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One card

A single card, drawn for one question

One card, for one question. The whole pack is shuffled and the top card taken.

  • Cards 1
  • Laid In a fixed shape
  • Where it comes from No first source traced

Ask something and deal this spread

1
1 card, in the order they are laid.

Reading the shape

One card leaves nowhere for the reading to wander. There is no neighbouring position to soften, redirect or repeat it; the card meets the question on its own.

A short reading is not necessarily a thin one. The same seventy-eight cards are shuffled in the same way; only the amount asked of the deck changes.

How it is laid

The full pack is shuffled by a simulated riffle — ten riffles, with cuts and turns between them — and the top card is taken.

What each place asks

  1. The card The answer to what was asked, read without a position to qualify it.

Where it comes from

No first publication is claimed for the simple practice of drawing one card for a question.

Attribution variant unsourced

The layout has no first publication

Tarot divination is documented from Etteilla onward, and Waite publishes the Celtic Cross, but no early source has been located for this layout. SEARCHED AGAIN IN OCTOBER 2026, AND THE SEARCH IS THE FINDING. Each of these layouts is described in the modern literature as long-established — a spread of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, often sent back to Etteilla — and not one of those sources cites a book, a date or a page for any of them. The attribution is repeated between accounts rather than evidenced by any of them. Waite publishes two methods and neither is this one. A repeated assertion is not a source, so the layout stays unsourced: what is recorded here is that the attribution was looked for and not found, which is a different statement from not having looked. Its position meanings are modern editorial descriptions and are not attributed to an earlier author.

Sources (1)
  1. The Pictorial Key to the Tarot , Illustrated edition, William Rider & Son, 1922 — Part III, §§6–8

    Cited for contrast. Waite publishes two methods and neither is this one. His alternative method deals forty-two cards into six packets of seven with no positional meanings, and he recommends it when no definite question is asked.

    Read at wikisource.org ↗