Designing Your Own Tarot Spreads (Special Topics in Tarot Series) [Paperback]

Teresa Michelsen (Author)

Book Description

Series: Special Topics in Tarot Series | Publication Date: March 8, 2003

Handle every topic with confidence and clarity as you learn to design readings that really answer the question asked. Why rely on the Celtic Cross or Past-Present-Future spread when you can develop layouts that reflect your personal style and your client's concerns? This book covers all the fundamentals of spread design with examples and exercises. Now you can tailor your spreads to the questions your clients ask every day.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Teresa Michelsen is a tarot reader and instructor with more than 25 years of experience reading tarot. She is well-known on the tarot e-mail lists under her reading name of Thrysse, and has published many articles on tarot on the worldwide web and in ATA publications. Teresa teaches on-line tarot courses for beginning and intermediate readers, and has published her first book on Designing your Own Tarot Spreads in 2002. Her award-winning tarot website, www.tarotmoon.com, is a favorite destination of tarot readers who come for her lessons and articles on tarot, her examples of completed tarot readings, and beautifully laid-out pages on tarot cards and readings. Teresa lives near Seattle, Washington, and in addition to her tarot work, has home-based businesses in environmental consulting and mediation.

See Teresa's website below for more information on her online Tarot classes!

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Elements of a Tarot Spread

The first step toward designing your own tarot spreads is to define the basic elements of a spread and be able to recognize and work with them. In general, every spread you will design or use contains the following basic components: A question or topic area The number of cards to be dealt The spatial arrangement of the cards The meanings of the card positions The order in which they will be laid and readSome spreads have additional elements, including: Special constraints on how the cards will be placed or read Additional cards that are not part of the main spread but add to it in some way. Even a one-card reading can be thought of as a spread, although it doesn't have all of the elements above. For a one-card reading, the question you define is especially important, as even more than usual it will determine whether or not you receive a clear answer. For example, if the question is "Why can't I ever seem to meet my deadlines at work?", you could define the card you receive as "The main reason you can't meet your deadlines." Other choices are also possible. For example, you could choose "The one thing you can do to meet your deadlines more often."

An interesting design element of a one-card reading is that you can define upright cards to mean one thing and reversed cards to mean another. This provides added information and flexibility to the reading. In the example above, let's assume we defined the one card as the main reason you can't meet your deadlines. We could also say that if it is an upright card, it represents an external influence (such as constant interruptions at work), while a reversed card would represent an internal issue (such as really wanting a different job).

Now let's look at the larger, widely used Astrological or Horoscope spread shown in Figure 1 to see how all the basic elements of a tarot spread are incorporated into it.

The Question The Astrological spread lends itself best to questions that are similar to those that might be answered using various kinds of astrological charts. For example, a spread could be laid out similar to a natal or birth chart to examine a client's life purpose and the strengths and challenges she faces in this life.* Another approach, similar to a solar-return chart, would be to look at the coming year starting on the querent's birthday. A third choice would be to look at the compatibility of a relationship by laying out two cards in each house-one for each person.

Number of Cards In this spread, there are twelve cards, one for each house in an astrological chart. Twenty-four cards may be used if you wish to place two cards in each house, or if looking at a relationship as described above.

Spatial Design Spatial design refers to the arrangement of cards in space, or the geometric layout of the spread. In this case, the cards are arranged in a circle, starting just below the nine o'clock position and proceeding counterclockwise around the circle. This is based on the arrangement of an astrological chart, in which the first house falls just below the nine o'clock line.

Position Meanings In this spread, each of the twelve cards falls within one of the astrological houses, which govern a particular area of life or the personality. Some keywords for the houses and positional meanings are shown in Figure 1.

Order of Laying and Reading This spread is normally laid in the order of the houses, starting with the first house and proceeding to the twelfth. The cards may be read in the same order, however, there are often patterns among opposite houses and houses with the same elemental affinity that are worth noting and may affect the order in which the cards should be read or discussed.

Special Constraints There are normally no particular limits on what cards can be placed or dealt into each position. However, one example of a more specialized approach would be to use the client's actual astrological birth chart. You could place the major arcana cards associated with each planet into their actual houses at the time of birth, and reverse any cards associated with retrograde planets. Then conduct the reading, perhaps filling in empty houses with minor arcana cards dealt from the shuffled deck to represent less significant influences.

