Easily Understand Every Tarot Spread Better.
No matter what spread you are using, start here to better and more easily understand your reading. This approach of looking at the cards as a whole before reading individual positions will strengthen your skills, add nuance, greater understanding, and cohesion to your approach to any spread.
Before analyzing individual cards and their positions, start by looking at the entire spread, and ask the following.
What feeling(s) do you get looking at the cards as a group? Try looking at what’s laid out in front of you as one image, like a collage, rather than a series of images.
Are there more major arcana (sun/death/fool, etc) or minor arcana (cups/swords/wands/coins) cards present?
What suit(s) appear the most? (cups/swords/wands/coins)
Do any numbers appear more than once? (ie: 7 shows up from more than one suite.)
How many cards are face cards (page/knight/queen/king)?
Revisit the entire spread as if it’s one big collage, looking at it again as you did in question 1. Has the meaning of this picture shifted for you? What details call your attention more this time?
Download the free worksheet to make answering these questions a breeze.
Stop and take some time with these questions before trying to analyze individual cards. As you answer these questions you should get a good feel for the reading without needing to first look at any individual cards.
If we have more major Arcana cards than minor Arcana, we immediately know we are dealing with things that feel really big picture and that the querent is deeply invested in. However if we have mostly minor Arcana cards then we are dealing with more day-to-day issues that don't tend to have as long-term of an effect.
Looking at what suites appear the most will help us to determine what realm these things are happening in. As we know, cups are the suite of emotions and are connected with water. Swords are the suite of air and intellect. Wands are the suite of fire and action. Coins are the suite of Earth and grounding, stability, material affairs. So simply looking at a prevalence of a particular suite can tell us a lot before we get to individual cards. For instance, if we are being called towards action, we might see a lot of wands. If we're trying to connect with our feelings and intuition, we'll see a lot of cups. If we're dealing with things that are related to a business and material affairs, then we'll see a lot of coins. We might look at how these are pairing too. So if we're seeing a lot of coins paired with swords then we might be looking at business ventures that are intellectually based or we might be being asked to think things through and really apply our logic towards our material affairs. Versus, if we have coins paired with a bunch of wands, it might be telling us that we need to be taking actions on things. Then if we were to have coins paired with cups, that might be telling us that we're needing to assess our intuition and do an emotional gut check on how we feel about these material affairs, business ventures, things that we're using to build stability. That might be telling us to look for ways to connect more to our heart work, or it might be telling us to check in with our intuition before going forward on any business ventures.
Looking at our next question we're going to see if we have a repeating number anywhere, and we can look to those numbers for guidance as well. We know that a one for instance is the seed of new ventures, so these would be things that are starting. We know that tens are kind of the highest and best embodiment of any suite, so a ten of coins is wealth, and a 10 of cups is that happy ending emotional payoff. We might look and see that we're finding sixes throughout which represent success in those particular endeavors or fives which represent strife/conflict. So just by looking at if we have any number that is popping up more than once could indicate that across multiple arenas; so if we have for instance the five of both cups and swords then we know that we might be facing struggles that are both deeply emotional and on an intellectual level. Doing this quick check before we even start to look at individual positions, if we're seeing a lot of fives showing up from multiple suites, then we know that we're feeling very conflicted or facing conflicts across multiple fronts, but if we saw a prevalence of twos across those same suites we would know we’re talking more about partnerships, balance, goal setting.
If we're seeing a prevalence of face cards then we know that this is a situation where there's a strong influence of community and people involved. A face card might mean someone other than yourself who has influence on something or it could also mean aspects of yourself that you're being called to embody. However, typically if we're seeing more face cards than it means literally that we're surrounded by people who are involved in the situation and who have an effect on the outcome. The collaboration and community with those people or resolving conflicts with those people are going to be at the heart of the issue.
Our last question is doing a bit of a gut check and instinctually looking at the cards trying not to think of the cards as individual images but thinking of them as pieces in a collage. So if we were to look at the picture as a whole, and we were to just visually read what's happening in this spread, what are we seeing? This is something that you can do both at the end or at the beginning, or preferably, both. For beginner readers, trying to run through the questions sometimes feels a little bit more comfortable to analyze counting numbers that appear, counting face cards, counting major and minor Arcana because that is more objective; we can see there's a certain number of this thing. So you might be more comfortable answering those questions first, but I actually like to do this question as the very first question, and if you feel stuck on it then you can always come back to it as the last question. I'm book-ending the worksheet with this question at the beginning and end because I'd like you to take a look at the spread just on Instinct both before and after you answer these other questions. First answer, what am I visually seeing, and how does that make me feel? Then move through the more objective questions of I'm seeing this number of this, how many of these, and then once we've done that, circle back to this question of looking at the images again together. What am I seeing? What is the picture as a whole, and how does that picture make me feel? Just imagine it as you would if you were standing at an art gallery or a museum in front of an artwork, and you're looking across different parts of the image, seeing details, and trying to come up with the story of this painting/photograph. That's how we want to look at the cards laid out in front of us. We're looking at them as one giant collage or photograph with all these different details inside, and how do those work together, and how does that make us feel, and what does that mean to us? Taking some time to run through these questions before we start diving into specific positions and cards will make your reading flow much more cohesively, and I think bring you more depth and ease to your readings.
Here’s the worksheet, again.
