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  8 of Pentacles |
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Hidden Influences  Queen of Cups |
External Influences  8 of Swords |
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The Present  7 of Pentacles |
Suggestion  8 of Wands |
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The Past  4 of Swords |
The Outcome  5 of Pentacles |
The Past Card represents past events that are affecting the question.
4 of Swords
The effigy of a knight in the attitude of prayer, at full length upon his tomb.
Upright Meaning:
Vigilance, retreat, solitude, hermit's repose, exile, tomb and coffin. It is these last that have suggested the design.
7 of Pentacles
A young man, leaning on his staff, looks intently at seven pentacles attached to a clump of greenery on his right; one would say that these were his treasures and that his heart was there.
Reversed Meaning:
Somebody trying to borrow money and the anxiety that this spawns; altercation, quarrels, haggle, bad deal, rip-off, pestering, entice, con, beguile, coax, bait and switch.
Queen of Cups
Beautiful, fair, dreamy – as one who sees visions in a cup. This is, however, only one of her aspects; she sees, but she also acts, and her activity feeds her dream.
Reversed Meaning:
The accounts vary; good woman; otherwise, distinguished woman but one not to be trusted; perverse woman; vice, dishonour, depravity.
8 of Pentacles
An artist in stone at his work, which he exhibits in the form of trophies.
Reversed Meaning:
Voided ambition, vanity, cupidity, exaction, usury, cunning, sham, intrigue, loan shark, swindle, blackmail, cheat, shakedown, double-deal.
8 of Swords
A woman, blindfolded and bound, with the swords of the card around her. Yet it is rather a card of temporary endurance than of irretrievable bondage.
Upright Meaning:
Bad news, violent chagrin, crisis, censure, power in trammels, conflict, calumny, sickness, having one's hands tied, insanity.
8 of Wands
The card represents motion through the immovable – a flight of wands through an open country; but they draw to the term of their course. That which they signify is at hand; it may be even on the threshold.
Reversed Meaning:
Arrows of jealousy, internal dispute, stinging of conscience, quarrels, domestic disputes for married people.
5 of Pentacles
Two injured people in a snow storm pass a well-lit church.
Upright Meaning:
Material trouble, poverty, destitution, abjection, love without money, debt, famine, hardship, concordance, affinities, distress, bankruptcy.