Get Ready for Your Year Ahead with a Tarot Tableau Reading

If you've been reading cards for a while, you might have heard of a tableau or grand tableau but not know what it is or why it's perfect for this time of year.

Reading the Big Picture
Le grand tableau of the Lenormand method is a card reading that uses all the cards in the deck to reveal predictive insights for you or your client, but it's not just a tool for Lenormand readers. Whether you read with tarot cards, Kipper cards, playing cards, or even runes, you can conduct a tableau to see what the future holds. And if you use a numbered oracle deck, you can even use oracle cards (but read on for some cautions).

The term grand tableau helps distinguish this type of reading from, say, a future-oriented three-card reading. The phrase grand tableau has two meanings in French. The first is "big table," reminding you that you'll need a lot of space to lay out so many cards. While this is a funny and practical translation, the other translation is more helpful for understanding the method's purpose for divination: "big picture." A grand tableau shows you what's coming up in all areas. It's not just a peek into the future; it's a wall-sized window.

A Tableau Is Not Just a Whole Mess of Cards
When you're conducting a traditional tableau, or even a more modern approach like my own Tarot Tableau method, you're dealing a large number of cards (the whole deck, all the major arcana, all the runes, etc.) into a predefined grid.

With the Lenormand, Kipper, my Tarot Tableau, and some rune readings, the tableau grid is organized in rows and columns with positions following the same sequence as the original system.

For example, a Kipper grand tableau's third position is called the House of Marriage, which is the third card in the deck. In a Tarot Tableau, the last position would be called the House of the World.

These House positions provide a sequential order that allows for prediction. Things unfold in a particular sequence, left to right or right to left, as you progress through the year, month, or week. If you have 9 columns of cards in your Kipper tableau and are looking 9 months ahead, you can get a sense of the general vibe or major event of month 5 by looking at column 5. Isn't that convenient?

But the Houses do more than just tell you the order for laying out your cards. They indicate areas of you or your querent's life, and these are used to conduct lovely little mini-readings into specific areas of life. This is what allows a tableau to provide such a big-picture view. It also gives you a starting point with the tableau if you're overwhelmed by seeing so many cards on the table. (You're not alone in that.)

You're a tarot reader who wants to know about creative endeavors? Look to the House of the Empress. You want guidance on where things are at risk of falling apart? Look to the House of the Tower.

This combination of a predictive sequence and an all-encompassing view of things make tableaux (the plural of tableau) incredibly rich for seeking insights about the future. It's a prediction and advice about what you can do about it all in one. Once you're comfortable with the big picture and those individual mini-readings, you can go even deeper and learn to cross-verify predictions and uncover subtle interactions between the cards based on their relative positions. There are so many great techniques available for those who love learning and digging in!

Putting Predictive Readings in Perspective
With predictive readings, it's important to keep in mind how you believe predictive readings work. Does your divination give you a probable trajectory of current events that you can take advantage of or avoid? Is the future written in stone? How much leeway do you have to change the predicted outcome, and how hard is it to do so? Answers to these will help you set the right intentions and have the right expectations about your reading. They'll also help you use the wisdom you divine, and that's sometimes the hardest part for even long-time readers.

A common theory is that the further out you read, the more things can change from the time of reading. A year is a long time for even small changes to have a large impact; just ask someone who sticks with a simple New Year resolution for the whole year. But when looking at the week ahead, you might need to take more dramatic action to shift the tide of events. A year-ahead reading helps you chart your goals, whereas a week-ahead is more helpful for taking necessary precautions or setting expectations about the next seven days.

And remember, even a "bad" warning about the week ahead can be good for you if it helps you reset your expectations or take reasonable steps to shift the expected outcome.

Using a Tableau for Reflection and Goal-Setting
Even if you don't believe that you can predict the future in a meaningful way, you may still benefit from the wide-ranging look at the "big picture" of a tableau.

I often work with creative clients who want help overcoming obstacles in completing their passion projects while they're managing a difficult situation at their day job, and they're also looking for guidance on their love life. All of that can be found within a tableau. Not all of it will be equally important, at least not according to the tableau itself if you're doing a traditional predictive reading, but it's there for the uncovering.

And if you've ever run into a situation where you're reading for someone who doesn't know what they need a reading for, a tableau is a great solution because once you start talking about one topic in the reading, your querent may realize they want you to look into something completely different. No problem! It's already there in front of you.

