Celtic Cross

Hi all.

I have a problem with the card in the "past" position in the Celtic cross. How would you interpret a card say for instance the Ace of Pentacles,or the Ace of Cups,or even the 10 of Cups or the wishcard. These are all good cards,which you don't really like to see go out of your life. It is easy enough,if it is a troublesome card,like the 5 of pentacles or the 3 of swords etc. Please,can anyone help me with this,as I'm having a bit of a problem with this.Many thanks!

Certainly good things do pass out of everyone's life.

Maybe I am not understanding your question. If I do, then I would say the interpretation is that you experienced the happiness or goodness represented in the past, do not experience this now, and that fact is a part of whatever the current situation is for which you threw the cards.

Thank you Marion, that makes good sense!

It may also be helpful to view the "past" card as something "behind you;" as in, you have put it behind you and are ready to move on from there. It is the sum total of an experience that bears little or no weight on the outcome of your query.

if we are talking about position 4 . . .

when I started with the celtic cross, I treated this as a "receding influence," but then one night I got eight cups in that position, and I thought, how do you let go of letting go?, so I began to broaden my sense of each of the positions . . . and these days, I would say maybe position 4 is something that underlies position 3, which in turn is a sort of specification of whatever is going on in positions 1 and 2.

awhile back, someone on one of these forums described a version of the celtic cross in which position 3 is called "focus" and position 4 is called "foundation," and I guess those names are a closer description to how I now see the spread, though again, all of the positions are flexible. if I have a crowd of swords over here or a run 3/4/5 of a suit, or a pair of nines, or whatever, then the orientation of these one to another, left/right, up/down, reversals, etc. can somewhat override the formal positional assignments.

lately I have begun laying out the cards

4/2/1/3/5
9/7/6/8/10

with the "shadow" card centered over the 1 and 6, and comparing this arrangement to the same cards in the celtic cross, and I have been getting some excellent correspondences . . .

zb

Thank's very much for all your interesting and helpfull advice.

zach, the way I'd interpret "letting go of letting go" is that one is too quick to give up and move on from situations and that maybe you need to try harder to hang in there and see things to a conclusion instead of abandoning them completely.

lyric,

while I agree that this is a possible reading, at the time it came up, and in the context of the other cards, it was very forcefully clear to me that the card meant that there was something I needed to learn to let go of, and its placement in position 4 was a matter of emphasis . . .

zb