The seven-card Horse Shoe is a convenient, basic layout that can be used to answer different types of questions, especially concerning questions where insight would be helpful. Like several other spreads, it has cards representing the past, present, and future.
The pinnacle of the Horse Shoe, looking like the top of the mountain, shows the obstacle or challenge that needs to be addressed and overcome. Card #6 suggests a course of action to meet this challenge. The final card shows the outcome or future, should this advice be followed.
Other clues are provided in Cards #3 and #5, which indicate hidden or outside influences that come into play, affecting the journey to your goal.
Obstacle  4 of Cups |
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Hidden Influences  3 of Wands |
External Influences  Death |
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The Present  9 of Cups |
Suggestion  The Hanged Man |
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The Past  The Hierophant |
The Outcome  Page of Wands |
The Past Card represents past events that are affecting the question.
The Hierophant
Seated on his throne, the Pope symbolises the male understanding of the spiritual workings of the world and traditional values. Two monks flank him on either side.
Reversed Meaning:
Society, concord, overkindness, weakness, doormat, misinterpretation, misunderstanding.
9 of Cups
A goodly personage has feasted to his heart's content, and abundant refreshment of wine is on the arched counter behind him, seeming to indicate that the future is also assured. The picture offers the material side only, but there are other aspects.
Reversed Meaning:
Truth, loyalty, liberty; but with some mistakes, imperfections, or miscalculations.
3 of Wands
A calm, stately personage, with his back turned, looking from a cliff's edge at ships passing over the sea. Three staves are planted in the ground, and he leans slightly on one of them.
Upright Meaning:
He symbolises established strength, enterprise, effort, trade, commerce, discovery; those are his ships, bearing his merchandise, which are sailing over the sea. The card also signifies able co-operation in business, as if the successful merchant prince were looking from his side towards yours with a view to help you.
4 of Cups
A young man is seated under a tree and contemplates three cups set on the grass before him; an arm reaching out from a cloud offers him another cup. His expression notwithstanding is one of discontent with his environment.
Upright Meaning:
Weariness, blended pleasure, disgust, aversion, imaginary vexations, as if the wine of this world had caused satiety only; another wine, as if a fairy gift, is now offered the wastrel, but he sees no consolation therein.
Death
The Grim Reaper rides into town on a pale horse. The king has fallen, and the Pope greets Death with the king's family. The sun sets in the gateway on the horizon.
Reversed Meaning:
Inertia, sleep, lethargy, hope destroyed, depression, sloth, misery, undoing, ruin, subjugation.
The Hanged Man
A man hangs upside down from the Tau cross. This is a card of self-sacrifice and enlightenment.
Upright Meaning:
Wisdom, circumspection, discernment, trials, sacrifice, augury, prophecy, pause, reflection, ideas, imagination, meditation.
Page of Wands
A young man stands in the act of proclamation. He is unknown but faithful, and his tidings are strange.
Upright Meaning:
Dark young man, faithful, a lover, family intelligence, a messenger, favourable testimony. A dangerous rival, if followed by the Page of Cups.