Additional Cards As with most spreads, additional cards can be added to an astrological layout. One example might be to place a card in the center of the layout. With a life reading, this card might represent one's life purpose. With a solar or birthday reading, this card might represent the general outlook or main theme of the coming year.

The following chapters discuss each of these design elements in detail, focusing on how to use them in creating your own spreads.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Llewellyn Publications; 1st edition (March 8, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0738702633
• ISBN-13: 978-0738702636
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #189,675 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Teresa Michelsen is a tarot reader, author, and teacher with more than 25 years of experience reading and teaching tarot. Teresa is the webmistress of the ComparativeTarot discussion list, teaches on-line tarot courses for beginning and intermediate tarot readers, published her first book on Designing your Own Tarot Spreads in 2003, and published The Complete Tarot Reader in 2005, both with Llewellyn. Teresa lives in Olympia, Washington, USA and in addition to her tarot work, has home-based businesses in environmental consulting and mediation. She loves traveling, blogging, reading, gaming, cooking, birding, kayaking, and is interested in organic foods and sustainability issues, microlending, and health care reform.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best !!!, July 29, 2003

By 

Aurora Diaz "auroradiaz" (Guaynabo, PR United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Designing Your Own Tarot Spreads (Special Topics in Tarot Series) (Paperback)

I own about 50 tarot books, and this is one of the best. No repetition of information that most tarot books always do. She goes straight to the point of guiding you to make the most of a spread. She teaches the ideas that only experience and wisdom had proof to serve. She teaches how to make spreads that really shows the essence of a reading. She gave's many ideas about making good layouts, spread design(form of the spread), multi purpose spreads,alternatives spreads, predictive spreads, psychological and interactive spreads,articulating feelings in a spread,spiritual and metaphysical spreads,finding lost objects and persons ,past life readings. The most I liked is the guide to make practical spreads: "Rather than telling the client what is likely to happen, use the majority of cards positions to give him a to-do list that he can take away."
This book i will keep for a long time by my side.Theresa Michelsen is indeed one of our best Tarot teachers that can guide you step by step in improving your reading style and accuracy...good readings rely mostly on a good layout...and she will guide in a very special way!!!
This is a must to book if you want to be a good tarot reader. Aurora Diaz, Puerto Rico

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredibly useful, September 23, 2004

By 

Theia (Carrboro, NC United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Designing Your Own Tarot Spreads (Special Topics in Tarot Series) (Paperback)

I bought this book because I had reached a level in my tarot studies (I have been learning for a little over a year) where I felt I needed to go beyond the celtic cross, but was having little success using the other spreads I found in books. I tried a few times to design my own spreads but was only successful in creating one truely useful spread. In the week after receiving this book I created six spreads, four of which I deemed good enough to add to my book of shadows.

The trick, the author explains, is to focus on the question first. I had been too busy trying to create a multi-purpose spread like the celtic cross to realize the power of this simple technique. This is not to say that the spread will not be multi-purpose, in fact a whole chapter is devoted to generalizing the spread to fit more situations. Packed full of examples and great excercises (I had one spread grow out of an exercise) this book gives you all the inspiration you'll ever need.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Put the question first, September 11, 2005

By 

K. Rominger "Dream with your eyes open..." (Show Low, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Designing Your Own Tarot Spreads (Special Topics in Tarot Series) (Paperback)

Designing Your Own Tarot Spreads by Teresa Michelsen, part of the Special Topics in Tarot series for intermediate to advanced students of the Tarot, teaches the reader that creating spreads begins with the questions you're considering. Card positions flow from the various aspects of the question asked, not the other way around.

Michelsen provides a wealth of spreads, not for the reader to copy, but to modify, expand, and learn from as they craft specific, often multi-layered questions to put to the cards. One of the most useful aspects of her book deals with reading for others and how you can help a friend or client clarify the issues they seek answers to. Doing a reading this way, with give and take in a conversational model, takes more time, but delivers an often empowering experience for both querant and reader. The advice, options, and possibilities offered by the cards take on a greater richness, and ultimately, are far mor applicable to a given situation than "canned" spreads -- even if they are "tried and true."