Who was it that waxed pithily about consistency and hobgoblins and small minds? Well, I’m sure someone else came up with a snappy comeback about inconsistency and flightiness. In my twenty years of playing with tarot, I cannot claim any sort of consistency in any area. Not one. And that includes my practices regarding spreads. I started off, as a mentioned previously, of collecting and using any published spread I could find. Then I spent many happy years creating new spreads for each and every question. There was the short-lived and non-productive “I don’t need no stinkin spreads!” phase, where I just tossed cards on the table and stared at them. For a while I detested the

One of my all time very favorite spreads was published on the now defunct Tarot Passages website (the site www.tarotpassages.com is still up and filled with great information but has not been updated for quite a while). This spread, called The Hourglass Spread, was created by Teresa Michelsen, author of The Complete Tarot Reader and Designing Your Own Tarot Spreads, and is particularly illuminating when you are both looking back and looking ahead: The spread is read from
the bottom to top as follows: Base Level (cards 1, 2, and 3):  This level represents the sands that have already fallen, and the cards in this level represent things to reflect on about the past year: