← Encyclopedia of Tarot · lesson 99/121
Celtic Cross
The Celtic Cross is the most famous of the larger tarot spreads: ten cards, six of them arranged as a cross in a circle and four set in a column to the right. It is meant for a single, specific question, and it looks at that question from many sides at once — what is at its heart, what opposes it, where it came from, where it is heading, how the querent stands toward it and what surrounds them.
Where it comes from
Waite published it in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911) under the title "an ancient Celtic method of divination". Nothing older than Waite's book has been found to support the "ancient" or the "Celtic"; historians think it more likely came from the occult circles around the Golden Dawn, to which Waite belonged, and it was Waite's book, followed by Eden Gray's popular guides in the 1960s and 1970s, that made it the standard spread of the twentieth century. The name comes from its shape: a cross with a ring around it, like the stone crosses of Ireland.
The two parts
Readers often think of the spread in two halves:
- The cross (six cards) describes the situation itself, in time: the centre, what opposes it, and what lies above, below, behind and ahead.
- The staff (four cards, in a column) describes the querent's relation to it: their attitude, their surroundings, their hopes and fears, and where it tends to lead.
Waite's order
In Waite's version a significator is laid down first, and the cards are placed around it:
- What covers — the general atmosphere of the question.
- What crosses — laid sideways over the first: the nature of the obstacles in the matter.
- What crowns — above: the aim, or the best that can be reached, not yet actual.
- What is beneath — the foundation, what is already part of the querent's experience.
- What is behind — the influence just passed or passing away.
- What is before — the influence coming into action in the near future.
- Oneself — the querent's own position and attitude.
- The house — the environment and the people around them.
- Hopes and fears.
- What will come — the outcome, to which Waite told the reader to pay particular attention.
One detail is often forgotten: Waite placed "behind" and "before" according to the way the significator's figure faces, so the past could lie to the left or to the right.
Versions differ
There is no single correct Celtic Cross, and anyone moving between books will meet several. The most common differences:
- The order of cards three to six. Many modern books, Joan Bunning's among them, put the foundation or distant past third (below), the recent past fourth (to the left), the best potential fifth (above) and the near future sixth (to the right) — the same places as Waite, dealt in a different order.
- The fixed direction of time. Most readers now simply place the past to the left and the future to the right, whatever the significator faces.
- The significator. Many leave it out, so the first card itself stands at the centre as "the present".
- The staff. Some deal it from the top down rather than from the bottom up, and the names of positions seven to ten vary: "self", "how others see you", "external influences", "advice" or "what you need to know".
None of these is a mistake. What matters is that the reader knows which version they are using before the cards are turned.
How it is read
Ten cards make a story too large to read one card at a time. Readers usually take the centre pair first (what covers and what crosses, the heart of the tension), then read the cross as a timeline, then the staff as the querent's side of it. They look for links: whether the crown and the outcome agree, whether the hopes and fears card echoes the obstacle, which suits and numbers dominate, how many Major Arcana appear and how many court cards people the spread. The outcome card is a direction — where things tend to lead if nothing changes — rather than a sentence passed.
In a reading here
The ten-card Celtic Cross offered here follows the modern order without a significator: the present, the challenge, the foundation, the recent past, the crown, the near future, then the staff of yourself, external influences, hopes and fears, and the outcome. There are weekly and monthly variants as well.