Tarot Spread: Life Line Tarot Spread

When I created the Life Line Tarot, I wanted to encourage simplicity alongside depth—that’s what the openness and single-line aesthetic enhances. So when I created a tarot spread for the deck, printed on one of the extra cards, I wanted to offer that same blend. I came up with this 1–5-card spread, which I call the Life Line Tarot spread.

For this spread, you need a specific question. When ready, you draw one card. That’s the answer. 

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And then you’re done. 

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Just kidding.

If you need more clarity, you draw another card, which modifies the previous card, sort of like an adjective. If you need more cards, you start building a sentence from either keywords or hard-hitting insights. You don’t need a lot of nuance for this sort of reading, just an appreciation for what is and can be. That said, you’re welcome to bring as much nuance to the reading as you want.

You draw up to five cards, each one serving a different grammatical (syntactic, if you want to get nerdy about it) role: subject, adjective, verb, adverb, and object. Note that the second and fourth cards are less important than the first and third because they modify those. The fifth is rarely necessary because the object/target should be fairly obvious by the time you get there, but some people may like it for more open-ended questions and for creative works where anything is possible and the card pulls are more of a thought exercise than anything based in the practical material world. And if you need more clarity after the fifth card, go back to card 1. That’s your answer after all. Everything should come back to card 1.

Is this spread or way of reading cards unique to me? No. I’m sure you’ll find other people who have pretty much the exact same spread or at least a similar method for reading cards. That’s because it’s based off of language, and that’s how most of us interpret the world, let alone cartomancy. It’s how I might read a string of Lenormand cards or a string of House–pair matches in my Tarot Tableau. There are even times where I’ll intuitively read cards that way.

You don’t always need something new to see tarot in a new light.

Want help creating your own layouts?

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