Marcus Katz - 10 Mar

Secrets of the Celtic Cross

Marcus Katz & Tali Goodwin

Marcus Katz & Tali Goodwin, 2016.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

About the Authors

What next? These cards havent finished yet.

Goodwin to Katz, Typical Conversation.

Tali Goodwin is the co-author of award-winning and #1 best-selling Tarot books, including Around the Tarot in 78 Days , Tarot Face to Face , and Learning Lenormand . She is also a leading Tarot researcher and is credited with the discovery of A. E. Waites second tarot deck, kept secret for a century, published as Abiding in the Sanctuary . She has also uncovered and published the Original Lenormand deck, and with co-author Derek Bain, the original Golden Dawn Tarot images in A New Dawn for Tarot .

Her research into the life of Pamela Colman-Smith with new photographs is published as The Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot by Llewellyn Worldwide (2015). She is co-Director of Tarosophy Tarot Associations (Worldwide) and organizes the international tarot conventions, TarotCon .

Marcus Katz is author of the ground-breaking Tarot book and teaching system, Tarosophy , and is the co-founder of Tarosophy Tarot Associations (Worldwide). In addition to Tarot books with Tali Goodwin, he is the author of The Magister , an 11-volume opus on the Western Esoteric Initiatory System, The Magicians Kabbalah , and the forthcoming Path of the Seasons . He teaches students privately in the Crucible Club , available by application.

CONTENTS

The Celtic Cross spread is arguably the most well-known Tarot spread in general usage. However, it is also one of the most misunderstood. Here is an example of how it is described on one popular tarot site:

The 11 positions of the Celtic Cross offer enough detail to represent complex situations, which is why it has been the standard Tarot spread for hundreds of years.

Actually, the spread is neither a standard nor has it been used for hundreds of years.

In fact, it has only been used for a century. This common misunderstanding appears on almost every site on tarot and in every book is due in no small part to the marketing of the original method. Since the spread was published, it has always been called an ancient Celtic method of divination or the Celtic Cross when it is neither ancient nor Celtic, nor particularly designed as a cross.

In this book you will discover the real history of this spread and we will clarify the confusion which surrounds the method in the name of the spread itself, the history, and the practical method of reading the cards in the spread.

We will also provide you many new and powerful ways to read the spread using an outcome-orientated approach, which is geared to finding the solution to a situation first and then working to discover the resources and practical steps to attain the best possible outcome.

These methods come from thirty years of reading the Celtic Cross for tens of thousands of clients and is a summary of what works best from our experience, delivered in the best way for beginners.

If you are not interested in the history, which does answer most of the regular questions about the spread from students (such as which way do you read the past and future positions or why do books have different names for the positions) you can skip the first section of this book and go straight to the powerful methods of reading the spread and the new Celtic Square method.

If You Do Not Yet Know How to Read Tarot

We recommend our other tarot books on Kindle and in paperback, particularly Tarot Flip , if you are in a hurry and want to use meanings distilled from hundreds of real tarot readers.

A more general stroll through card-learning is provided in True Tarot Card Meanings by Andrea Green, and a comprehensive guide to learning the tarot in our own 78 Days Around the Tarot .

If you would like to learn the secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot and more about the lives of Pamela Colman Smith and A. E. Waite, we would recommend Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot which has wholly original research and revelations.

In this present book, we will concentrate on the Celtic Cross and reading methods which key into our other books, although many of the outcome-orientated methods and language patterns can be used with any spread for any situation.

We start with what appears a simple question why is it called the Celtic Cross? and we will use this as a gateway into many other areas of Tarot. And as with any research, this article raises more questions than it answers, although we hope it excludes some previously given answers, and there is ongoing research which will be made available in future editions of our Tarosophist International magazine, which is free to members of the Tarosophy Tarot Association.

Importantly, we exclusively present in this section the first published photographs of the earliest hand-written and typescript versions of the spread from the archives of the Golden Dawn, the Hermetic Society which was founded in London in 1888 and flourished for about twenty years. We also provide full transcripts of these two primary and original documents.

We will look at a number of members of this Society, and their role in creating the Waite-Smith Tarot deck, with which as we will discover - the Celtic Cross is inextricably associated.

We hope that this section presents all tarot students and readers with an examination of the way in which tarot history, myth and presentation gets confused over time, and the manner in which we can now work on re-discovering our roots, which are often far more curious and interesting than the wishful-thinking and unfounded speculation that too often surrounds tarot.

We would also like to think in this research we can notice and clarify confusions in the practical application of the spread itself which have come about during its brief history.

The bibliography at the end of this book provides many areas for you to research the history of this spread, deck and those involved in their creation. The titles given also cover much of the history of the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn, the original backdrop of so much of our current tarot.

The Celtic Cross spread can be found in most books on tarot. A selection of introductory books and learning guides gives a range of descriptions for the spread; in Learning the Tarot (Bunning, 1998), it is probably the oldest and most popular pattern, in Tarot Readings and Meditations (Pollack, 1986) there are almost seventy pages devoted to examples of reading the spread, in Tarot Made Easy (Garen, 1989) it appears as the Keltic Cross, in the popular Tarot: A New Handbook for the Apprentice (Connolly, 1979) the spread is described as a very ancient method, whereas in the Mythic Tarot (Sharman-Burke & Greene, 1986), it is merely one of the oldest spreads.

The spread is often described as being presented by A. E. Waite, or recommended by him (as in Tarot Plain and Simple (Louis, 2003)), published by him, and so forth. Over time, this conflation has led to the spread sometimes as in a discussion thread on one tarot forum being termed Waites Celtic Cross method.

The Celtic Cross spread itself consists of ten cards of which actually only two are crossed, then four cards are placed around the central cross of two, and a short line of four cards is placed to one side.