Waite's method, published 1911
Ten cards for a definite question: six form a cross around the matter, while four rise at the right to show the querent's place in it and where it leads.
For many readers, this is the shape of a tarot reading: a cross of six cards beside a staff of four. Its familiar name hides a less certain history.
It reaches print in 1911, in Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot, under the heading "An Ancient Celtic Method of Divination". Yet Celtic appears only in the table of contents and running head. Waite's account never calls the method ancient or connects it with the Celts.
What he does say, in the section immediately before it, is this: he is offering "a short process which has been used privately for many years past in England, Scotland and Ireland", and he does not think it has been published, "certainly not in connexion with Tarot cards". That is a claim about a private practice then current in the British Isles. The surviving text does not tell us whether Waite learned the layout as given, adapted it, or devised it himself.
Six cards gather around the question: what covers and crosses it, what lies above and below, and what passes behind and comes before. Four more climb a staff at the right: the querent, their surroundings, their hopes or fears, and the issue. The cross reads the matter; the staff reads the person standing within it.
Waite begins with a Significator, a face-up card chosen to stand for the person or matter. His rules match court cards to age, appearance and temperament.
He then says to "shuffle and cut the rest of the pack three times, keeping the faces of the cards downwards", and turn up the ten in order, each with its own phrase — this covers him, this crosses him, and so on.
Here the Significator is optional and the ten positions remain unchanged. The digital shuffle uses repeated riffles and cuts, since three cuts alone do not mix a pack.
The position meanings below are Waite's own words, quoted from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part III §7.
First published by A. E. Waite in 1911 under the heading "An Ancient Celtic Method of Divination".
The earliest located printed description. Waite offers it beside a second method drawn from the French Oracles of Julia Orsini.
The section that sets the method out card by card.
Waite's own text does not call the method Celtic or ancient. He describes it as a private practice of England, Scotland and Ireland that he believes to be unpublished.
The word Celtic occurs three times in the whole book — the table of contents and two running heads — and never in Waite's prose. The popular attribution rests on the heading alone.
“I offer in the first place a short process which has been used privately for many years past in England, Scotland and Ireland. I do not think that it has been published — certainly not in connexion with Tarot cards.”
Transcribed from the section immediately preceding the Celtic method.