OTHER CARD READING LAY-OUTS

A smaller, 25-card version of the Grand Tableau appears below, if you don’t want to do the Grand Tableau lay-out. I can’t remember if I read this in a book somewhere or if I devised it myself:

25-Card-Lay-Out
With this lay-out, you first lay the significator in the middle. As with the Grand Tableau, you lay out the top-row of cards, from left to right, then the second row, from left to right, then the third row, skipping over the significator (unless you really want a ‘cover’ card for the significator), then the remaining two rows in the same way as the first two. As with the Grand Tableau, all the cards ‘behind’ the significator are in the past, all the cards in the direction the significator is facing are the future cards. The two cards above represent what is on the inquirer’s mind, the two cards below, things they’ve mastered, or which support them.

The past and future columns in this lay-out tend to sort themselves into a series of pairs, in terms of their meanings, although sometimes you can have three or four cards grouped together which will address the same thing. I’ve found this lay-out to be a more manageable spread than the Grand Tableau, while still giving you a good overview of past and future.