates itself” and then ignites its own idea. It is an eruption of flames, the overflowing power of which destroys existing forms so that the life force can flow into new forms. In spiritual cosmogony, chaos represents the bridge between the spirit and the idea. It is a symbol of the inner firepower underlying outer endeavors as an invisible inner impetus.
2 The Quark Era (The Creative Quality)
This era corresponds to the absolute primal idea of the divine manifesting itself as matter and penetrating into the world of forms. It is the spirit of the will, and of God’s spark, which conceal itself in form. Even during those first milliseconds of the young universe, it laid the cornerstone for continual development right up to the present day. The Quark Era only lasted about one ten-thousandth of a second. On our level of human creation, this means that the second card reflects the creative quality underlying our idea.
3 The Hadron Era (Dynamic Energy)
The third card shows the dynamic quality of our idea on the energy plane, meaning how the potential energy may assert itself (in the world) within the entire whirlwind of creation. Even in our inner experience, we must also accept the hectic phases that accompany outward changes and upheavals. Inner unrest originates in a creative urge to burst the framework that has become too constricting to the awakened spirit of fire. This corresponds with the cosmogony of the Hadron Era when, for some ten-thousandths of a second, the universe consisted almost exclusively of hadron, the smallest component detectable to physics in the atomic nucleus.
4 The Radiation Era (Compression)
