As Tierney puts it in Chapter Five of How to Use Your Deck of 1000 Spreads: "Choosing a topic or an entire spread at random may seem so. . . random. But choosing cards this way not only lets the universe decide what the querent needs to know, but it also removes any reader and/or querent bias that might come with consciously creating spreads."
At Tierney's suggestion, I first removed the green Card of the Day, the green Significator card, and the blue Clarification card from the deck. I then separated the cards into five piles, arranged by color, backsides facing up. I shuffled the first pile (green topic cards), asking Spirit to give me a suitable topic.
The result: MIND (your current mental or emotional state)
Well, that's usually a pretty good topic. I now get to choose as many cards from the other piles as I like. I'm not a huge fan of huge spreads, so I am going to go with a simple 3-card spread. Rather than leave the remaining cards in color-coded piles, I shuffled them together and drew three cards from the stack. All three are blue Influence cards:
CONS (consequences, effects, or downsides of a particular choice or action you may take in regard to the spread's topic or other relevant spread positions)
CROWNING INFLUENCES (the known influences that are helping or hindering this reading's topic)
SURPRISE (an unexpected plot twist or turn of events you don't see coming in regard to your question, situation, or topic)
Tierney advises us to switch the order of the cards if we feel they make sense in a different order. I am going to place Crowning Influences first, followed by Cons, and ending with Surprise.
The "Cons" card is typically paired with the "Pros" card, so I am going to pull the "Pros" card from the deck and add it to this reading. My reading now looks like this:
TOPIC: Mind
(1) Crowning Influences
(2) Pros
(3) Cons
(4) Surprise
My instinct is to arrange these cards into this layout:
....2......3.....
........4.........
I suppose I could put position 4 at the top and position 1 at the bottom, but "crowning influences" just sounds like it should go above.
The Druid Craft Tarot (by Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm, illustrated by Will Worthington / St. Martin's Press) responded loudly to my call for volunteers, so that is the deck I am using for this reading. And the winners are...
Zanna's Divined Spread, with all cards addressing the topic of "Mind". Visit her blog to read her interpretation. |