I've used the venerable Celtic Cross spread during most of my long involvement with the tarot, having first encountered it in Eden Gray's book The Tarot Revealed in 1972. At the time I didn't realize that Gray had taken a few liberties with A.E. Waite's original, and I found her version to be remarkably effective. … Continue reading Dissecting the Celtic Cross
Tarot Spreads
An I Ching/Tarot Problem-Solving Spread
This is my first attempt at fashioning a practical spread from a combination of the I Ching and the tarot. The decks I intend to be used are Anthony Clark's I Ching Pack, which has direct correspondences to the hexagrams; the Thoth deck with its association to the hexagrams through Aleister Crowley's commentary in The … Continue reading An I Ching/Tarot Problem-Solving Spread
Weather or Not: An Event-Planning Spread
This spread serves two purposes: its more obvious aim is to forecast the likely weather conditions for a planned outdoor event or travel situation. Its more abstract objective is to serve as a data-collection tool for determining how effective prediction is with the cards. One of the chief weaknesses in cartomantic prognostication is that so … Continue reading Weather or Not: An Event-Planning Spread
The “Shadow-Play” Motivational Awareness Spread
As a spin-off of my "House System for Tarot" post, I created a spread that draws the house cards from the bottom of the deck as shadow-card companions to the more outwardly explicit cards pulled from the top of the deck. These cards will show underlying motives or causes that affect the outer aspects of … Continue reading The “Shadow-Play” Motivational Awareness Spread
“Mirror of the Soul” Karmic Message Spread
The Pythagoreans held that Number is sacred and embodies the root of all Existence; the measure of anything whatsoever can be taken in its ten formative principals, which ascend from an embryonic origin in the Monad or Point (1) to mature perfection in the Decad (10). (Note that this isn't the mathematical perception of Pythagoreanism … Continue reading “Mirror of the Soul” Karmic Message Spread
“Roll Them Bones” Situational Awareness Spread
Here I'm having some more fun with dice and cards in collaboration. The dice are used to narrow down the card possibilities for each position. The idea is to "roll the bones" until you arrive at a number that fits within the range for the position, and then remove the four minor or court cards … Continue reading “Roll Them Bones” Situational Awareness Spread
Any Way You Slice It
I was just on Pinterest looking at tips for topical reading (that is, divination based on the general "fortune-telling" subjects of love, money, work, health, etc), which I belatedly realized are just variations on the Lost Man Spread. A card is pre-selected as "Significator" to represent the topic of interest, but it is left in … Continue reading Any Way You Slice It
The “Skeleton in the Closet” Chain-of-Destiny Spread
I firmly believe that few momentous events in a human life occur in a vacuum, however random or unprecedented they may seem to be. On a personal, interpersonal or trans-personal level, there was almost always something in the past that set the individual up for the experience, whether it was a sin of commission or … Continue reading The “Skeleton in the Closet” Chain-of-Destiny Spread
Symbolic Triptych: A Past/Present/Future Life-Reading Snapshot
This spread is an oddity for me in that it only has three cards. But I wanted to play around with geometric symbolism and someone asked me for a small-spread recommendation. The square represents stability in past circumstances (even if only in the sense that they aren't going to change) and perfectly symbolizes the "Foundation" … Continue reading Symbolic Triptych: A Past/Present/Future Life-Reading Snapshot
The “Tale of Two Arcs” Business Dynamic Spread
I enjoy playing with 3D effects in spreads. Sometimes I use layered positions to obtain that perspective, but here I'm opting for visual card size to show rising and falling developments in two contrasting arcs, one that peaks in the middle and the other that hits a mid-cycle trough. Any start-up business venture faces a … Continue reading The “Tale of Two Arcs” Business Dynamic Spread
