Lesson 07
Landscape, weather, environment
Observe first. Interpret second. Research third.
The land is not wallpaper. Weather is not mood lighting. If there is a mountain, a river, a crop, a bare tree, it is in the sentence.
The scene around the figure is part of what the card is saying. You already know the suit's element. Now see whether the landscape agrees, or argues.
The card is a place
Look at landscape, weather, elements. Water, fire, plants, animals, mountains, paths, clouds, distance.
Ask what the environment is doing to the figure, or instead of a figure. A person standing in a desert is not having the same conversation as a person standing in a garden. A still lake is not a flood.
Do not file water as emotion and mountains as obstacles and then stop looking. Ask what this water is doing, in this picture, for this question. You know Cups are water as a suit. A river on a Sword card is doing a different job than a cup of water. Suit is grammar. Landscape is this sentence.
Worked example. Two lands.
Five of Pentacles: snow, a stone building, stained glass, no shelter in the figures' reach. Earth as climate that will not hold them.
Ace of Pentacles: a garden, a hedge, a path, a gate, a living coin. Earth as a place you could walk into.
Same suit. Opposite lands. If you only read earth as money, you miss that one card is weather against the body and the other is a garden offering a seed. Describe the place, then interpret the suit.
Practice
Describe the place
Pull a card. Pretend you have to describe the location to someone who is about to walk into it. Climate, ground, what grows, what the sky is doing, how far you can see. Then, and only then, ask what that place has to do with your question, and whether it agrees with the suit you know.
Open the practiceActivity
When land and suit argue
Find a card where the landscape does not obviously match the suit's element, or complicates it. Swords with water. Wands with a still garden. Write the argument. That argument is often the reading.
Reflection