Tarot Spreads: How to Read Them, Create Them, and Revise Them

Bring structure, clarity, and purpose to every reading.

For many who read tarot--and those new to tarot--spreads can offer a lot of power, clarity, and purpose to readings. Tarot spreads, intentional arrangements for tarot cards that include a particular meaning or prompt for each card, help us to ask focused, direct questions of our cards. Rather than focusing on premade cookie-cutter layouts, Meg Jones Wall takes you to the very foundation of tarot spreads so that you can understand how and why a spread is created and how it works. This book will walk you through reading spreads as well as writing and revising original spreads, giving you everything you need to understand, develop, tweak, and test tarot spreads of your very own.

Learn to adapt and revise card spreads to deepen your exploration.

Meg encourages you to release yourself from the expectation that you need to use a spread precisely as written in order to get the full benefit of a layout in your reading. Spreads are infinitely customizable to suit your own needs, preferences, and experience level. While the cards can offer clarity in a variety of ways, tarot spreads can help us be more direct about what we want to know, explore, question, and understand. No matter our question, concern, or situation, tarot spreads empower us to be clear about what we need from our reading.

At the core of every spread are the prompts--the meanings given to each card positioned in a layout. So that you can more effectively write and design your own spread, Meg offers over 200 prompts and suggestions for simple one-card to five-card layouts for a variety of intentions from relationships to self-awareness to community to wealth, and includes special recommended spreads for lunar cycles, the zodiac, the archetypes, the sabbats, the elements, and more.

Meg Jones Wall is a queer, chronically ill, Brooklyn-based tarot reader, writer, and photographer and the creator of 3am.tarot. She is the author of Finding the Fool (2023). As a freelance writer, Meg’s work has appeared in WIRED, Catapult, Autostraddle, Luna Luna, Witchology, and more.