The Celtic cross

How the cross is laid

The first card goes in the middle and the second is laid across it. The third goes below, the fourth to the left, the fifth above and the sixth to the right, which makes the cross; the seventh to the tenth are stacked from the bottom up in a column beside it, called the staff. The spread goes back to the version Arthur Edward Waite published in 1910, where the third card crowns the first and the fourth lies beneath it. The order used here, with the ground below and the aim above, is the one many later books follow, and readers still disagree about the details.

Why no position forecasts

The usual names for the sixth and tenth cards are the near future and the outcome. This site makes no forecasts anywhere, so the sixth position here is the next thing in front of you, meaning the step within reach now, and the tenth is what the other nine add up to as things stand. The rest keep their usual sense: the ground under the matter, what is already behind, what is being aimed at, your own stance, the people and places around it, and the hopes and fears, which are often one card seen from two sides.

Using the page

Settle the question before pressing Draw ten, and word it about the present: “what is going on with the job I have stopped enjoying” gives the positions something to hold, where a yes-or-no question about what happens next does not. The ten come from the full seventy-eight-card deck, all different, and each has a little over a one-in-four chance of landing reversed. Twenty-two of the seventy-eight are Major Arcana, so a draw of ten usually holds two or three of them, and two or three reversed cards. The cards turn over one at a time in position order, each reading appearing below as its card turns; on a phone the cross becomes a numbered grid.

Reading the ten together

Read each card in its own place first, then in pairs, because the layout is built in pairs. The first two are the matter and what pulls against it. Down the middle, the third card, what it rests on, sits under the fifth, what you are aiming at, so that line runs from the ground to the aim. Across, the fourth, what is behind you, faces the sixth, the next thing in front of you. In the staff, set the seventh, your own stance, beside the eighth, the people and places around it; the ninth, the hopes and fears, often says why the second card is hard to move. The tenth is read last, and only against the other nine.

Say the first card is the Hermit. The page reads it as it stands: stepping back far enough to hear yourself. Across it lies the Five of Cups, so what pulls against it looks like a loss that has not been counted properly, in feeling and attachment. Taken as a pair, the two ask whether the stepping back is hard because something about the old arrangement has not been let go. If the sixth card is the Eight of Pentacles, what is within reach is moving a short way rather than deciding again, in work, money and the ordinary week: a small step, not a verdict on the job.

Common confusions

Waite presented the spread as an ancient Celtic method, but no older source for it is known, and books still disagree about where the third to sixth cards go. A reversed card here is the same idea met with more resistance rather than its opposite, which is one convention among several. The tenth card is not a verdict either: most books call it the outcome, but here it is what the other nine add up to now. And drawing again until the cross looks kinder tells you more about the hoping than about the question, which is why the page keeps the first draw on this device with its date and leaves Draw again to you.

What the reading is

Each card’s text is composed from the same short descriptions the rest of the deck uses, fitted to its position, and a reversed card keeps its meaning, met with more resistance. The shuffle happens on your device, and the draw is kept there with its date until you draw again, so the same ten are waiting when you come back. The cards are a way of looking at a question from ten sides. They predict nothing.

Where it fits

For something shorter, three cards ask where you are, what is in the way and what would help, and a card for today gives one card with the whole deck to look through. Your birth cards are the Major Arcana a birth date adds up to, and the I Ching is another old way of putting a question to chance, with three coins and six lines.