Breaking Into Spreads: A Beginner’s Syllabus
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Here is another essay prompted by a “frequently asked question” from the online tarot community.
Tarot beginners who follow the conventional wisdom of learning the cards one-at-a-time, both in a sequential “card-a-day” manner and via single-card pulls, are often unsure how they can break out of that narrow box and into more complex spread-based readings. Some well-meaning but, in my opinion, misguided advisors will tell them to forget all about formal spreads and just deal cards randomly until it feels like time to stop, then see what “shakes out” in the form of an intuitive account of events and circumstances. Others suggest letting cards fall out of the deck haphazardly during the shuffle and then set about reading only those chance drops in the same unstructured way. I believe this casual attitude toward card selection does a disservice to those novices who are looking for a reliable anchor in a vast sea of confusing impressions; I call it the “throw everything at the wall to see what sticks” paradigm, and it has no place in the neophyte’s repertoire when the cards are still an enigma.
Simple spreads with relatively non-prescriptive “positional” meanings provide a guided trajectory for making sense of cards in combination, in that one image flows into the next in an orderly fashion with a stated purpose that supports meaningful storytelling and doesn’t require much on-the-fly extemporizing. Perhaps the most common one is the three-card “line” that is read from left-to-right in a “Past-Present-Future” manner; the testimony of the “Past” and “Present” cards can offer a reality-check against known conditions in the matter, and interpretation of the “Future” card should therefore gain credence if its antecedents are on-target. For the student, the advantage of this exercise over the one-card vignette is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum and allows for a small amount of development over time. There are other ways to tackle the three-card layout but they require some judgment that may exceed the skills of an inexperienced diviner. This one is my choice for daily draws, although I read it more in a “Present-Immediate Future-Evolved Future” mode that usually plays out as “morning, afternoon and night.”
The next adventure is to step up to the five-card “line” spread, which provides an expanded “sentence structure” with more supplemental adjectives and adverbs to describe the action. This permits the reader to stretch out in an anecdotal fashion and really dig into the effect of card combinations that can create “ups-and-downs” in the story-line. Another benefit of this spread (and of any layout with an odd number of cards) is that there is a card squarely in the middle of the series that can be read as the primary focus of the situation (with the other cards offering explanatory detail), or as a turning-point or climax separating early conditions from later developments (Papus uses the term “apogee” to describe this high point). The second method is my preferred way to read any odd-numbered sequence because it “trends” toward a conclusion.
At this point it may be best for the by-now-journeyman reader to pause and consider creating personal spreads. This doesn’t have to be a formidable undertaking since it has only three main components: 1) decide what you want to know, which will suggest the situational flow of your series of spread positions; 2) determine how much you want to know about it, which will dictate how many positions you will need to adequately convey the answer; and 3) choose how you want the information delivered, which is mainly a function of spread “shape” — line, triangle, square, circle, etc. — that can add inflection to the reading.These simple rules can be applied to layouts of any length and construction, but for the time being their scope should be kept fairly small.
The learner’s crowning achievement will be to graduate to longer spreads like the venerable 10-card Celtic Cross, which I consider to be the premier all-purpose “multi-tool” for general life-reading scenarios (that is, with no specific question in mind). Extracting the meat from a CC in a systematic and coherent way is a fine art of deductive delineation that begins with a “gestalt” overview of all the cards and then becomes organized into discrete chapters, although not necessary in the time-delimited manner shown in A.E. Waite’s classical version of the spread since circumstances are often fluid and the time-line can be indistinct. (Unlike many experienced readers, I lay all of the cards face-up so I can get an immediate “snapshot” of the whole spread; then I go to work breaking it down into logical segments that may revolve around key features identified during the preliminary scan.)
However, in my experience most readings will involve only a single straightforward query and are best served by a spread of no more than five cards, regardless of its design. Your mileage may vary, but three cards is often insufficient to escape having to fill gaps in the plot with inspired (aka “intuitive” or “psychic”) guesswork when the cards don’t jell into a seamless story; on the other hand, ten cards can be a case of “information overload” that must be meticulously sorted out. For me, a five-card analysis hits the narrative “sweet spot” for most occasions.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on February 6, 2024.
