How To Use The Spiral Spread Method To Level Up Your Tarot Readings

How to Use the Spiral Spread Method to Level Up Your Tarot Readings

I could wax poetic about big spreads. @goodbonestarot has written on why you should pull more cards even as a tarot newbie which I wholeheartedly agree with. There’s something really aesthetically and spiritually satisfying about having a big spread laid out on your floor, maybe a couple candles going to set the mood while you bask in a waterfall of truth. Or maybe that’s just me. 

Either way, big spreads can help you understand a situation complexly, provide a lot of opportunities for creative problem solving, and help you gain a less prescriptive/more intuitive understanding of how to conduct your tarot readings. So there’s a lot to be gained from reading a big spread from time to time. 

But big spreads are also intimidating and setting out to do a massive one all in one go can obscure some of the insights you might get along the way. Which is why I recommend spiraling them out as you need for the occasion. Below I give an example of how I do this with a “spiral spread” that I use but you can find plenty of other spreads that would work with this method too. 

Phase 1: Six Cards

1: Signifier/What do you bring to the situation?

2: Challenge/Situation

3: Past

4: Future

5: What’s at the root of your situation?

6: What advice do gods/spirits/the Universe have for you?

This level is my go-to spread for reading at parties right now. Remember that ask where I talked about accidentally making a tough guy start crying at a party? That was this spread. So even at this level it can really pack a punch. It’s enough depth that a querent usually feels like they got a proper reading but not deep enough that the details start to get lost which I feel like is important when reading in busy social situations. 

Phase 2: Ten Cards

1: Signifier/What do you bring to the situation?

2: Challenge/Situation

3: Past

4: Future

5: What’s at the root of your situation?

6: What advice do gods/spirits/the Universe have for you?

7: How do gods/spirits/the Universe see your past?

8: How do gods/spirits/the Universe see your future?

9: How does this root relate to your past?

10: How does this root relate to your future?

This was my go-to spread for many many years. I used it more when I was hanging out with friends in lowkey settings where I had plenty of time to read it out. You’ll see here that what’s built in here is the relationships between forces acting on a person’s life. If I’m going to draw extra cards, that tends to be where I get the most bang for my buck. Relationships fill out the spread and add complexity and depth without opening a whole new can of worms. This level strikes a good balance here I think. 

Phase 3: Fifteen Cards

1: Signifier/What do you bring to the situation?

2: Challenge/Situation

3: Past

4: Future

5: What’s at the root of your situation?

6: What advice do gods/spirits/the Universe have for you?

7: How do gods/spirits/the Universe see your past?

8: How do gods/spirits/the Universe see your future?

9: How does this root relate to your past?

10: How does this root relate to your future?

11: How did your past lead to the present?

12: How will your present lead to your future?

13: How do you relate to/how is your relationship with your gods/spirits/the Universe?

14: How do you relate to the root of the situation?

15: Ultimate Outcome/Resolution

I’ve only used this level of the spread a few times over the years. Usually for myself but I have on occasion used it for friends who were really going through a rough patch. It’s definitely a lot to take in which is why I suggest laying it out and reading it in phases. I consider cards 11-15 to really be more along the lines of clarifying cards than strictly part of the spread. Which is to say, pull the ones you feel are most important. I’ve pulled them just for the root or just for the future - whatever make the most sense for your situation. 

Closing Thoughts

Big spreads really do ask you to rely on your intuition and if that feels uncomfortable starting out, know that that discomfort is normal. We spend a lot of our lives being told to trust sources of information other than ourselves and while a lot of that is done for good reason, it can alienate us from all the good knowledge we have within. So big spreads are an opportunity to reclaim it. 

I really recommend writing down insights as you go or having another person do it for you because big spreads turn up a lot of them, often ones that reveal even more when considered together. You don’t want to forget anything along the way. Also seeing how you see a card at one level before you lay down the next phase can also be very illuminating. 

If you’ve not done a big spread before or it’s been a long time, I really recommend giving it a go. Life is complex, it’s important to be comfortable with spreads that are complex too. 

I hope this helps! If you have any questions, let me know!

*I do not claim my way is the one true way so take what is useful and leave the rest.

**If you wind up using this stuff in another setting, please credit me. This stuff is my art. Don’t steal, please credit. Thanks!

A Spread for Cards that are Hard to Read

Do you have any of those cards that when they turn up they make you really uncomfortable and you never feel like you can properly describe their meaning to someone you’re reading for? I know I do – The Lovers, The Queen of Wands, and The Emperor have haunted me since I started reading. Cards that are difficult to read can teach us a lot about ourselves and can help guide our shadow work.

