Beyond the Celtic Cross. Paul Hughes-Barlow

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      There are many variations on the Celtic Cross spread, but this does not make much difference once we have gone below the surface of the reading to explore its hidden depths. As we study the cards in the reading, I recommend that you have them laid out in front of you. Use a tarot deck you are familiar with. As you will come to see, the divinatory meanings of the cards are not as important as you might expect. If you have learnt the divinatory meaning of the positions differently from those described above, don’t worry! Our primary concern will be the relationships between the cards. As we work through the examples, you will soon become very familiar with these cards indeed.

      Just like an iceberg, we see only ten percent of a tarot spread. The stunning visuals and layouts of the cards and spreads seduce the mind, which then becomes blind to what is going on underneath. Below the surface there is an intricate web of connections and interactions that can surface as insights and intuitive leaps. Sometimes we have no idea where these come from and may find ourselves unable to explain them.

      A large part of the ten percent that we can see are the tarot meanings, which are often a hangover from a bygone age. Yet we still cling to them. How many times have we tried to shoehorn a recalcitrant or quaint meaning into the Ten of Swords in the future position when the client wants to know how a love affair will develop? The structure of the Tarot draped over the Tree of Life is another problem area—the nuts and bolts of sephiroth, pillars, and other technical concepts are too often meaningless when applied to the lives of our clients.

      In hermeneutical terms the ‘meanings’ of the cards only appear when they are spread out for the client at that moment. Spreads like the Celtic Cross have an implicit direction of time, from the past through the present to the future. However, we are all of us a mess of contradictions once we stop to consider our notion of time. Some of us live in the future, while others live in fear of what happened in the past. How can we access all of this in the Celtic Cross?

      To redress the balance, we will explore the hidden depths of the Celtic Cross spread. Catherine realised that her own interpretations of the spread were inadequate, and she supposed the technique of ‘Elemental Dignities’—which she had heard of—might help, but she was unsure how to apply it to the reading. As we worked on this together, Catherine encouraged me to write in more detail about the process of uncovering the hidden ninety percent of the reading. At first, we imagined we might simply convert our emails into a narrative structure. However, the complex layers of meaning that we started to uncover forced us to re-think. Even though I have been reading the tarot for years using these techniques, I had no notion that we would find so much to explore.

      Whilst we re-wrote and restructured the book, transformations occurred within both of us. Catherine’s confidence at reading grew in leaps and bounds and the questions she asked became more complex, philosophical and insightful, so I was obliged to raise my own standards too. We wanted to capture this transformation as it expressed itself in our original emails, but this created its own problems. The exponential growth in our understanding created a messy and convoluted structure for the book, for this is the crucial problem with the orderly patterns of tarot spreads: they do not adequately reflect how we actually live our lives.

      Our love lives and social lives, for example, are intimately bound up with our working environment—there is simply no separation. For many, home-life may be non-existent or something we try to avoid. Some of us live our lives backwards. Nothing is ever in its right place. Imbalance is everywhere.

      Tarot readings should reflect the messy way that life is, otherwise how can we communicate with our clients? With ‘messy’ tarot spreads, perhaps? Well, we could indeed simply throw some cards onto the table and randomly pick one as the starting point, but then how could we communicate or teach the structure we personally found among the cards to another person? Some people can do this kind of reading to great effect, but is mirroring chaos really the best way forward? What if our client is actually very orderly? A reading of this type would probably not work in that case. And besides, the orderly aspects of the reader’s own mind would very likely rebel against such chaos.

      To overcome the problem we may resort to applying a name or title to each position in the spread, but then we become confined by the surface meanings. Some people use the imagery within the cards to help them—indeed, many well-known tarot experts suggest precisely this—but again we are dancing on the surface. How can we get to the roots?

      We need a balance between order and chaos. We don’t want titles and positions that trap us into a corner. We want the cards to reflect what is really going on, without trying to shoehorn a card into a position yet expecting it to tell us the full story. We want reliable and simple methods to get to the ninety percent of the reading that is hidden from both us and the client.

      If we abandon spreads, positions and meanings, then what do we have left? Actually, a huge amount.

      When we deal the cards for a Celtic Cross spread, we always put down the same number of cards in the same order. This sequence of ten cards is the only constant between readings. At the time they were written, the original instructions for the system of divination I will present in these pages emphasised that the order of the cards should not be altered in any way. The reason for this was that back in those days everyone played cards for entertainment. When people played gin or rummy, for example, they would instinctively pick up their cards and sort them by suit or number. It was this instinctive behaviour that the instruction not to alter the order was seeking to curb.

      A tarot spread is, then, the sequential placement of a string of cards. The places are assigned a name or title that gives meaning to the relationship between each place and the card in that place. But from our point of view the application of names or titles becomes arbitrary. The techniques we will explore in this book depend only upon the primary sequence of the cards. The first thing we will do, then, is to restore the cards used in Catherine’s Celtic Cross spread to that simple, sequential order: