The Celtic cross

The great spread of the initiated: ten cards for a full and deep reading.

The Celtic cross is the great format of tarot: ten cards that unfold a whole situation. The heart of the spread sets your situation and its immediate obstacle. Around it, four cards read your roots, your recent past, what may come and your near future. Then the column rises: you facing the situation, those around you, your hopes and fears, the outcome.

It is the spread of questions that commit you: a life choice, a pivotal year, a tangled situation. Set aside a quiet moment to receive it: ten cards speak more slowly than one and that is precisely their value.

✦ The 10 positions of this spread ✦

Your situation
The immediate obstacle
What grounds you
The recent past
What may come
The near future
You facing the situation
Those around you
Your hopes and fears
The outcome

✦ How the cards are shuffled ✦

No lazy random draw: Arkarma shuffles a real deck of 22 arcana the way hands would. Seven riffle shuffles broken up by cuts, some of which turn part of the pack over: that is how reversed cards are born, in clusters, as on a real table. Your question and your day enter the shuffle: ask the same question on the same day and the deck will be shuffled exactly the same way. Only your hand, by choosing other cards, can change the answer.

The deck then spreads before you and it is your hand that chooses: the intention, the moment and the gesture. The reading that follows takes up your question word for word and answers you as a reader would, card after card.

✦ Frequently asked questions ✦

Why is the Celtic cross reserved for the initiated?

Because ten cards create ten relations to read: the reading asks for structure. Arkarma unfolds it for you in three beats: the heart of your situation, what surrounds you and your road to the outcome.

What does the card that crosses the first mean?

It is the immediate obstacle: the force working on your situation, set across it. Even a positive card set across points to an energy to tame rather than an enemy.

Hopes and fears: how does a single card say both?

Because hope and fear are often the same thing seen from two sides: to hope for a return is to fear the absence. This card names that double movement and the ninth position is often the truest of the spread.

✦ Draw this spread

Before you draw, you can explore the meaning of the 22 major arcana: every card of your reading has its full page there, upright as well as reversed. And for another view, the 10 spreads of Arkarma await you.