What is a spread?
A place in a spread is a question put to the card that lands there. The same card answers differently in different places. The Hanged Man as where something comes from is not the Hanged Man as where it could go. So the names of the places do half the work, and it is worth reading them before you deal.
How do you read three cards in a row?
Waite’s book has no three-card spread. It is the smallest spread with a middle, which may be why so many readers begin with it. Many call the places past, present and future. The names here are plainer: where it comes from, where you are, where it could go.
The third place is not a forecast. It shows the way things lean if nothing changes, and something can always change. One way to read the row is as a single sentence: the first card does something, by way of the middle card, to the last. Another is to cover the middle card and look only at the two ends. What would it take to get from one to the other? Then uncover the middle again.
What are Waite’s ten cards?
The first method in Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot lays ten cards: six in a cross and four in a column beside it. As each card goes down you say a short line over it, such as “This covers him” or “This crosses him”. Waite called it “An Ancient Celtic Method of Divination”. Later readers named it the Celtic Cross, and that page has it in his own words, with his layout and a draw.
He printed two more methods after it. One lays out 42 cards, the other takes up the 35 cards left over to carry a question further. Both are in his book, in full.
How are the cards dealt here?
Each deal starts from a whole, freshly shuffled deck, so no card comes up twice in one spread. If you leave the box ticked, each card has an even chance of landing upside down, and you get Waite’s reversed words for it. Nothing is stored. Each spread you deal has an address of its own, so you can keep it or share it; deal again and the page moves on to the new one.
Every card comes with the prompt to look, then Waite’s words for the side that came up. Each links to its own page, with the full scan and what the older books said. If you would rather lay the cards by hand, all 78 are on one page.