I’ve been toying with this spread a little and I wanted to put it out there for others to try out. The idea is that you let the deck speak to what’s blocking your understanding of a given card – which if you’re interested in shadow work, often highlights areas of ourselves that need to be given attention.

The spread is laid out as follows.

Method

Shuffle the deck and find your chosen card. Place it in the first position. Take the cards immediately following it or proceeding it depending on which will have enough cards to fill every position in the spread. An alternative is to draw the card, put it in first position, shuffle how you choose, and draw the top cards to fill the remaining spots.

Positions

The first card is pretty straight forward. Choose a card that’s giving you trouble, that makes you uncomfortable every time it comes up. I think people tend to pick major arcana cards here but don’t be afraid to pick a minor card. All blocks have something to teach us

The second card is how your past influences how you read this card. It could be an event, a belief, an unresolved fear – anything really. Our past often dictates our expectations of the future. So when a card is difficult to read it often points to an expectation we’ve picked up from our past and it either challenges that expectation or confirms something uncomfortable.

The third card is how your perception of yourself is influencing how you read the first card. Similar to the second card, when a card is difficult to read it often challenges our image of ourselves. It may make us feel like bad people when we think highly of ourselves or vice versa, highlight an area we’ve struggled with, or make us question the narrative we tell ourselves.

The fourth card is how others in your life inform your reading of the first card. Often we see other people in the cards, ones we like and ones we don’t. Our feelings for or about that person will often undermine how we read this card in relation to ourselves and to other people.

The fifth, sixth, and seventh card are all what those influences can teach us about ourselves. The lessons they highlight can also offer clues as how to unblock your reading of the main card.

Conclusion

I hope folks find this spread helpful. I’m still tweaking it and toying with it. If you use it to create something new or come up with a different way to do a similar task, please reblog and/or let me know! I’d love to boost more materials on this.

As always, take the best and leave the rest and if you have any questions let me know!

Learn the Court Cards Fast: Reading Court Cards as Dualities

I’m not sure how helpful this post will be to others as it’s based very much in my own personal understanding of the court cards. I struggled for a very long time until I just abandoned most of what I’d read about them and began to understand them in the context of the rest of my own frameworks.

I think a common understanding of them is that you start as a Page and work your way up to being King. They often get read as “How much have you mastered the ideals of the suit?” with page being hardly at all and the King being the absolute best. It’s very hierarchical, top-down, and it’s not only sexist with regards to the Queen, but more generally invalidating of what the other cards have to offer in their own right.

I have come across alternative readings of the Court Cards but none of them really clicked until I started reading them as dualities.

The first duality I see in court cards is between the material/work and the ideals of each suit. Pages and Knights are focused on the work of each suit. They are carrying out the functions of their court, each with different advantages and disadvantages.

Unfocused vs. Focused Work

Pages, while perhaps less experienced, don’t engage with the work with the same ferocity of the Knights. Their lives tend to be more balanced, they tend to be more of the Jack of All Trades.  There’s a real trade off with not being specialized. They’re versatile, flexible, ready to learn and change. But they can’t execute to the degree that a Knight can, might get easily distracted or side tracked. When not showing up in a signifying role, or showing up specifically in an action position, they can also sometimes point toward gossip or rumors.

Knights, on the other hand, are fierce to a fault. They are specialized, focused, and honestly kind of terrifying to me personally. They are the ideals of the suit, weaponized, constantly in motion. They are coming to fuck your shit up. They’re not balanced though. They’re rigid, don’t change course easily, and are stubborn to a fault. But they are also undeniably effective. They do what they set out to do, they are reliable, they will fight until the battle is won. When not showing up in a signifying role, or showing up in an action position, they can also point toward news or a reversal of luck.

Internal vs. External Ideals

Regents embody the ideals of the suit in their highest form. They are twin forms of mastery. And much like real regents, they’re often unattainable. I find in readings they serve as reminders, lessons, or status relative to other people in a situation. We might be a page of wands in an art class but a queen in our own families. I find that the lessons of the regents are much less absolute than the Major Arcana.

Queens symbolize the internal mastery of the ideals of the suit, people who’ve attained a deep understanding of the suit as it applies to themselves and those closest to them. They often work behind the scenes and their mastery isn’t always given its fair due by others. Their skill is no less refined and important though. Queens perform the kind of work that can only be done in private. They are masters of growth, healing, and wholeness in terms of their suits. For these reasons, they’re not less dangerous or effective than Kings. Their work may not always be seen but it is always deeply felt.

