The Funnel, the Hourglass and the Megaphone

As a visual artist of the graphic persuasion, I’m constantly looking for patterns in card layouts. The Lenormand Grand Tableau is particularly ripe for this pursuit. I’ve already posted about “ripples on the pond” (concentric circles of cards surrounding the various topic cards that overlap, either reinforcing or cancelling one another); “knighting arrays” (block patterns of knighted cards that can link Significators to one another or to other topic cards) and “oblique diagonals” (lines of intersecting and knighting cards derived from topic cards in the same column or row).

https://parsifalswheeldivination.com/2018/01/09/ripples-on-a-pond/
https://parsifalswheeldivination.com/2018/02/14/knighting-on-the-diagonal/
https://parsifalswheeldivination.com/2018/02/10/the-angle-of-the-dangle/

Yesterday I did a GT in which the Significator (the Lady) was in the very bottom row of the spread. Since everything above the Significator is considered to influence the subject’s circumstances, it struck me that she was in a kind of “funnel” scenario with most of her life’s joys and cares bearing down on her in a concentrated way. When there is such a mass of testimony sitting above the Significator, I’ve always found it difficult to impose any sense of order or hierarchy on the interpretation outside of those insights available from the usual linking techniques of distance, knighting, intersection, quadrants and mirroring. It was a short step from there to a vivid image of a literal funnel with its discharge point at the Significator’s location. This would seem to work as an adjunct to the distance method in which the cards within the funnel have a more focused influence on the querent than those that lie outside its limits. It reminds me of the “hot-spot” created when you hold a magnifying glass in sunlight, gathering and pinpointing the illumination. The cards in the funnel “stack” in interesting ways; in this example there are three additional tiers of diagonals that can be read as modifiers to the cards on the central column, which in turn feed into the Significator.

In this pattern, the column centered on the Significator would hold the most influential cards, followed by the diagonals and then the knighting events within the boundary of the funnel. If the Significator lies near the top or middle of the spread, the funnel would  either be inverted, depicting the querent’s most effective span of control, or become an “hourglass” shape with both “above” and “below” components.If the Significator appears to the far left or right, it may be most useful to build the funnel sideways, giving it more of a “megaphone” appearance that either gathers (left-facing) or disseminates (right-facing) the influence of the cards it contains.