In her 1970  book The Complete Guide to the Tarot, Eden Gray teamed up with astrologer Mary Beckwith Cohen to attempt a redistribution of the Major Arcana to the Qabalistic Tree of Life by disregarding the paths between the sephiroth and instead placing the zodiacal trumps in an oval around the Tree. She called her innovation “The Three-Dimensional Tree,” but – to avoid confusing it with the Golden Dawn’s Tree of Life in Three Dimensions as later explicated by Israel Regardie and Robert Wang – I simply consider it the “Tree in the Oval” model (with all of its obvious allusions to Aleister Crowley’s ubiquitous “Cosmic Egg” symbolism).

I didn’t find her reassignments especially convincing from either an astrological or qabalistic perspective, so I substituted my own correspondences. Note that the signs in the opposing hemispheres of my version all have a lateral affinity for one another, whether by zodiacal opposition or common rulership, as do those at the top and bottom of the two outer columns. If nothing else, I imposed a sense of symmetry and order on the design.  It just seems to make more astrological sense. I did not include the “modern” planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto in my system, instead staying with the primal elements Fire (Judgement), Water (Hanged Man) and Air (Fool).