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XVII - THE STAR The Three Star Spread is based on this picture. One woman stands on iron ore and watches a basket star swimming in the sea. Another woman stands on fossil crinoids (relatives of the sea star) and watches a falling iron meteor. Each woman tries to attract the other's attention, though they do not look at each other. A single glowing eye unites the women, their visions, and the ground they stand on. This layout is used to clarify a relationship between two people. Odd numbers represent one person, even numbers represent the other. Card 9 unites the two. Try reading both sides for each person. The spread can also be read for one person: Odd numbers represent what you think and do in the world and how others see you. Even numbers represent the subconscious, the imagination, and how you see yourself. Card 9 balances the two.
Cards 1&2: The ground that each person stands on: home and work, responsibilities, and
the past as it affects the current situation. |
| II - Red Earth (The High Priestess): The extinct Australian Pleistocene horned tortoise, Meiolania, carries a shell of iron ore stromatolites (fossil algae), one of the earth's oldest life forms. Unknowable guardian of earth history and geological secrets, she is a guide to true knowledge and opens the door to new mysteries we would not have guessed existed. |
| XXI - The World: The lodestone forms the heart of an iron dancer with a bell body, a blade mask that splits the air, coiled legs that dance on water, and spike hands trailing fire. Beyond are the interlocking iron crystals of the earth's core. Knowing her limits and fully using the space within them, she dances arrival, completion, and wholeness. |
| Four of Blades: A fire rake cuts a furrow through sand to expose wet pebbles. Beyond this protective line there is space to quiet the mind, recover stability, prepare a defense, or walk away. |
| Nine of Spikes: Hand-tipped hairpins still hold the heat of the forge. The central one holds transforming cicadas whose songs call up reserves of endurance, of creative energy at its most intense, the ecstatic dance that gives wings to one who journeys underground. |
| Five of Coils: A broken high-carbon steel chain of brittle stars surrounds a living brittle star with a broken arm. This steel shatters if quenched, and must be cooled in sand for strength. When something feels too fragile to work with, stress must be relieved slowly. Before giving up or remaking what is broken, touch the wisdom in the break. |
| Apprentice of Blades: Earth of Air. She holds a winter orchid (Aplectrum hyemale) and an ancient Greenland eskimo knife, cold-hammered from a flake of meteorite iron. Orchid flowers decorate her hair, and seeds blow when she plays the xun, a Chinese ocarina. Seeking intellectual challenge, she studies form and pattern in nature and applies it to practical design. |
| Eight of Spikes: When the timing is right, iron feathers on a shaman's costume transform into real feathers, heated in magical flight. A bird bone flute summons a caracara spirit, Garuda of the desert grasslands. The shaman's stories inspire people and remind them who they are. |
| Shaman of Coils: Fire of Water. Her face is a loggerhead sea turtle skull under a manta ray mask that watches a giant squid from the deep ocean. Hands of charred driftwood reach up to her out of the waves. She is the healer of shattered spirits, who searches the depths to gather and renew fragmented souls. |
| Two of Coils: Twisted steel snakes assist each other's hatching and devour each other's tails, a double Uroboros. The end of one attachment flows into the beginning of another, a mutual exchange and a swirling, changing flow of feeling between opposite poles. |
All artwork, electronic images, and text are copyright ©2001-2004 by Lorena Babcock Moore. Script copyright ©2004 by Daniel Moore.