How did Waite lay it?
Waite began with one card chosen before the shuffle, the Significator. It stands for the person asking, or for the matter itself, and lies face up in the middle. For a person he took a court card by age: a Knight for a man of forty or more, a King for a younger man, a Queen for a woman over forty, a Page for a younger one. The suit went by colouring, from Wands for “very fair people” to Pentacles for the darkest. Temperament could overrule that. Someone “exceedingly dark” but “very energetic”, he wrote, might be better shown by a Sword.
Then you shuffle and cut the pack three times, faces down, and turn the cards up one by one. Each has its line, said aloud as it goes down: “This covers him.” “This crosses him.” Six make the cross. The next four rise in a column on the right, the seventh at the foot.
The fifth and sixth cards depend on where the Significator looks. “Behind him” goes on the side he looks away from, “before him” on the side he faces. If the card faces neither way, the reader “must decide before beginning the operation”.
How does the draw on this page work?
The draw here leaves the Significator out and deals all ten from a full deck. If you want the whole method, lay a court card of your own first, the old way, and let the first card cover it. The places follow Waite’s diagram, with the fifth on the right.
“What will come” is Waite’s name for the tenth place. You can also read it more quietly, as where things lean if nothing changes. Waite had his own advice for a tenth card that stays unclear: lay the whole spread again, with that card as the new Significator. One reading then hands its last card to the next.
Where does the method come from?
Waite gave no more of a source than this: “a short process which has been used privately for many years past in England, Scotland and Ireland”. He did not think it had been printed before. He never called it the Celtic Cross; that name came later, from readers. You can take it as an old practice he passed on, or as one he gave its shape. Either way, it walks around a single question and looks at it from ten sides.
For a smaller spread, try three cards in a row.
