The Four Elements Compass

russell

This spread involves choosing one card from each suit as compass points surrounding yourself. Start laying cards down; place the first trump or court card that you get into the center, and discard the rest. Then continue laying cards down. When you get a suited card, place it into position. If you get a duplicate of a suit, or a trump card, discard it. Do this until you have one card of each suit at each compass point.

You can use this to explore the different facets of a situation, or aspects of yourself that are relevant, or need to be worked on. For example, what is the important hidden element of the current situation? What can I expect from the outer, visible aspect? What about the ideas behind things, or the people in charge? What about physical, down-to-earth matters? It depends on your situation and what you are thinking about at the moment.

...........swords
cups....yourself....rods
............coins

—Russell
 

Edward Tarot Hands

yes I do one similar but place the four suits in different positions with cups at the bottom and rods at the top, with swords on the east and coins west. In the center i use one of the Trumps.
It's kind of modeled on the Chinese elemental system.
I just like playing with it seeing how the cards can interact with each other in different ways
 

Luna's Crone

i like these will have to right them down.
 

Gaston D.

I do a similar spread except I simply use the first four cards that turn up on top of the deck after shuffling and use the following elemental/directional correspondences:

North - Air - Swords - intellectual/mental

East - Earth - Pentacles - physical/material

South - Water - Cups - emotional/intuitive

West - Fire - Wands - creative/spiritual

This reading provides a sort of "snapshot" indicating my current intellectual/physical/emotional/creative states (or that of whoever I'm reading for). Sometimes I will draw an additional card for one or more directions if it seems some additional clarity or potential solution is needed.

I realize this is a different set of directional correspondences than some people use, but it seems that there is no universally accepted one. This is simply the one that makes the most intuitive sense to me.