by Marcus Katz
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 haven’t 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. Waite’s 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 Magician’s Kabbalah, and the forthcoming Path of the Seasons. He teaches students privately in the Crucible Club, available by application.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Why Is It Called the Celtic Cross?
The Spread
The First Publication of the Celtic Cross
The Background of the Golden Dawn
Who Designed the Celtic Cross Method?
The Method of the Spread
The Archives and Original Documents of the Golden Dawn
An Early Hand-Written Version of the Celtic Cross Spread
A Gipsy Method of Divination
The Work of F. L. Gardner
The Rosy Cross and the Celtic Cross
When did the Spread become Ancient?
Conclusion
Reading the Celtic Cross
1: Reading from the Outcome
2: Find the Flow & Set the Tone
3: The Resources Always Meet the Challenge
4: The Future Comes to Those Who Make It
5: Yourself and Others
6: Where Your Attention Goes is Here
7: The Past is Behind You Now
8: Positive Outcome Frame
9: Finding the First Step
10: The Anchor Card
11: The Four Important Things
12: The Wheel and the Road
13: The Celtic Square
14: You are I when I Say It Like This
15: Should, Would, Could and Might
16: Add a Sliding Scale to your Cards
17. Big Picture (Getting it Started and Finished)
18. Little Picture (It’s in Your Hands)
19. Big Picture, Little Picture (Chunking)
20. Looking Back Forwards
21: The Force is Strong in This One
22: Vectors, Victims and Victors
23: No Fault, Only Fix
24: Our Story is Not Done
Conclusion
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Websites & Resources
Introduction
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.
Why Is It Called the Celtic Cross?
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 assoc
iated.
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 Spread
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 ‘Waite’s 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.
Most authors explain this layout as representing the title by illustrating or describing the cross as the central cross of a Celtic cross, the surrounding cards as the knotwork, and the cards on the right as the stave (as in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Pollack (1980 & 1983)) or stand of the Celtic cross itself.
We will see that this was neither intended in the design nor the title, which is spurious to the spread itself.
The First Publication of the Celtic Cross
The first known publication of the method is to be found in A. E. Waite’s (1857 – 1942) monograph The Key to the Tarot (hereafter KT) of which a first edition can be found in the British Library with its wonderful moiré patterned cover with Orouboros Serpent.[1] This was optionally bundled and boxed with the Waite-Smith cards being published also by Rider (London) in December 1909 and into 1910.
Here it is simply referred to by Waite as:
… a short process which has been used privately for many years past in England, Scotland and Ireland.
He goes on to say:
I do not think that it has been published – certainly not in connexion with Tarot cards; I believe that it will serve all purpose.[2]
Immediately following this book were further versions of the same work, now re-titled The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (hereafter PKT or Pictorial Key), and including illustrations of the cards, published a year later in 1911. This version contains an apology by Waite for his dealing – as an “exponent of the High Mystery Schools” – in divination methods. He goes on to state that:
I have given prominence to one method of working that has not been published previously; having the merit of simplicity, while it is also of universal application, it may be held to replace the cumbrous and involved systems of the larger handbooks.
In the title, it is now referred to for the first time as an “Ancient Celtic Method of Divination”. So even here it is still not a “Celtic Cross”. The Celtic descriptor is applying to its geographical (and spurious) usage, not the shape of the spread. As we will see, it is unlikely that the spread was commonly used other than by a few people, and the “many years past” Waite refers to are likely to be about 15-20 years at most.
So, in Waite’s typical style, instead of writing, “this method has been used privately by a few individuals over the last fifteen years, living in various parts of the country”, we get an intimation that it is an old Celtic method which he is revealing for the first time. This should already ring alarm bells as the ancient Celts did not have Tarot cards.
There are other significant differences in the text between the two versions – and following versions of the Pictorial Key. One such difference is that in the Pictorial Key, we are told what to do if the final (tenth) card is a Court Card. There are other differences, but time prevents collating every edition and performing a textual analysis across the versions.
Jensen (2006) discusses the popularity of the spread, and goes on to conclude with the open question:
Where Waite found inspiration for it is not known, but the interest in everything Celtic was typical for the time.
