Ten cards: six make the cross, four the staff beside it.
The spread was set down in print by A. E. Waite in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) and was already old in practice. It is the reading most people picture when they picture tarot: a small cross of cards with a column standing beside it. Its strength is that it separates the layers of a question — what is happening, what caused it, what is pressing on it, and where it tends — so that a reader is not asked to draw everything from a single card.
The centre of the cross. This card names the matter as it stands today — the atmosphere you are breathing, whether or not you have put words to it.
Laid across the first card. Traditionally read upright, it shows what lies over the present: the obstacle in the road, or sometimes the very help you have not recognised as help.
Below the cross. The root of the situation — what it grew from, often something settled long ago and now working out of sight.
To the left. An influence that is fading: what has just happened, or a phase whose hold is loosening.
Above the cross. What could come of this at its best; also the conscious aim you hold, which may or may not be the outcome.
To the right. What approaches in the coming days or weeks — the next turn, not the destination.
First card of the staff. How you are carrying the question: your posture, your inner stance, what you bring to the table.
The people, pressures and circumstances around you, and how the matter looks from outside.
What you long for and what you dread. In the Celtic Cross these are often the same card, and reading it asks honesty.
The top of the staff. Where the present road leads if nothing changes. The outcome is a forecast, not a sentence.
Begin with the centre pair: the present and what crosses it. Then read the vertical line — foundation, present, crown — as the arc of the matter from root to best possibility, and the horizontal line — past, present, future — as its movement in time. The staff is read upward, from how you are holding the question to where it leads. A reversed card in the outcome is not a bad omen; it usually points to something unfinished or delayed rather than lost.