Celtic Cross

The most widely used tarot spread in the world carries a name that makes two historical claims, and both are false. The actual history is better than the invented one.

What Waite printed

A. E. Waite published The Pictorial Key to the Tarot in 1910, and the spread appears there under the heading An Ancient Celtic Method of Divination. That heading is the origin of the name and of the belief.

Waite's own prose is more careful than his heading. He describes it as a short process that has been used privately for many years past in England, Scotland and Ireland, which is a claim about recent private practice in the British Isles, not about antiquity, and not about Celts.

The heading did the damage. It has been reprinted continuously for over a century.

Where it probably came from

Waite was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the spread has the marks of that milieu. Documentary work on Golden Dawn papers, including material associated with Frederick Leigh Gardner, a member and book collector, points to an origin in the order's orbit in the 1890s.

The motive is easy to reconstruct. The Golden Dawn's own divinatory method, the Opening of the Key, is a five-stage procedure using the whole deck that can take an hour or more. A ten-card layout that produces a usable reading in a few minutes is exactly what a busy practitioner would want.

Why "Celtic"

Because of when it was named. The Celtic Revival was at its height in the 1890s and 1900s, and a Celtic pedigree was culturally valuable in exactly the London and Dublin circles Waite moved in. Yeats was in the Golden Dawn. Attaching a Celtic name to a new method was not fraud so much as fashion.

The cross-and-staff shape has no Celtic precedent. The Celtic cross as a monument type, a ring around the intersection, does not resemble the layout, which is a plain cross with a column of cards beside it.

Why this does not diminish it

A spread is a piece of interpretive design, and it should be judged as one. This one has lasted over a century, in constant competitive use, against thousands of alternatives. It survived because the design works:

• It separates the situation from the thing crossing it, which is the single most useful distinction a spread can make.
• It distinguishes what the querent believes from what is around them, positions seven and eight, which is where most readings actually turn.
• It puts hopes and fears in the same position, which is either its cleverest feature or its most annoying one, depending on the day.

None of that requires it to be old. The spread is a good instrument built by named people in the 1890s, and that is a more interesting fact than a druidic origin would have been.

The disagreements over this spread are not beginners misunderstanding it. They are genuine, they are old, and they go back to ambiguities in the earliest printed description.

Above and below, or future and past

Waite's original description locates cards by physical position, what is above the querent, what is beneath them, what is behind and what is before.

Later handbooks converted those into temporal positions: past, future, foundation, near future. The conversion is not neutral. What is beneath a situation and what is in its past are different questions, and a reader following one scheme will read the same card differently from a reader following the other.

Most modern decks ship with the temporal reading. The positional reading is the older one.

Which way the staff runs

Waite lays the staff of four cards from the bottom upward, ending at the outcome. Some traditions run it top down. Since the four positions are in a fixed sequence ending at the outcome, reversing the direction reverses which position the outcome occupies.

This is why published Celtic Cross diagrams do not agree on which card is number ten and where it sits.

The crossing card

Position two is laid across position one, and Waite is explicit that it is read upright regardless of orientation, because a card laid sideways has no meaningful upright or reversed state.

Many readers ignore this and read the crossing card reversed if it comes out that way. There is no strong argument for it beyond habit.

There is also a persistent question about whether the crossing card is an obstacle or simply the other force in play. Waite's sense is closer to the second, what crosses the matter, for good or ill, and reading it as automatically adverse loses the cases where the crossing card is the help arriving.

Hopes and fears

Position nine is traditionally hopes and fears together, which strikes most people as evasive until they have used it for a while.

The defence is that hopes and fears about the same outcome are frequently the same thing, and that a querent who cannot tell which one a card is describing has usually learned the most useful thing in the reading. The critique is that it makes the position unfalsifiable.

Both are fair. Some readers split it into two positions and run an eleven-card spread.

The significator

Waite places a significator card, chosen to represent the querent, on the table first, with card one laid on top of it.

Almost nobody does this now. It removes a card from the deck before the reading, which most modern readers dislike, and it requires choosing a court card for the querent by a scheme of age, colouring and sex that has not aged well.

Its disappearance is the largest single difference between the spread as Waite printed it and the spread as it is used today.