Getting Started
A deck of twenty-four cards—twelve forms, each appearing twice. The doubling matters—it means that sometimes you will draw the same form for both positions, and when this happens, the reading enters a different state. We will return to this.
The deck alone is incomplete. Every reading requires two things: the physical cards you hold in your hands, and access to the digital interface where the Field lives. The forms come from the deck. The Field comes from the screen. One realm is stable, archetypal, the shapes that persist across deep time. The other realm is chaotic, daily, pulled from the noise of the present moment. A reading brings them into collision.
This is the structure of Morphē: you draw from the ordered world of the forms, then reach through the screen into the disordered world of the Field. The meaning emerges where they meet.
The Forms are fundamental shapes that reality takes. You have seen all of them before, though perhaps without names. The spiral of water draining, the hollow of a cup waiting to be filled, the crack that runs through a windshield after impact, the wave that passes through a crowd at a stadium, each person rising and sitting while the pattern travels. These shapes appear at every scale—in galaxies, in cells, in the movements of markets and moods and weather systems. The deck gives them names so you can think with them.
A reading draws two forms. The first is the Ground: what is already present, the condition you are standing in, the context that shapes what can happen. The second is the Figure: what moves, what enters, what acts upon or emerges from the ground.
The Field is regenerated daily at midnight UTC. It consists of fragments pulled from live sources—seismic data, news wires, satellite imagery, market movements, sensor readings, error logs—stripped of context and rendered ambiguous. Each reading receives four Field elements randomly drawn from the deck of the day: a number, a word, an image, a pattern. Today's Field is today's weather, you cannot draw yesterday's elements, and tomorrow's do not yet exist.
The Field can only be accessed through the digital interface. This is intentional. The forms belong to the physical world of shuffling and drawing, of cards held in hands. The Field belongs to the digital void, the chaos of data that flows through networks, the present moment rendered as noise. When you enter your forms into the screen and the Field responds, you are bridging two modes of existence. The reading lives in that bridge.
Before you learn the twelve forms, learn the four ways they organize themselves in space. These categories already live in your body.
CENTER is the feeling of attention gathering to a point. Close your eyes and notice where your awareness goes when you focus: it contracts, it concentrates, it draws inward toward a locus. A seed holds everything compressed into a single point of potential. A hollow organizes space around what is missing at its center. A spiral winds toward or away from something you cannot quite see. When you encounter a CENTER form, you are encountering concentration—energy gathered at a locus, whether that locus is full or empty, whether the movement is toward it or away from it.
PATH is the feeling of moving toward something, of trajectory, of the line that extends from here to there. Think of walking down a hallway, of a crack running through glass, of a river finding its way downhill. PATH forms have direction, though the direction may be ambiguous—a branch could be diverging or converging, a gradient could be rising or falling. When you encounter a PATH form, you are encountering extension along an axis, movement that traces a line through space.
FIELD is the feeling of being touched by what surrounds you, of surface and distribution, of the way a network connects points without privileging any one of them. Think of ripples spreading across water, of the web that has no center, of the membrane that separates inside from outside while allowing certain things to pass. FIELD forms spread across a plane, propagate through a medium, distribute themselves rather than concentrating. When you encounter a FIELD form, you are encountering connection across surface—the horizontal rather than the vertical, the distributed rather than the singular.
BODY is the feeling of weight, of taking up space, of substance that accumulates or disperses through three dimensions. Think of sediment settling at the bottom of a glass, of smoke rising and spreading into air, of the rhythm of breath that keeps returning. BODY forms have mass, have volume, have the density that comes from matter existing in time. When you encounter a BODY form, you are encountering thickness—the volumetric rather than the planar, the substantial rather than the diagrammatic.
These four ways of organizing space combine with three ways of moving through time:
Four spatial modes times three temporal movements yields twelve combinations. Each combination is one of the forms. This is why there are exactly twelve—the number emerges from the structure of pattern itself.
You will learn these through use. For now, know their names and their positions:
| Initiating | Sustaining | Transforming | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CENTER | 1 - Seed | 5 - Hollow | 7 - Spiral |
| PATH | 3 - Branch | 9 - Gradient | 2 - Crack |
| FIELD | 10 - Mesh | 8 - Wave | 6 - Membrane |
| BODY | 4 - Sediment | 12 - Return | 11 - Plume |
Each reading receives four elements from the Field:
Number - A raw quantity, stripped of units and context. It came from somewhere real today: seismic data, market movements, disease counts, atmospheric readings. You see 847 and you don't know 847 of what. Deaths, dollars, kilometers, hours. The number carries magnitude without meaning. The meaning is yours to find.
