Where tarot comes from · Lesson 5 of 6
The Celtic Cross, honestly
Learn where the Celtic Cross really comes from, what Waite’s ten positions first meant, and how to read a ten-card layout without an outcome card.
A method from 1910
The Celtic Cross is the spread most people meet first, and it usually arrives with an air of great age. Its first known printing is in the guide A. E. Waite wrote for the deck he made with Pamela Colman Smith, published in 1910 and expanded the next year as The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. Waite called it “An Ancient Celtic Method of Divination”. No earlier source for this layout has been found, and nothing links it to Celtic practice. The label is Waite’s own.
It did not come from nowhere. From the late eighteenth century, fortune-telling methods commonly chose one card to stand for the enquirer and laid others around it, and Waite’s layout belongs to that family. What he gave it was this particular shape: a small cross of six cards beside a column of four. Later writers renumbered it, so one book calls card 4 the past and another calls it the root. Neither is wrong. They describe different versions of the same idea, and it helps to know which one you are reading.
What Waite’s positions meant
Waite began with a significator: a court card picked to match the enquirer’s age and colouring, laid face up at the centre. Olivia leaves this step out, because court cards here are qualities anyone can have, not portraits of people. Then came ten cards, each with a short label. The first “covers” the enquirer and the second “crosses” them. The third “crowns”, the fourth lies “beneath”, the fifth is “behind” and the sixth “before”. Up the column sit the enquirer’s self, their “house” or surroundings, their “hopes or fears”, and last, “what will come”.
Some of these labels already point inwards. Waite read the crowning card as the enquirer’s aim or ideal in the matter, and he gave hopes and fears a single place, which many readers since have found apt: a hope and a fear are often the same wish seen from two sides. Other labels point to time. Behind meant what is passing, before meant what is approaching, and the tenth card was the final result. That last one is the part Olivia sets aside.
Why there is no outcome card
A last card labelled “what will come” changes how every other card is read. The reading turns into a lead-up to a verdict, the tenth card becomes the loudest in the spread, and a hard card there can feel like a sentence passed on you. Olivia reads cards as themes to look at, not events to wait for, so it keeps the tenth place and changes its question.
In Olivia’s relabelling the ten positions ask about the situation; what complicates it; what you are aiming for; what lies at the root; what is passing; what you are turning towards; your perspective; outer influences; hopes and fears; and the thread to carry forward. The tenth card is something to take with you and work on, not a result. Read it beside the third, because the gap between what you are aiming for and the thread you are given is where the real work sits.
Reading ten cards in pairs
Ten cards read one by one become a list. Survey them first: count the Major Arcana, notice which suit gathers, and look for any image that repeats. Then read the layout in pairs of positions. Begin with the two crossed cards, 1 and 2, which many teachers treat as the heart of the reading. Card 4 sits under card 1 as its root. Cards 5 and 6 face each other across the cross: what is loosening its hold, and what is drawing your attention. Cards 7 and 8 set your own view beside what surrounds you. Card 9 stands alone: ask which part of it you hope for and which part you fear.
Last, read cards 3 and 10 together, then write one sentence for the whole layout and one small step you can try. If that sentence could have been written without the cross at the centre, go back to cards 1 and 2 and begin again from there.
Interactive
Practice: the Celtic Cross, without an outcome
Ten cards dealt at random into Waite’s layout, with Olivia’s questions in place of his labels. The tenth place asks for a thread to carry, not a result. Look at the whole first, then read the positions, beginning with the two crossed cards.
Look at the whole
Before reading any position, look at the ten cards as one picture: how many Major Arcana, which suit gathers, any image that repeats. Each line says how often that happens in a random draw.
The spread in one sentence
Read cards 3 and 10 together, then write one sentence for the whole layout and one small step you can try.
Try this
- Draw the cross and the column in your notebook, and label all ten places with Olivia’s reflective questions rather than Waite’s labels.
- With a deck you own, lay ten cards for one open question, then look at the whole layout for thirty seconds before reading anything.
- Read cards 1 and 2 as a single pair, and write one sentence about how the second complicates the first.
- Open the Olivia card pages for cards 3 and 10, note one image from each, and write what the gap between them asks of you.
- End with one small step you can try, and record it with the date in your journal.
To remember
- The Celtic Cross was first printed by Waite in 1910; “ancient” is his own label.
- Read the ten positions in pairs, starting with the two crossed cards.
- Card 10 is a thread to carry, read beside card 3, never an outcome.