By Sarah Taylor
This week, I wanted to write a bit about tarot layouts — the card configurations that form the basis of a tarot reading. It is a vast area to cover; there are shelves full of books devoted to the subject. So I thought that I would approach it from a personal perspective and take a look at the four layouts that I use the most, both on myself and with clients (some more client-centric than others).
Essentially, a tarot layout is a map — of what, exactly, I do not fully know, but I have come to understand that it reflects back to us both our inner and outer experiences, as well as experiences from the past, present and future. (I write that I don’t fully know because I have questions that remain unanswered. For example, does a layout reflect the experience of the reader as well as the querent in different, but parallel, ways? Are they always correct? How objective are they? What is ‘objective’ anyway? All questions I’d like to address and which feel like they deserve a whole article dedicated to them.)
The way that a layout reflects this experience can be open-ended, or it can be prescriptive. Think of it in terms of, say, the difference between a visit to a psychotherapist or a life coach. A therapist tends to intervene very little, and with non-directive cues; a coach, on the other hand, can be quite instructive, suggesting a particular course of action or steering a client away from an unhelpful behaviour pattern. Both offer different ways to get to the same destination: identifying inner truth and aligning with it.
The first pair of the four layouts is non-directive, the second pair is directive. Which one I use in a reading depends on what question or situation I’m addressing. A general rule of thumb is that non-directive works for longer time frames; directive for narrower ones, and where some decision is requiring our attention — though that isn’t always the case. It usually becomes clear quite quickly, and I’ll know I’m on the right track when there is an intuitive engagement with the layout I’ve selected — the felt sense of a ‘click’ that indicates it’s okay to proceed.
The Celtic Cross
I covered the Celtic Cross in detail last year, so I will keep this to a brief minimum. (You can read parts one, two, three and four here.) I use the Celtic Cross as a doorway to insight — that moment where the unconscious becomes conscious. It’s ideally suited to this because it works on the vertical as well as the horizontal: the ‘cross’ section of the reading is concerned with the un/preconscious, conscious and super-conscious (the vertical axis) as well as the world of past, present and future (the horizontal axis). Therefore the reading asks us to look both inside and outside ourselves, and if we do, we will often see a correlation between the two.