Word - A fragment of one to four words, torn from its sentence. It meant something specific somewhere—a news headline, an error message, a legal filing, a comment thread. Here it floats, orphaned, seeking new attachment.
Image - A visual fragment, processed and abstracted. Satellite imagery reduced to four colors, a microscope slide rendered as contour, a traffic camera frame blurred beyond recognition. You are uncertain what you're looking at. That uncertainty is the point.
Pattern - A waveform or chart, stripped of labels and axes. The shape of change over time, without knowing what changed. A slow rise, a plateau, a sudden drop. The rhythm of something real, identity withheld.
Sometimes a register will be void—empty, blank, nothing there. This happens when the source failed or the data was incomplete. The gap remains. The gap is the reading. The oracle declines to speak in that register, and that silence carries weight.
Sometimes an element will be broken—corrupted, glitched, unreadable. This too is meaningful. The system encountered something it could not hold. You must sit with the refusal.
Shuffle the deck. As you shuffle, hold your question loosely—an opening of attention, a loosening of the grip on what you think you already know. You are creating conditions in which you might notice something that has been unseen or ignored.
Draw the first card. This is the Ground. Place it on your left.
Draw the second card. This is the Figure. Place it on your right.
If both cards show the same form, you have drawn a double. Set them both at center. This reading will work differently—we will address doubles below.
Now turn to the screen.
On the screen, you will see a grid of twelve glyphs—one for each form. Tap the glyph of your first card (Ground), then tap the glyph of your second card (Figure). If you drew a double, tap the same glyph twice.
The screen will confirm your forms. A pause. Then the Field responds—four elements dealt from today's deck, pulled from the chaos of the present moment.
If you prefer fully digital casting: press and hold the center of the screen. Concentric rings will expand slowly, building tension. When you release, two forms will be dealt from a virtual deck of twenty-four cards. Doubles remain possible—roughly one in twenty-three readings.
Either way, the reading is now complete: two forms from the ordered realm, four fragments from the disordered one. The collision has been prepared. Now you dwell.
You draw The Branch as Ground, The Hollow as Figure. You enter them into the screen. The Field responds.
The Branch is PATH-Initiating. The Hollow is CENTER-Sustaining. A path that begins, a center that holds. Direction meeting stillness. The fork meeting the void.
The Ground (Branch): You are standing at a junction, or in the aftermath of one. Paths have split or are splitting. The situation is shaped by divergence—choices multiplying, possibilities opening or foreclosing. This is the context. Whatever the Figure brings will enter this condition of forking.
The Figure (Hollow): Into this divergence comes the void. Something is being hollowed out, or a vessel is being prepared. The Hollow as Figure means the action is one of emptying, of making space, of organizing around an absence. The question becomes: which branch leads to the hollow? Which fork opens onto emptiness? Is this emptiness a wound or a womb—a loss or a preparation for receiving?
The Spatial Relationship: PATH meets CENTER. Direction meets concentration. The diffuse energy of branching possibilities encounters the singular pull of the void. There is tension here—the branch wants to multiply, the hollow wants to gather. What does it mean to choose a path that leads to emptiness? What does it mean to find, at the end of divergence, a space that simply waits?
The Numbers: 3 + 5 = 8. The sum points toward The Wave—transmission, propagation, signal passing through. Perhaps what moves through the branch toward the hollow is itself a wave, something that will pass through both forms and leave them changed.
The Field has responded. Today it offers:
847The number 847. A magnitude without context. What is 847? Deaths, dollars, kilometers, hours? The scale is human—not billions, not fractions. Something countable. How does this quantity sit between the branch and the hollow?
"Gradually." The word lands between the forms. The emptying happens over time, imperceptibly. The gradient is present in the word even though the Gradient is not present in the forms—the Field carries what the Forms do not.
The image shows a river delta—branching made visible from above. The Field has echoed the Ground. And the delta is where the river meets the sea, where the branches finally empty into something larger. The hollowing at the end of all divergence.
The pattern shows slow rise, plateau, sharp drop. Accumulation, holding, sudden release. The rhythm of the situation made visible as shape.
