Revisiting the Tirage en Croix: “Hold the Woo!”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The excellent tirage en croix (aka “French Cross”) spread originated in Continental Europe and it offers an ideal alternative to the modern three-card and five-card line. It is a straightforward predictive layout that I understand was developed by Swiss occultist Oswald Wirth. I recently came across a description of it on the r/tarot sub that I want to briefly “deconstruct.”
“Lay five cards in a cross pattern.
The top card is the situation or what you should be focusing on.
The bottom card is the outcome or what you should do.
The left card is the negative things or what’s acting against you.
The right card is the positive things or things acting in your favor.
And the center card is the quintessential meaning of the whole spread, the central message.”
It doesn’t get much simpler than this: one direct input card, one direct output card, two modifying “environmental insight” cards and a high-level summary card. There is no fiddling with the transitions between “past, present and future;” instead it focuses on “becoming” in a very pragmatic way: “I’m here now; I will be there soon; here are the “helps and hindrances” by which I will make the leap; and here is the “big picture” theme for the journey. (I realize that there may be other opinions regarding the structure of the spread, in particular the expanded “situational and environmental envelope” (my phrase, not hers) and temporal flow shown in Sallie Nichols’ TdM-based Tarot and the Archetypal Journey, in which she gives a nod to the tirage en croix as her inspiration.) Unlike Nichols, the present author only implies and doesn’t recommend a fixed positional sequence for the pull, but this is the version I recall from my earlier investigation.
My previous online discussions of this spread have led me to believe that it is where the “quintessence” calculation first appeared. Instead of randomly pulling the fifth (middle) card, we sum the numerical “face values” of the first four cards — “Theosophical addition” — and, if necessary, numerologically reduce the total — “Theosophical reduction” — to yield a trump card that serves as the “roll-up” or central message of the reading. Since it seems that the tirage en croix was designed for use solely with the 22 trump cards, this may be a moot exercise but it’s an intriguing sidelight that adds a little mystery to the narrative. (Before anyone says it, I know you can derive a “quint” card that has already appeared in the draw; just take it from a second deck and consider it “double-dipping” on that card’s influence in that it becomes the overarching motif as well as a developmental factor.)
I once had a dialogue with a mathematician who pointed out that the “Theosophical addition and reduction” techniques for arriving at the quintessence are unsound because this method creates a distribution curve that results in some trump cards never appearing as the “quint.” He assumed that we are trying to arrive at a single-digit outcome in every case, and in that sense I agreed with him. But I did an experiment with “casting out nines” (removing increments of nine from the total), a type of reduction — the “proof of nine” according to Papus — that throws a wider net since it permits stopping at a two-digit trump that is the “numerological counterpart” of the lower number (e.g. Devil [XV] relates to Lover [VI], since 15–9=6). This largely eliminates (or at least flattens) the “bell curve” phenomenon. We can then decide which conclusion best fits the context of the reading, or perhaps use both if a broader or more transitory theme seems germane to the scenario. (Incidentally, if we view the Fool as “zero,” it also supports arriving at that card as the quintessence, something Theosophical addition can’t achieve unless we renumber the Fool as “22.”)
Although I’ve garnered a few frowns from traditionalists, I acknowledge being more than a little flexible in my use of the tirage en croix since I first discovered it in a TdM thread on the Aeclectic Tarot forum back in 2011. I may use the whole 78-card deck; I may apply only the court and pip cards if I want a strictly mundane reading; I may employ a more recent esoteric deck instead of an historical one; I may invoke the quintessence calculation for a wide array of other spreads; I often use the spread to good effect with the Lenormand cards, although with a slightly different architecture. I, for one, believe that there are rules and then there are rational rules, and I tend to use any arrow in the interpretive quiver that shows merit in practice without being too far-fetched (e.g. too much like “psychic guesswork”). Think of it as ordering a tarot sandwich: “Give me a double helping of traditional ‘beef’ with a side of imagination. Hold the ‘woo’!”
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on January 3, 2024.
