Ever Used ALL the Cards in a Single Spread?

Just curious if anyone here has attempted to do so? - or if they feel such an action might violate some innate law of using the cards, or be considered disrespectful (or overly ambitious!), or perhaps simply overwhelm the reader with the complexity - not least the table space.

I am sure that I have seen, and more than once, people here posting they have done this. There certainly isn't any rule against it and besides what august body could even make a rule like that? To me it would just take so long to do the reading. Lazy?

The later operations of the Opening of the Key require dealing out the entire pack into 12 (astrological house) packs, 12 more (astrological sign) packs, 36 (astrological decan) packs and 10 (Tree of Life) packs. It doesn't seem to matter that they don't come out evenly. I thik I only did it once since dealing out all of the cards four times and thoroughly reading (counting, pairing, etc.) the pack with the Significator in it four times takes so long.

My sister-in-law from my first husband 'threw the cards' and used every single card in the deck to do a reading ... more a 'stream-of-consciousness' act than a 'spread.'

She would have you shuffle the deck and just start laying out 6 or 7 cards and start talking and lay out another row on top of that one, and just keep laying out cards and talking until she ran out of cards.

For her the constricted concept of 'This Card in This Position is Your (fill in the blank)' was very odd.

Re

Hi Alta, nice to make your acquaintance once more.

Wow, so there are actually instances of it? That's interesting to know- thanks for your responses. Can I ask if the reading with so many cards was by far more comprehensive, a little more comprehensive, or utterly cluttered?

@tarotbear - I like that description and approach more than a standard spread - she must have been highly intuitive.

WRayne said:

tarotbear - I like that description and approach more than a standard spread - she must have been highly intuitive.

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You should note that she was not 'reading' the cards as in 'The XXX card means This' - she was using the cards as a springboard and telling you her impressions as she moved from one card to another - no 'past-present-future' stuff unless what 'connections' she made in the 'stream-of-consciousness' told her that 'this was something in the past.'

This is no 'Tell me your question and I will tell you the answer'-type reading - this is 'connections and impressions', fast and furious without positions or meanings.

Yes I believe I understood her method as initially stated. My own is very similar - I have not studied the 'meanings' of the cards. I did this once with the meanings of dreams only to feel greatly misled upon encountering the superior approach of Jung. Returning to Tarot - I too intuit their meanings as a stream of consciousness, every time I read the cards (rarely) I ask them 'Show me' this person or that. I think about them and then I extract five, loosely describing distant past, past, present, near present, future (in contradistinction to your sister-in-law - I do use time as a foci) but they always mean something very different pending the individual to whom I'm speaking, any of whom have remarked that my readings leave them reeling. I think to come at Tarot with pre-loaded associations is far less conduitious than to simply let the meanings arise of themselves. I find nameless decks less hindrance than those carefully labelled and defined from the outset.

To clarify - often I do not know or even ask for the question of the person I am giving a TarotR too - or the person themselves - nor am I ever in proximity to them. Yet they resonate.

Actually I believe back in the day I gave a reading for Alta.

WRayne said:

Can I ask if the reading with so many cards was by far more comprehensive, a little more comprehensive, or utterly cluttered

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My experience was that it was overkill just to answer a question As a "life-reading" covering a longer period of time, it made more sense. It was definitely more compehensive than any other approach I've ever seen, brining in three sets of astrological associations and the Tree of Life correspondences.

There are many questions that can easily be answered with 3 cards or less; I would think that anyone using the '78-Card Throw' method is asking/answering a question that has layers and depth that a 10-card Celtic Cross would not make a dent in.

Then again - it is all a matter of 'purpose' and 'reading style'.