Sit with this. The meaning lives in the collision, in the way branch and hollow and 847 and "gradually" and the delta and the waveform create a charged space around whatever question you brought. What are you noticing? What do these forms and fragments illuminate about the situation you are actually in?
You draw The Spiral twice. Both cards show the same form.
This is a threshold reading. The normal grammar—Ground and Figure, condition and action, what's present and what's coming—collapses here. There is no distinction between the two positions because both positions hold the same pattern. The Spiral has saturated the reading.
Place both cards at center. Notice what it means that there is no direction, no arrow from one to the other. The reading is still. Time has paused inside this pattern.
The Spiral is CENTER-Transforming. Winding inward or outward, depth through recursion, the approach that proceeds by circling. To draw it doubled means the spiraling has become total. You are spiraling into a spiral. There is no straight path anywhere in this reading. The center you are approaching (or fleeing) is itself winding. The transformation is transforming.
The Shadow: When a form meets itself, its pathology becomes active. The Spiral's shadow is the whirlpool—trapped in the gyre, obsessive descent that never reaches bottom, circling forever. The doubled Spiral asks: is this productive depth, or has the loop become a trap? Is the winding taking you somewhere, or has winding itself become all there is?
The Numbers: 7 + 7 = 14, which reduces to 5—The Hollow. The arithmetic points toward the void at the center of all this winding. What is the Spiral spiraling toward? Absence. The center may be empty. The depth may be a depth into nothing.
You turn to the screen. The Field responds:
3The Field elements become crucial here. They are the only variation in a reading otherwise defined by singularity.
The number 3. Small, prime, indivisible. Three what? Three more turns of the spiral? Three layers down? The smallness of the number against the totality of the doubled spiral—perhaps the depth is not as infinite as it feels. Perhaps there is a bottom, and it is closer than you think.
"Unscheduled." What was not planned, what arrived without appointment. The spiral you are in was not on the calendar. You did not choose this descent (or ascent). It came for you.
The image register is void. The Field declines to show. In a reading already saturated with spiraling, the oracle refuses to offer a picture. What can't be seen? What does the spiral hide at its center that even the Field will not reveal?
The pattern shows regular oscillation—a rhythm, a return. The Wave's shape appearing in the Spiral's reading. Perhaps the spiraling has a pulse, a periodicity. Perhaps it breathes—an in and out, even if the in and out themselves are winding.
What does it mean that you drew this? What in your situation has become recursive, has started circling, has lost the straight path? The reading shows you the saturation. What you do with that showing is yours.
If you want a companion in interpretation, invoke the Assist. A panel will slide in beside your reading.
The Assist sits beside you and thinks out loud—noticing relationships between forms, pointing to numerical resonances, wondering about the Field elements, asking questions you might sit with. It speaks in fragments and leaves things open.
You can ask the Assist questions: "What about the void in the image register?" or "I'm reading this about a decision at work." It will respond with more fragments, more threads, more openings.
The Assist attends to shadow when the conditions are present—when forms share spatial organization and their opposition creates tension, when a sustaining form appears in the Figure position and is being asked to move, when you have drawn a double. It will note these conditions without declaring what they mean.
If you want to sit with the reading alone, do not invoke the Assist. The reading is complete without it.
After dwelling with your reading, you may write. The journal prompt asks: "What are you noticing?"
You do not have to write anything. You may write pages. The prompt does not demand.
If you save the reading, it enters your archive with the date, the forms, the Field elements from that day, and whatever you wrote. You can return to it later to remember what the collision produced, to trace the resonance across time. The Field has expired. Those elements can never be recast. What remains is the record of encounter.
The archive can show you patterns if you ask: which forms have appeared most often in your readings, whether you have drawn doubles before, whether the Field has been void in certain registers repeatedly. These observations are offered without interpretation. The system notices. You decide what the noticing means.
Divination breaks habitual thought. The random draw forces your attention off its worn tracks. The charged symbols create a space for projection to manifest—you see what you bring to the collision, what patterns you impose, what meanings you reach for. The ritual frame gives permission for intuition to speak, and you know as you draw.
A reading is a mirror held at an angle. You see yourself, from a direction you could not have managed alone.
The meaning you find is yours. The system provides the conditions, but you do the work.
The meaning lives in the collision, and you are part of the collision.