Tarot layouts

Unleash Your Inner Psychic: Create a Personal Tarot Card Layout

Design or adapt, it’s up to you

4 min readFeb 11

Cards from the Light Seer’s Tarot. Photo by author.

You know how important it is to connect with your cards and to relax and tune into your intuition. But what about the spread you have chosen? Do you feel in alignment with it, or does it feel overwhelming? Sometimes, using a spread created by someone else seems impersonal and hard to relate to the question.

The answer is to create your own spreads.

There are two ways you can create a personal spread. The first is to design it from scratch. The second is to modify an existing spread. I tend to use the former when using a few cards and the second when I’m doing an in-depth reading with ten or more cards.

Designing a Tarot Spread

Clarify your intention. What specific information do you want to know? It might be a deep dive into a tricky situation, or it could be a more general view of a broader area, such as relationships or career.
How many cards do you want to use? You will probably have to firm this up once you have decided on the integral questions/card positions.
Choose the positions. To be honest, what pattern you lay them out in is not as important as remembering what information you want each card to represent. The pattern can help with this, of course. Often a diagonal layout is effective as you can begin with the ‘base’ and get more specific as the cards rise to the ‘summit.’
Solidify the questions/information by giving each position a name. For instance, the first card may represent ‘Where am I now in relation to this problem?’ So the first card may simply be labeled ‘Present situation.’ Or perhaps you want to know how you got to this point, therefore it might be ‘Root of the problem.’
Write down and draw the spread on a piece of paper. Show the cards as rectangles in your preferred layout. Label each with its position and commit to memory. You can always keep this nearby as a crib sheet.