The Five Card Cross Tarot Spread

The Five Card Cross spread is a tarot layout of 5 cards, used for a balanced snapshot of a situation and its resolution. It is a small cross-shaped spread giving a quick but rounded view of a matter.

How it is laid out

In this arrangement the reader deals five cards in a cross: the present at the centre, the past to the left, the future to the right, the root cause below, and the potential above.

Tarot spreads are conventions of interpretation rather than fixed rules: each fixes a set of positions, and the card that falls in a position is read in the light of what that position is held to mean. Some layouts, such as the Celtic Cross, are long established in the twentieth-century reading tradition; others, including several themed modern spreads, are more recent inventions. The Five Card Cross spread is described here as one such interpretive framework within that tradition.