The French Cross

The French cross, as it’s usually known in English, appears to come from Oswald Wirth. According to Mary Greer, it depicts a courtroom, in which one side argues for your course of action and another argues against it. One card acts as a judge and a card as the “Sentence” or what will result from the course of action the judge suggests. The final card synthesizes it all together, though Wirth reads it first, not last.

That’s pretty close to the way I learned it. The major difference is that Wirth uses only the trumps, naturally, while I learned an option to lay small cards out over top of them.

For this exercise we’re going to do it that way, just so we get 10 cards on the table.

step one

separate your trump cards from your small cards, and shuffle them. Cut them, then set the small cards aside.

step two

Lay the cards out in a cross shape, like this

       3
    1     2
       4

step three

find the final card, which you do via number-crunching: total up the card numbers visible, and if you get a number between 1 & 22, use that card. Twenty-two is the Fool. If you get a number above 22, reduce it. Greer says that, as it turns out, the best way to do this is to just subtract 22 from whatever number you got. I learned that looking into the spread to write this up, so I’ll be doing it that way from now on. I always though the other methods of reducing cards seemed to limite the options, but I couldn’t parse the math well enough.

Note that this card may be one that’s already in the spread. If so, just keep that in mind. You could grab a copy of the card from another deck if you really wanted, I suppose.

step four

Set aside your pile of trumps and grab the small cards. Deal one, in order, onto the trump cards – in this case, no math is required. Simply deal a card onto the 5th trump as you do for all the others.

step five

Read the danged thing.

  1. Pros: what argues in favor of your situation or the course of action you plan
  2. Cons: what argues against your situation or the course of action you plan
  3. Judge: the advice the cards are giving you
  4. Effects: what following the advice will lead to
  5. What the whole reading is really about, or what the “mood” is

Commentary

I’ve used this spread with clients, friends, and myself, and it reads you to fucking filth, in my experience.

One problem you may run into is that it guarantees half your cards will be trumps; that’s not a problem in the spread, but a lot of methods of reading the cards will say to look at how many trumps have shown up to gauge the significance of the event, question, or action. That doesn’t work here.

Sources