You can also use the wide-ranging spread for personal reflection by letting the card in each House help you reflect on that area of your life. If you're like me and like to have specific questions, you might want to have those handy ahead of time. (If you have the Seaborn Kipper, you'll find several reflection questions for each card.) But open-ended reflection is a powerful tool, too.

Getting Started with Tableaux
The first time you lay out all 36 cards in a Kipper tableau or even all 22 major arcana in a Tarot tableau, it can feel like a lot. And there's a reason for that: it is a lot. And if you're used to getting fifteen minutes of insight out of three cards, the thought of seven or twelve times as many may seem like it's going to take all day to read the spread. But it doesn't have to be difficult.

When you read with a lot of cards, you don't need to read them all individually. You're looking for patterns and themes that are repeated. It's not important that the Devil and Death and the Tower are all in your Tarot tableau because all 22 major arcana are in there. If you didn't see the Devil and Death and the Tower, you’d have a bigger problem because you'd have some missing cards. Instead of a smaller reading, when the point of the reading is which cards are there and what of their many nuanced meanings are brought to life, the trick to a tableau is knowing how to pay attention to which cards are where and letting their core essence tell it to you clearly.

As with any form of divination, it takes practice, but here are some simple tips:

1. Set a specific time period.
   If you want a predictive reading, choose something that feels reasonable for prediction and for reflecting on the prediction. Know how each column corresponds to that time period, such as a column per day or per week or per month. I recommend starting with a week if you're new to predictive readings.
   
   
2. Set an intention for your focus (general life, work life, side hustle, love life).
   You can see all aspects of yourself in a tableau, but if you have a complicated (or "multipassionate") life, a general reading with no boundaries can be unnecessarily complicated.
   
   
3. Choose a significator.
   In Lenormand and Kipper, this is usually decided for you. In my Tarot Tableau method, it's always the Fool who's on a journey through life. But if you're using another system, you should know which card represents you. Once you've laid out the cards, you can see what's going on in the House of your significator and you can see where your significator has landed to give you perspective on the situation at hand.
   
   
4. Choose 2–3 specific aspects that you want to investigate.
   Once you have these, decide which Houses will reveal the most useful information for you. For example, if you're a Kipper card reader looking for predictive insights on a new written project, you may look to the House of the Letter and the House of Work. Once you have your tableau laid, you will know to focus on those specific Houses.
   
   
5. See where else your intuition guides, but be okay with leaving cards unread.
   When you’re just getting started, it's important to let things go. Don't read all the cards just because they're there. It's just too much information for most readers, and it's totally overwhelming for new readers. However, your intuition may not let you stick to your intentions around just 2–3 specific areas. Trust your intuition. It may reveal small details or help you see patterns that are relevant in subtle ways that may not show up in the expected places.

Using Oracle Decks and Other Systems for a Tableau
I mentioned early on that you can use an oracle deck for a tableau with certain cautions. This is true of a tableau made with any divination system: a good tableau requires two things. It needs to have a clear sequential order and it needs to offer insights into a wide range of things.

Some oracle decks meet both criteria. They are numbered sequentially and they cover all of the main areas that you might want for a reading (love, career, money, personal happiness). Some oracle decks do not.

If you're using an oracle deck like the Hedgewitch Botanical Oracle by Siolo Thompson, my first oracle deck and a perennial favorite, you can use the alphabetical listings in the guidebook as the sequence. You might just want to create a numbered list to help you remember. And you'll have to decide for yourself what the House of Lady's Mantle/Magic means to you in terms of your reading. Set that intention ahead of time and know where you're going to look for, say, money if you want to know about money (Hollyhock for Abundance would be my suggestion). With clear intentions, you can make it work. But if you're using an oracle deck that skews toward more abstract meanings and has a sort of haphazard structure that's hard to organize for yourself, you might struggle. It's doable, but it's not nearly as easy to do.

Even more abstract forms of divination, such as scrying or bibliomancy, are even harder to wrangle into a tableau. I love both methods and reading tableaux, but even I wouldn't bother with a bibliomancy or water-scrying tableau. It might be a fun thought experiment, but it's probably not a useful reading.

Looking at the Year Ahead
I hope that you're excited to explore the weeks, months, and years ahead with a tableau. There are so many ways to read your cards, and whether you're looking for predictive insights to help guide you, seeking creative new ways of thinking about your future, or hoping to simply reflect on particular aspects of your life, a tableau is a great place to start.