Indeed, Waite was fascinated – as was Yeats, a fellow Golden Dawn member, and several other members of the Order, notably Mathers, by Celtic revivalism. Waite’s rather neglected novel, The Quest of the Golden Stairs (1927) is a naïve tale of loving and longing of a Celtic Faëire realm. It is also full of correspondences to the Kabbalah.
It is this fascination and meeting of particular minds within the Order that provides us our major clues and backdrop for the Celtic Cross Spread and it is where our research took us – into the original archives of the Order, held within the Yorke Collection of the Warburg Institute, University of London.
We will first look at the background of the Order of the Golden Dawn and set the scene for the first use of this method revealed to be within the Order itself.
The Background of the Golden Dawn
The use of Tarot and its correspondence to Astrology, Kabbalah and other systems was a central component of the teachings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London, 1888, by three members of the S. R. I. A. and Freemasonry, W. W. Westcott, S. L. MacGregor Mathers and W. Woodman. They took the concept of Tarot and merged it with the Drawing Boards of Freemasonry to utilise tarot as ritual tools.
A candidate in the Order would be shown tarot designs as part of their initiation work as illustrating their magical progress. As such, tarot was viewed as a teaching tool and magical map, rather than a mere means of fortune-telling.
However, the Order did have a method of divination by cards – called the “Opening of the Key”. This required knowledge of the Holy Name, YHVH, Hebrew letters, the astrological, elemental and planetary correspondences of the tarot on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and an ability to appreciate numerology and the dignities between correspondences.
As such, it was a long, drawn-out affair, that in practice takes several hours to work through the five stages of reading, with many days then required to fully interpret the reading, particularly if one has also paired the cards for additional depth as suggested in the technique.
The Order designed their own tarot cards but not as a published deck, so they used French and Italian tarot card decks available from Europe. It was not until A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith created their deck in 1909 that an ‘English’ deck was available. You can read more about the creation of the Waite-Smith deck and the symbolism – revealed for the first time – in Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot (2015).
A good example of the reading of the “Opening of the Key” is given in Women of the Golden Dawn (Greer, 1996) where readings performed by Annie Horniman (1860 – 1937) in 1903 are given – and a page of her original notes are presented, all using the Opening of the Key method.[3] It is of importance to our story about the Celtic Cross that she sent these readings to the poet and fellow Order member, W. B. Yeats, by his magical name, (D)emon, for his additional comment, demonstrating his knowledge of the subject at that time.
It was into this Order that a number of significant personages found themselves being initiated – such as the poet W. B. Yeats, the artist Pamela Colman Smith, and the mystic, poet and verbose A.E. Waite. It is these three, with one other, that we now turn to explore the origins of the Celtic Cross spread.
Who Designed the Celtic Cross Method?
We know (so far) that the first publication of the method accompanied the deck designed by A. E. Waite and co-designed and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. This deck was created during an incredibly short period of time; just five months during the Summer of 1909. We can compare this to the five years it took for Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris to construct the other monolithic tarot of that era, the Thoth deck – which we tend to see as the deeper shadow of the Waite-Smith tarot deck.
There is however another originator in the background. In an article in the Occult Review (Volume X, No. 12, 1909) entitled ‘The Tarot: A Wheel of Fortune,’ Waite stated that as he and Pamela Colman Smith designed the deck:
… we have had other help from one who is deeply versed in the subject.
Roger Parisious (“Figures in a Dance: W. B. Yeats and the Waite-Rider Tarot”) suggested that this help came might have come from Yeats.[4]
Here is the original quotation from the Occult Review:
This being the case, and recurring for a moment to the fact that the Tarot, as I have said, is in the air, while many people who divine – and a substantial minority who are students rather than dippers at random into the chances of fortune – are all in want of the cards, I have embraced an opportunity which has been somewhat of the unexpected kind and have interested a very skilful and original artist in the proposal to design a set. Miss Pamela Coleman [sic] Smith, in addition to her obvious gifts, has some knowledge of Tarot values; she has lent a sympathetic ear to my proposal to rectify the symbolism by reference to channels of knowledge which are not in the open day; and we have had other help from one who is deeply versed in the subject. The result, and for the first time on record, is a marriage of art and symbolism for the production of a true Tarot under one of its aspects; it should be understood that there are others, but whatever has transpired about them or is likely to be related hereafter is and can only be concerned with a part of hidden system and will mislead rather than direct.
