30 Days of Tarot — Day 6: What was the first spread you learned?
Short Answer: It wasn’t the Celtic Cross!
It was a quick 3 card summary of a situation. “Good, Bad, & Surprise.”
My coworker’s encouragement helped me to take cartomancy as a serious affair. But the amount of conflicting information and all those proclaiming themselves to have the One True Tarot Method confused me.
It didn’t help there are so many spreads for so many situations! Most of the time I wanted to consult my cards, I was on the go and did not have the luxury of spreading out 15 cards with two hours immediately dedicated to deep introspection and correspondence crosschecking. I wanted something that would give me a quick summary of the situation, much like taking a quick glance at the weather forecast to judge if to bring the umbrella or not.
There are more ways to interpret a Celtic Cross than there are tarot readers, after all. But three cards are swift, to the point, and (usually) unambiguous.
- The Good News about $Query.
- The Bad News about $Query.
- Something else about $Query that you should know, usually something unexpected.
That’s it. Good. Bad. Surprise. One card for each if a quick summary is needed. Two or three cards for each if you want something a little more detailed, but without requiring dedicated time to sort through the nuances.
If I’m using a Majors-only deck, I keep it to one card per position. With a full deck, how many cards I pull is determined by how much time I have, and how detailed an answer do I want.
The 30 Days of Tarot Challenge was created by Ree of I Am Starstuff and can be found at the post: “30 DAY TAROT CHALLENGE“.