Kings symbolize the external mastery of the ideals of the suit, people who are publicly lauded and recognized for their expertise, passion, and skill. They are leaders, influencers, and tastemakers. They set the pace and the terms of engagement for the group around them. They often receive praise or scorn for their actions regardless of the work they actually do because their reputation proceeds them. They are undeniably skillful, especially with regards to groups of people rather than individuals. While Kings derive it from different sources, their influence is what makes them truly formidable.

Conclusion

Again, these are just my thoughts. They’re just another framework to smash up against what you already know and see what sticks. I find the duality or dualities model for the court cards to really help me and I’ve had much better luck interpreting them in readings for myself and others since building it. But it’s by far not the only way.

Another note – I’m nonbinary and I don’t consider the Queen and King to represent feminine and masculine energy of a suit like a lot of people write about. Even without the binary being alienating, I think it’s important to develop frameworks that challenge conventional gender “energy” interpretations when it comes to court cards. I’m definitely interested in how others have worked on this as well.

As always – hope this helps and if you have any questions please let me know!

*I never claim my way is the one true way. Take what is useful and leave the rest.

**If you wind up using this stuff in another setting, I’d really appreciate it if you could cite me. This is my art. Don’t steal, please credit.

The Deck Bonding Challenge

One of the ideas I tossed around when I was looking at challenges to create for myself for the #100DaysOfTarot, one of the ideas I tossed around was a deck bonding challenge; to take my “Start Here” material and organize it into small chunks that someone could do daily while still using their deck for regular readings. I initially scrapped the idea since I don’t have a new deck I’m working with at the moment but my girlfriend asked me to write the challenge out for her to do with her deck. 

If you want to see someone doing this challenge in June, I’d recommend checking out @petrosophia, she’s kickass. I’m biased of course but she’s also just objectively a very reflective person, which is helpful if you want someone to follow along with. 

Before You Start

I’d recommend reading all of my “Start Here” section but especially my posts on not learning tarot cards like flashcards and on reading vertically. 

The important concepts here are the narrative approach to the Major Arcana/the suits and, well, reading vertically - taking all of the 1′s then all of the 2′s and so on. 

What to Do Each Day

On days the prompt says to ask the deck a question, shuffle and draw three cards. Use the book to look up the meanings if you need to. Make any notes you might want to keep or make a post about it. 

On the other days, select the cards listed and start with your first impressions. What story do you think is being told? What’s the emotion of each card? What’s the action? After you’ve made notes of your first impressions, make notes of the book’s definitions for each card as well. When you’ve completed a suit - say all of the pentacles - write a brief one or two sentence summary of the story being told. When working vertically, jot down three keywords after you’ve finished taking notes. 

For the two signifier questions, feel free to either select one and reflect on it or shuffle and draw one then reflect on it. Or hell do both. See how closely your pick matches you deck. 

You might also consider combining these prompts with the SOAP Journaling framework. 

Why Do This Challenge

The benefit I see with this challenge is that it allows you to develop a framework understanding of your deck over the course of several weeks which I think is more approachable for a lot of folks. I’m also just a firm believer that a little structure goes a long way. 

But feel free to play with this structure. Do all the Pentacles at once if you please. Maybe you need to break down the Vertical Reading into smaller chunks. Maybe you’re using a playing card deck so you just omit all of the Major Arcana. This is just a starting point. 

And I’m excited to see what y’all do with it! 

