The Five Card Cross belongs to the family of cross layouts, in which a central card is surrounded by four others placed above, below, left and right.
Provenance
Cross layouts of four, five, six and ten cards circulate across tarot publishing with no consistent naming and no traceable first author for most variants. The best-known member of the family, the ten-card Celtic Cross, is recorded in this atlas with its own history. The five-card version has no such record, and the atlas states its authorship as unknown rather than assuming it is a simplification of the larger one, which would be a guess.
Why the positions sit where they do
The geometry does interpretive work. The past sits to one side and the future to the other because reading runs left to right in the languages these layouts were written in. The root cause sits below and the potential above because of a metaphor about foundations and aspirations that is equally a matter of language rather than of cards. Readers working in other writing directions have been known to reverse the horizontal axis, which is a reasonable adjustment and shows how much of the layout is convention.
What five positions give
Enough structure to separate cause from present from direction, without the ten-card spread's demand that a reader hold ten distinct position meanings apart. That trade is the whole argument for the shorter layout.