Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
Following on from the first part of this short series on the Celtic Cross tarot reading — where I gave an overview of the Celtic Cross and the card positions — this week, I put theory into practice using cards drawn from the Rider-Waite Smith tarot deck.
This is a ‘sample reading’, but you might find that it is not as arbitrary as you might expect. The nature of tarot is that it rarely, if ever, takes holidays. However, I invite you to take a step back and see this particular reading from a technical, as well as an intuitive or personal, perspective. It is only when we understand the rules of a reading that we can work with them to access a flow that sits in parallel with it. Both rules and flow then inform our experience of the cards and the mirror they are holding up for us.
Here are the first six cards of the Celtic Cross reading and how I might choose to interpret them. The second part of the reading will follow in a few weeks.
Initial Overview
The first thing I do is to look at the cards as a group — in terms of suit, number, arcana, colour, the detail in the images and how they interact to form strings of narrative. What I see here are several different things that I don’t necessarily try to fit together immediately.
First, the dominant suit is Wands: there are three of these, followed by two Swords, and one Pentacle. There are no Cups. The greatest things at play here are creative energy — libido in a psychoanalytical sense — and intellect/thoughts. There is a sense of working with the physical world (the Two of Pentacles) but this is secondary to me — which doesn’t mean that it is any less important or can be pushed to one side.
Second, there are no major arcana cards in this cross. This means we are dealing with the ‘lived aspect’ of life — how it plays out practically. Again, this is no less important; it is just a different experience. This is how we move through our day, how we interact with others, how we are in and of ourselves — how all of this manifests.