Okay, so diving into tarot cards felt like a big step. Got my first deck, all pretty and mysterious, but then came the layouts, the spreads. Honestly, it was kind of a mess trying to figure out what went where and why.
At first, I just pulled single cards. Easy enough, right? Get a feel for the deck, the basic vibe of each card. But I knew the real juice was in how they connected, and that meant spreads. The little booklet that came with the deck showed a few, but the explanations were super basic. Like, “Position 1: You.” Okay, thanks, very helpful.
Starting Simple: The Three-Card Pull
I decided to get real basic. The three-card spread seemed manageable. Past, Present, Future. That’s what most people said online, anyway. So I started doing that every morning.
- Shuffle the cards, thinking about my day or a general question.
- Lay out three cards, left to right.
- Left card: That’s the past, stuff leading up to now.
- Middle card: The present, what’s happening right this second.
- Right card: The future, where things might be heading.
It took a while for it to sink in. Sometimes the ‘past’ card felt totally random. But I kept at it, writing down the cards and what I thought they meant in that position. That was the key, I think. Not just the card meaning, but the meaning tied to the ‘past’ or ‘present’ slot. After a few weeks, it started clicking. I could see the little story forming across the three cards.
Tackling the Beast: The Celtic Cross
Then I got ambitious. Everyone talks about the Celtic Cross. Ten cards! It looked complicated on paper, and frankly, it was. All those positions had specific names and meanings – the cover, the cross, beneath you, behind you, hopes and fears, the outcome… my head was spinning.
What I did was print out a diagram of the spread. Like, a big one. And I wrote down the meaning of each position next to its number. Super basic, like:
- Present situation
- Immediate challenge
- Distant past / Foundation
- Recent past
- Possible outcome / Conscious goal
- Near future
- Your attitude / Self
- External influences / Environment
- Hopes and fears
- Final outcome
I kept that cheat sheet right next to me every time I tried the spread. And I tried it a lot, mostly just for myself, asking dumb questions just to practice laying out the cards and reading them in order. It felt clunky. I’d read position 1, then check my sheet. Read position 2, check the sheet again. It was slow going.
Slowly, very slowly, I started remembering. Okay, position 7 is usually how I feel about things. Position 8 is what other people or the world are throwing at me. It wasn’t about memorizing a list, it was more about getting a feel for the role each position played in the story of the reading. Practice was everything. Just doing it over and over, even when the readings felt nonsensical, that’s what burned the layout meanings into my brain.
Now, I don’t need the cheat sheet much for the common spreads. It’s more intuitive. But man, getting started? It was just about putting in the time, laying out the cards, and forcing myself to connect the card meaning with the position’s meaning, again and again. No magic trick, just repetition.
