The five-card cross · Five cards

A center card holds the heart of the matter, the situation as it stands. Across it lies the card that crosses it, laid at a right angle in the old figure, read as the challenge or the thing in the way. Beneath the center is the root, the basis the matter grows from or the past that set it up. Above is the crown, where the situation is heading or the aim held over it. The fifth card is the likely outcome, where the lines tend if nothing turns them.

It is a middle-depth reading, for a matter that asks for more than three cards but not the full ten. The shape is the skeleton of the Celtic Cross, the same first five positions without the staff of four cards, self, environment, hopes and fears, and outcome, that the long version adds down the side. Readers vary here. Some swap the sense of root and crown, and some read the fifth card as the near future rather than a final outcome, so it is worth fixing your labels before the draw.

The crossing card is not bad news. It is the thing the reading is actually about.

Read the center and its cross together first, since the matter and its tension are one pair. Then read the vertical line, root up to crown, as the situation’s direction over time. Take the outcome as a tendency and not a fate; it shows where the present arrangement points, and it moves when the arrangement moves.