The Prompts

1   Ask the Deck: What are your Strengths? (Draw 3 Cards)

2   Ask the Deck: What are your Weaknesses? (Draw 3 Cards)

3   Pentacles 1-4

4   Pentacles 5-7

5   Pentacles 8-10

6   Pentacles Page & Knight

7   Pentacles Queen & King

8   Swords 1-4

9   Swords 5-7

10  Swords 8-10

11  Swords Page & Knight

12  Swords Queen & King

13  Wands 1-4

14  Wands 5-7

15  Wands 8-10

16  Wands Page & Knight

17  Wands Queen & King

18  Cups 1-4

19  Cups 5-7

20  Cups 8-10

21  Cups P&K

22  Cups Q&K

23  Major Arcana 0 & 21

24  Major Arcana 1-5

25  Major Arcana 6-10

26  Major Arcana 11-15

27  Major Arcana 16-20

28  Vertical Reading - The 1’s

29  Vertical Reading – The  2’s

30  Vertical Reading - The 3’s

31  Vertical Reading – The  4’s

32  Vertical Reading – The 5’s

33  Vertical Reading – The  6’s

34  Vertical Reading – The 7’s

35  Vertical Reading – The  8’s

36  Vertical Reading – The 9’s  

37  Vertical Reading – The 10’s

38 Internal Signifier – Who am I Internally (Select or Draw a Card)

39 External Signifier – Who am I Externally (Select or Draw a Card)

40 Ask the Deck: What do you want me to know? (Draw 3)

Reading Tarot Cards Without Spreads

I’ve been putting off writing this post for a while because every time I go to draft it I realize that I don’t have fully have words to explain how I intuit cards without spreads. Normally, when I suggest it to students, they come up with their own unique way so I think it’s totally possible to learn by just diving in and trying it. I’ve taken some extra time lately though to really dig into what it is I do but I still feel like I come up short. So I present this as best I can and I might come back and add notes or revise it later as I have new realizations. In the meantime, here are my thoughts.

Drawing 1 – 4 Cards

For me, when I’m only drawing a few cards, there’s no real placement to read. I almost always take them as “This is what’s going on” or “This is what you need to know”. I use these more as a dialog between me and a spirit or me and the universe. So, for instance, I might pull 3 cards for “What’s going on?” and realize I’m neglecting my physical health and the reasons why. Then I can either stop and problem solve on my own with that new perspective or pull another set with a new question like “What do I need to do?”

It’s conversational and I like it because it really breaks the idea of one card answering one question that you get used to when you read with spreads. I think that’s really vital, especially if you’re doing lengthy interactive readings for querents who might request follow up cards or clarifications cards. When you get out of the “1 card for 1 question” mentality, that process becomes much more intuitive and smooth.

So there’s not much to add here. I really see drawing a few cards like a conversation with a person. They’re not going to always sit there and tell you a story in order – they’re going to highlight how they felt, what it meant, the why and the how. It’s very similar in my experience with pulling a few cards without a spread.

Drawing 5 + Cards

This is where I realized I’ve built up a combination of frameworks in my head for when I pull a lot of cards with no spread. A lot of people will say look at where the characters in the cards face to draw connections, count the major arcana and court cards to know how many people are involved – and I think that style can be really fruitful but it’s not what I know so I’ll let others speak more to that.

I do recommend pulling cards and not flipping them over until you’re done laying as many as you feel are needed for a question, just to prevent yourself from trying to make the story as you lay them down, but it will work just fine usually either way.

This is a rough diagram of how I interpret them.

Observant readers may note similarities between this diagram and my spiraling spread. It’s true they both inform each other, but the difference is that I’m not drawing a card for every “spot” on this diagram. I lay out the cards and then determine their meaning relative to each other rather than the numbered spot they occupy.

For instance, spreads done this way are often bottom or top heavy, pointing toward either a lot of outside influence or a lot of deeply rooted shadow self/unconscious blocks. They’re often left or right heavy too, meaning either the past was particularly relevant to the present or the universe is gearing up for some big shit in their/your life. There might be several cards in the self/present spot which might point to leading a double life or the strain of conflicting roles. I will generally let the suit of the present/self cards determine the area of life the reading is most relevant to.

If a querent is more interested in what to do at the end of a spread like this, then I might use one of my quick diagnosis spreads to gain a little more insight. Or draw 1-4 cards conversationally like I described above.

Conclusion

The real pro of reading without spreads is the flexibility of it. It really helps develop intuition and pattern regconition. It’s also super helpful for developing your own regular spreads. Several of my quick diagnosis spreads were patterns I kept seeing so I codified them into an actual spread. I really hope you try reading without spreads. Borrow from this method if you like, but I think developing personal systems works the best.

Best of luck!

*I do not claim my way is the one true way so take what is useful and leave the rest.

**If you wind up using this stuff in another setting, please credit me. This stuff is my art. Don’t steal, please credit. Thanks!

Which tarot card represents each star sign

In tarot, different cards can be associated with each zodiac sign based on their symbolism and characteristics.

Here are some commonly suggested tarot cards associated with each star sign:

1. Aries (March 21 - April 19): The Emperor

2. Taurus (April 20 - May 20): The Hierophant

3. Gemini (May 21 - June 20): The Lovers

4. Cancer (June 21 - July 22): The Chariot

5. Leo (July 23 - August 22): Strength

6. Virgo (August 23 - September 22): The Hermit

7. Libra (September 23 - October 22): Justice

8. Scorpio (October 23 - November 21): Death

9. Sagittarius (November 22 - December 21): Temperance

10. Capricorn (December 22 - January 19): The Devil

11. Aquarius (January 20 - February 18): The Star

12. Pisces (February 19 - March 20): The Moon

Please note that these associations can vary, and some individuals may have different interpretations based on personal beliefs or traditions.